Friday on MSNBC while commenting on the recent police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota and a sniper targeting and killing five Dallas police officers and wounding seven, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani questioned the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement and suggested it was doing more harm than good.

Giuliani said, “If you look at the number of murders of black men in America, that would make up less than 1% of the number of murders of black men in America. So the way we deal with it is to put it in proper perspective and be honest about it. What happened last night was the worst attack since September 11. People in Dallas should not feel guilty about it. Police officers in this country feel they have a target on their back. They felt that way for over a year now. This man made his motive clear. He was killing them—on just reading from the police commissioner—he wanted to kill officers. He expressed anger for Black Lives Matter. None of that made sense. Now the reality is we have to talk honestly.”

“No police officer should act brutally,” he continued. “No police officer should act in a way in which he has done that should be punished severely. I personally have prosecuted 70 police officers and put them in prison when I was U.S. Attorney and was instrumental in police officers being prosecuted by Loretta Lynch when I was mayor. On the other hand, I also recognize that 75 percent of the murder victims in New York City are black. The police have to be present in the black community. Not necessarily because they want to be, not because you’d like to have them there, but because that’s where the murders are taking place. From the time I became mayor and the time I left, murder went down from 1900 to 500. Then Mayor Bloomberg brought it down to 300. It’s now going up again. In that period of time, we saved thousands and thousands of mostly black lives by putting white police officers in areas where they were at risk. Now the New York City Police Department is a non-majority white police department.”

“That’s by design,” Giuliani added. “We accomplished making it a multi-racial, multi-ethnic police department. At the same token, not every police officer is a perfect person. Some are evil and bad. Most are good. The vast majority are good. We have to be honest with each other. When you talk about Black Lives Matter, the black young boy who was killed by another black young boy is just as dead as the black young boy killed by the police officer, except what I just mentioned happens 50 times more than the other. And I think there’s a target on police officer’s backs because of groups like Black Lives Matter that make it seem like all police are against blacks. They are not. They are the ones saving black lives. Black Lives Matter, it’s not saving any black lives. It’s the police officers that are doing it.”

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