Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani questioned why Black Lives Matter protesters seem to care less about black lives that are taken by other blacks.
“What we’ve got to hear from the black community is how and what they are doing among themselves about the crime problem in the black community,” Giuliani said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “When there are 60 shootings in Chicago over the Fourth of July and 14 murders and Black Lives Matter is nonexistent, and then there is one police murder, of very questionable circumstances, and we hear from Black Lives Matter, we wonder, do black lives matter, or only the very few black lives that are killed by white policemen but not all those black lives that are killed by other blacks?”
Giuliani called for people to “look differently at race in America” in order to mitigate the potential for unjust police shootings and violence.
“The reality is, we have to look differently at race in America if we’re going to change this,” Giuliani said. “We’ve been looking at it the same way for 20 years and here is where we are and we both have to try to understand each other. … Maybe whites have to look at it differently and blacks have to look at it differently.”
Giuliani urged black parents to assure their children to be respectful of police because “most of them are good, [but] some can be very bad” and he called for police departments to institute a “zero tolerance” policy for bad actors. But he seemed especially concerned with the excesses of Black Lives Matter activists and the need to for less violence in black neighborhoods.
Giuliani implied that it’s not productive for white people to be “constantly defending the police,” recalling a case of a police brutality that resulted in a 25-year conviction for the officer when he was mayor.
But he also noted: “I’ve also had police officers who were wrongly accused and acquitted by a jury even though mobs were calling [for] them to be put in jail, despite the fact that a jury found them not guilty. These are complicated situations and we have to try to understand each other.”
