DETROIT, MI -- For the second time since April, Mayor Dave Bing on Tuesday fired back at the mayor of another large U.S. city who took aim at Detroit.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in a New York Times article published last week said Detroit suffers from a lack of leadership.

He said he'd like to come to Detroit if he had to live somewhere other than Boston, but when asked what he would do here, Menino said:

"I’d blow up the place and start all over. No, seriously, when it takes a police officer 90 minutes to answer a call, there’s something wrong with the system. Forty percent of the streetlights are out, most of the buildings are boarded up. Why? Inaction, that’s the problem — leadership."

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino

Bing didn't take kindly to the comments and issued a response Tuesday afternoon:

“It is extremely regrettable that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino used such an unfortunate choice of words to describe what he would do if he came to Detroit," Bing said. "I would think the mayor of a city that recently experienced a deadly bombing attack would be more sensitive and not use the phrase ‘blow up.’

"I am also dismayed that Mayor Menino did not get his facts right before making his remarks to the widely-read New York Times. The Detroit Police Department’s response time is not – and has never been — 90 minutes. And, most of our city’s buildings are not boarded up. Since taking office more than four years ago, there has been tireless action on the part of my administration to improve the quality of life for our citizens. In fact, I invite Mayor Menino to visit Detroit to see our city for himself.”

City officials have placed Detroit's average police response time at 58 minutes. Police Chief James Craig has said that for a subset of 911 calls involving true emergencies, average response time last year was 15 minutes.

Tuesday's response from Bing wasn't the first time he's fired back at another mayor for speaking ill of Detroit.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in April used Detroit’s struggle with violence to illustrate how well his city is doing.

“Last year, we had a record low 419 murders,” Bloomberg said. “… If we had had Detroit’s murder rate, more than 4,500 New Yorkers would have been murdered last year instead of 419. That’s a factor of ten.”

Bing didn't like it and shot back a response criticizing Bloomberg for touting his crime fighting efforts at Detroit's expense.

“There are dramatic differences between New York and Detroit,” Bing said at the time. “First, the city of New York has nearly 40,000 law enforcement officers, compared to less than 3,000 here in the city of Detroit.

“Secondly, New York has crime fighting techniques and resources such as ‘stop and frisk at will’ and a sophisticated surveillance system that we do not currently have in our crime fighting arsenal, in part due to the fact we are under a federal consent decree."

A federal judge last month blasted New York's stop-and-frisk policy, saying police were violating Constitutional rights by making hundreds of thousands of stops without reason.

Detroit has a stop-and-frisk policy based on reasonable suspicion.

Follow MLive Detroit reporter Khalil AlHajal on Twitter @DetroitKhalil or on Facebook at Detroit Khalil. He can be reached at kalhajal@mlive.com or 313-643-0527.