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Giuliani: "I Saved More Black Lives Than Anyone"
By
John Del Signore
Published Nov 25, 2014
Modified Nov 25, 2014
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By
John Del Signore
Published Nov 25, 2014
Modified Nov 25, 2014
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Black New Yorkers owe a debt of gratitude to former mayor Rudy Giuliani for saving their lives, says former mayor Giuliani. The Enlightened Emperor of 9/11 Town issued his pronouncements to justify recent comments made on Meet the Press, in which he tried to deflect attention away from racial disparity in police forces by pointing out that most black Americans are killed by other blacks, not white cops who get away with murder, which only happens sometimes nbd.
"I saved more black lives than anyone as mayor," Giuliani wants you to know. "Many black kids are alive with the policies I put in place with [first] Police Commissioner [Bill] Bratton. And they call me racist? I saved black lives." Just ask the family of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed black man who was killed by a cop on Giuliani's police force.
The Savior Formerly Known As Giuliani is referring to the "broken windows" strategy of policing, in which police aggressively crack down on seemingly minor infractions in an attempt to pre-empt more serious crimes. This approach, implemented by current Commissioner Bill Bratton when he served under Giuliani, led to a nearly 200% increase in misdemeanor arrests since 1980, with the rate of misdemeanor arrests for black males ages 18 to 20 tripling during the Giuliani administration. One assumes their gratitude for Giuliani's saving grace cannot be expressed in words.
The Washington Post reports that a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report did indeed conclude that "93 percent of black homicide victims from 1980 through 2008 were killed by black offenders," but what Giuliani fails to mention is that 83 percent of white victims are also killed by whites. Homicide, by and large, tends to be intraracial, and mostly perpetrated by murderers whom the victim knows.
None of this changes the fact that, according to a 2012 ProPublica analysis, young black males were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white male youths.
It is true that violent crime in NYC declined drastically during the Giuliani administration; in 1993, when he took office, there were 1,946 murders, and when his second term ended in 2001, that number was down to 714. And to be sure, the Giuliani administration deserves some credit for reducing crime, but what's often glossed over is the fact that violent crime was trending downward in NYC before Giuliani took office, and corresponded with a dramatic decrease in violent crime in many major American cities throughout the 1990s.
Whether the zero-tolerance "Broken Windows" strategy—which has continued into the de Blasio era with the return of Commissioner Bratton—brought down violent crime is up for debate. That is, unless you're Giuliani, in which case correlation totally implies causation. Maybe he means he saved black lives by putting them in jail? Any black New Yorkers who'd like to express gratitude to the former mayor for saving them can send their thank-you notes to Giuliani Partners, LLC.
Tagged
crime
giuliani
rudy giuliani
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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