Giuliani: Black parents should 'teach children to be respectful of the police'

In order to solve the issue of racial bias in policing, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday, the United States needs to "look differently at race if we're going to change it."

For Giuliani, that means "maybe whites have to look at it differently and blacks have to look at it differently." It also means black people have "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," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation."


White people should recognize that African-American men and boys "have a fear of being confronted by the police because of some of these incidents," regardless of whether some people see it as "irrational" or "rational," he said.

The second reality, Giuliani said, is that there is "too much violence in the black community," remarking upon black-on-black violence being a greater danger than police-involved incidents.

"So 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. The real danger to them, 99 out of 100 times," is "other black kids who are going to kill them; that’s the way they’re gonna die," Giuliani said. "Now on the white side, we have to understand whether we get it or not there's an extraordinary fear of the police, and police have to institute a policy of zero tolerance like we did for crime in New York. Zero tolerance. No disrespect."

CBS' John Dickerson said that those "messages seem to conflict with one another."

"Of course they don't. If I were a black father and I was concerned with the safety of my child, really concerned about it and not in a politically activist sense, I would say respectful of the police, most of them are good, some can be very bad, and just be very careful. I'd also say be very careful of those kids in the neighborhood and don't get involved with them because, son, there's a 99 percent chance they're going to kill you, not the police," the former prosecutor said.

He said "there’s 60 shootings in Chicago over the Fourth of July and 14 murders, and Black Lives Matter is nonexistent, and then there’s one police murder of very questionable circumstances, and we hear from Black Lives Matter."

Asked to account for his suggestion that the Black Lives Matter movement puts a target on the backs of police officers, while African-Americans feel that the target is on their back after the fatal shooting of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, Giuliani did not back down.

"Well, then they talk about killing police officers," Giuliani began.

Dickerson interjected, "But they don't."

"They sure do. They sing rap songs about killing police officers and talk about killing police officers and they yell it out at rallies and the police officers hear it," Giuliani said.

Dickerson then remarked, "But Mr. Mayor, what you seem to be doing is taking —"

"Please let me finish," Giuliani continued, "And when you say black lives matter, that's inherently racist. Black lives matter, white lives matter, Asian lives matter, Hispanic lives matter. That’s anti-American and it’s racist."

Giuliani then turned his criticism on the media.

"Of course black lives matter, and they matter greatly, but when you focus on 1 percent or less than 1 percent of the murder that’s going on in America and you make it a national thing and all of you in the media make it much bigger than the black kid who’s getting killed in Chicago every 14 hours, you create a disproportion. The police understand it, and it puts a target on their back. Every cop in America will tell you that if you ask him."