“ ‘More police officers are shot and killed by blacks than police officers kill African-Americans.’ ”
That’s former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani offering his perspective to Fox News on rising concerns that police disproportionately kill black Americans.
“The unarmed shootings — which are the ones that are the troublesome ones — there are only 9 of them against blacks — 20 against whites in 2019. So that‘ll give you a sense. Meanwhile, there were 9,000 murders of blacks, 7,500 of which were black-on-black,” Giuliani told Fox’s Ed Henry during a recent interview.
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The comments come as President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order calling on police departments to adopt stricter use-of-force standards and create a database to track officer misconduct amid an eruption of social unrest in America over racial inequality and the treatment of blacks by law enforcement after a number of recent incidences.
Protests across the globe have been ignited by the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man who perished in police custody on May 25 in Minneapolis as a white police officer drove his knee into his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
Giuliani, however, described the reaction to the incidences and calls to defund the police as “created” and “almost hysterical.”
“I think logically, 99%, if not more, of the police contact with the public is appropriate,” said the former mayor, a Trump confidant and lawyer.
The statistics rattled off by Giuliani, a New York district attorney and federal prosecutor before becoming mayor, however, drew a rebuke from the Washington Post, who refuted his claims, making the case that “black Americans are more likely to be shot and killed by police when unarmed than are whites.”
The paper argued, drawing from its own database, that there were 55 incidents in which police shot and killed unarmed individuals last year, not the 9 that Giuliani notes. The newspaper goes on to say that of some 1,002 deaths at the hands of law enforcement last year, 250, or 25%, were of black people, while noting that 48 police offers died over the same period, citing data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Check out the complete Giuliani interview on Fox below:
Meanwhile, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were locking horns over congressional moves to reform policing, with Senate Republicans putting forth legislation that was viewed as less stringent than the House bill on policing expected to be approved later Wednesday.
