The former New York City mayor claimed his policies, which included stop-and-frisk, reduced violent crime after the singer’s racially charged VMAs performance

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Monday that he had “saved more black lives” than Beyoncé, following the singer’s heralded MTV Music Video Awards performance, which made allusions to racial injustice.



At the awards show in New York on Sunday, Beyoncé performed a medley of songs from her recent “visual album” Lemonade, which was released with an accompanying film. The 15-minute performance began with her dancers falling as though shot by guns after they were hit by a red light, a reference to police killings of black people, and she was later joined onstage by a black man wearing a hoodie, a seeming reference to the clothing teenager Trayvon Martin wore when he was killed. She also brought the mothers of four unarmed black men who were killed in the US to the awards show.

Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001, told Fox News on Monday that the singer’s performance was “a shame”.

“I saved more black lives than any of those people you saw onstage,” he said, “by reducing crime – and particularly homicide – by 75%, of which maybe four or five thousand were African American young people who are alive today because of the policies I put in effect that weren’t in effect for 35 years.”

Beyoncé’s performance should have also symbolized why police officers are dispatched to “those neighborhoods”, the former Republican presidential hopeful said.

“Neither of them have saved any lives, although only Giuliani has the hubris to claim that he has,” Jeffrey Fagan, director of the Center for Crime, Community and Law at Columbia Law School, said. “His claim is dubious at best, without basis in fact.”

There was a 56% drop in the violent crime rate during Giuliani’s tenure, which mirrored a nationwide trend in falling crime rates at the time. Giuliani also instituted a controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which a federal judge said in 2013 violated individuals’ constitutional rights and was “racially discriminatory”.

“Crime was going down everywhere at the same time; perhaps he wants to take credit for saving lives in San Diego, Houston and many other large US cities,” Fagan said.

Giuliani, who made a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, was hailed as a hero in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, but in recent years has become known for his inflammatory comments.

Last month, he suggested Muslims on the government’s watch list should be forced to wear GPS wristbands. In 2015, Democratic leaders condemned him for saying Barack Obama did not love America. Over the summer, Giuliani called Black Lives Matter “inherently racist”.

Giuliani, who endorsed Donald Trump earlier this year, has criticized Beyoncé before. After her February half-time performance at the Super Bowl, which featured dancers dressed like Black Panthers, Giuliani said Beyoncé had used the show “as a platform to attack police officers”.