In an appearance on CBS' Face the Nation Sunday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told black parents that they should teach their children to be respectful to police and worry more about violence in the black community.
"There's too much violence in the black community," Giuliani said. “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 … are other black kids who are going to kill them. That’s the way they’re going to die.”
As the Washington Post notes, this is not the first time Giuliani has stated such views, claiming in a 2014 interview on NBC's Meet the Press that “93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks.”
Upon fact-checking the claim, the Washington Post ruled that the statistic used lacked significant context, saying that the statement was misleading.
Giuliani acknowledged Sunday that "whites have to realize that African-American men have a fear, and boys have a fear, of being confronted by the police because of some of these incidents,” but when CBS' John Dickerson pointed out that those “messages seem to conflict with one another," the former mayor swiftly countered, Politico notes.
"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, ‘[Be] 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,’” Giuliani said.
Giuliani's comments came days after the killings of police officers in Dallas, as well as the fatal police-involved shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn.
Large protests over the deaths of Sterling and Castile continued Saturday, and hundreds were arrested across the nation.
Giuliani also slammed the Black Lives Matter movement in his interview, calling the movement "inherently racist."
“Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter,” he said. “That’s anti-American, and it’s racist.”
Read more at the Washington Post and Politico.