Capping off his weekend of inflammatory comments after the Dallas police shooting, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called Black Lives Matter “inherently racist” and “anti-American” — and even incorrectly claiming that black children have “a 99% chance” of killing each other.
Appearing on CBS’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday, Giuliani had little to say about the deadly police shootings that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and nationwide protests — including the one in Dallas that was ambushed by a cop killer.
Instead, he said it is up to the “blacks” to show respect to police officers.
“If you want to deal with this on the black side, you’ve got to teach your children to be respectful to the police, and you’ve got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police,” Giuliani said.
“The real danger to them — 99 out of 100 times — is other black kids who are going to kill them,” the Republican ex-mayor added, citing a fake statistic.
“That’s the way they’re gonna die,” he added.
If he “were a black father,” he said, he’d warn his son to “be very careful of those kids in the neighborhood and don’t get involved with them because, son, there’s a 99% chance they’re going to kill you — not the police!”
The closest estimate to Giuliani’s fictional numbers is the FBI’s 2014 homicide data, which said black victims are killed by other black people 90% of the time. The rate of white-on-white homicide, the stats say, is not far off at 82%.
Furthermore, white men are more likely to shoot and kill a cop. As of May, 71% of police officers who’ve been shot and killed have been by white men, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which tracks police fatalities.
Giuliani’s presidential candidate of choice, Donald Trump, last year tweeted the inaccurate claim that the black-on-black murder rate is 97% — and the even more wildly wrong claim that 81% of whites are killed by blacks.
In his Sunday interview, Giuliani proposed no police reforms other than a “zero tolerance” policy toward “disrespect.”
As for the Black Lives Matter movement, he said its members “sing rap songs about killing police officers” and “yell it out at rallies.”
“When you say ‘black lives matter,’ that’s inherently racist,” the ex-mayor said. “Black lives matter, white lives matter, Asian lives matter, Hispanic lives matter. That’s anti-American and it’s racist.”
Giuliani did not immediately return messages for comment from the Daily News to elaborate on where he got the stats he cited and whether Alton Sterling and Philando Castile showed “no respect” to police.
A rep said he was attending a wake.
Giuliani’s comments came two days after he hammered similar talking points on MSNBC, saying African-Americans need to realize black kids are “the real danger.”
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who previously served under Giuliani, said Sunday that some of the former mayor’s criticisms of Black Lives Matter are “appropriate.” But overall, he said, the mayor is missing the mark.
“There is no denying within the police profession, 800,000 of us, that we have racists, we have brutal people, we have criminals, cops who shouldn’t be here,” Bratton said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“But they do not represent the vast majority of American police.”
He called policing “a shared responsibility” between cops and civilians, and said “everybody’s voice needs to be heard.”
Giuliani’s two terms as mayor were marked by issues of police brutality identical to those being debated today.
During his tenure — between 1994 and 2001 — NYPD officers shot and killed 160 suspects, according to department statistics.
That included 30 fatal shootings in 1996 — the highest of any year between 1991 and 2010. His mayoralty saw more than 10 deadly police shootings every year, though it also showed a drop from the Ed Koch and David Dinkins administrations, when there were often more than 20 fatal cop shootings annually.
Two of the most notorious shootings claimed the lives of unarmed black men: Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.
Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was shot 19 times after he reached for his wallet during a police encounter in 1999 in the Bronx. The four officers involved were charged with second-degree murder, but acquitted.
Dorismond, 26, was shot and killed during a scuffle with an undercover officer in 2000.
Giuliani himself faced intense backlash after he unsealed Dorismond’s juvenile delinquency record and said the victim was “no altar boy.”
Dorismond’s death was ruled an accident and the cop who shot him, Anthony Vasquez, was not indicted.
In his “Face The Nation” interview, Giuliani erroneously stated that an officer who “brutally attacked” Diallo “is now sitting in jail for 25 years due to the work of my police commissioner, Howard Safir, and the prosecution of now Attorney General Loretta Lynch.”
He appeared to confuse Diallo with Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was assaulted and sodomized by NYPD officers in 1997. That case — which occurred in Safir’s tenure, and was prosecuted by Loretta Lynch — led to a 30-year prison sentence for one officer, Justin Volpe.
