Sunday, just one day before the expected Grand Jury results in Ferguson Mo, and in response to a question on Meet the Press put to him about the high frequency of majority White Police Departments handling enforcement over majority Black citizens former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani decided rather than to address what he as asked, but instead to blame Black people - specifically the children who are getting shot and uninvolved third parties - for how many times that police are killing them.
Video
Todd: How do you make a police force that looks like the community they serve?
Giuliani: Well, starting with Mayor Coch, Mayor Dinkins, myself and Mayor DeBlazio we tried very hard in New York to make the Police Force as proportionate as we possibly can. We go out of our way to do that, think we do a pretty good job. Not a perfect job.
Todd: You're not on this list [of highly disproportionately policed cities], so that's a good thing.
Giuliani: I was glad to see that we weren't by the way. But the fact is, I find this very disappointing that we aren't discussing the fact that 93% of Blacks in America are Killed by other Blacks. We're talking about the exception here. [Crosstalk] Let me finish. We are talking about the significant exception, 93% of Blacks are killed by other Blacks.
Michael Eric Dyson: Let me respond to that.
Giuliani: [Continues] I would like to see the attention paid to that, that you are paying to this.
This is of course a very favorite right-wing trope, that nobody in the black community actually cares about the murder of black people, unless a white cop does it and they can make it "Racial", which is simply
Hogwash! Dyson immediately made the most salient point about this.
Dyson: Most black people who commit crimes against other black people go to jail.
Bingo. On the nose. The complaint, completely and IMO deliberately misunderstood by Giuliani isn't that crimes against black people shouldn't happen, it's that when they do the Justice system tends to discount the guilt of the perpetrator when they are White.
And particularly when they are Cops operating under the color of authority. Dyson went on to also make that point only to have Giuliani repeatedly interrupt - immediately after Dyson had allowed him to speak - and claim...
Guiliani: It's hardly insignificant. It is the reason for the heavy police presence in the Black Community. 93%! ... So why don't you cut it down so so many White police Officers have to be in Black areas?
1) Is he claiming that Michael Eric Dyson is personally responsible for these murders somehow? What is he
pulling the trigger remotely? How exactly does Giuliani propose that
Dyson cut down the Murder Rate when apparently Police can't seem to do it?
2) Why does it have to be White Officers who are patrolling these areas At All? Black Officers can't be trusted to care? Or to do their jobs?
I will attempt to unravel this hop, jump and skip logic over the flip.
On Fox News today, Giuliani continued to make his arguement.
"I used to look at our crime reduction, and the reason we reduced homicide by 65 percent is because we reduced it in the black community," Giuliani said of his time as mayor. "Because there is virtually no homicide in the white community."
There's no homicide in the White Community? Virtually? Really?
Hella, Not. And of course he had to say this:
“The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer. That’s going to happen less than one percent of the time," he later added. "The danger to a black child -- if it was my child -- the danger is another black.”
Yes, we should clearly
Fear the Black People, and as we do we should think that that argument makes Giuliani sound even the tiniest bit racist or bigoted at all. Nope. Not a wit.
Giuliani should of course know damn well better, because on his watch as Mayor of New York it wasn't exactly a rarity for White Police to shoot down an unarmed black man. But then again, we've known for a long time exactly how frequently Giuliani likes to blame shift to victims for their own murder, as he didn't when NYPD shot down unarmed security guard Patrick Dorismond.
Before Patrick Dorismond's body was cold, the Giuliani administration launched an obscene campaign to vilify the dead security guard and all but portray him as someone who had a police bullet coming to him. Having little to work with, Giuliani ordered Police Commissioner Safir to unseal a juvenile record on the man, disclosing that he had been arrested for robbery and assault in 1987, when he was 13.
The charge, reportedly stemming from a childhood fist fight over a quarter, was dropped and his record sealed because he was a child. But Giuliani's legal advisers took the position that once he was dead, Dorismond's right not to have police records from his childhood publicized by the mayor died with him. It allowed Giuliani to declare that Dorismond was no "altar boy" and that his previous brush with the police "may justify, more closely, what the police officer did."
As for the cop who shot the security guard, Giuliani praised him for his "distinguished" career as an undercover officer, declaring that in going out and shooting an innocent, unarmed man to death in the street he "put his life on the line in the middle of the night to protect the safety and security of this city."
Yeah, not his first burn the dead innocent guy at the stake rodeo.
The first problem is with Guiliani's 93% Figure. It's wrong. Flat wrong. I will explain momentarily but before I do I will point out where that wrong number comes from, which is the FBI Uniform Crime Report.
And this is an issue which I have addressed before in reference to similar claims made on the Melissa Harris Perry Show a few months ago in response to Joe Klein who said something very similar to Guiliani.
If you go by this chart it appears that the total number of Black Victims [2,648] are mostly killed by Black Offenders [2,412] which is 92%.
However, as Melissa points out in her response to Klein it also says that [3,128] White Victims are mostly killed by White [2,612] Offenders which is 82.4%. So - if you go by this table - if there's a "Black on Black" crime problem, the "White on White" Crime problem is almost exactly as bad.
So that's not exactly "virtually no homicide" is it?
Second Problem: If 82.4% of Whites are Killing Whites - why don't we have a Majority of Black Officers Patrolling in their Cities to help take care of this issue they clearly can't handle on their own?
Back to First Problem: This data is incomplete and therefore any judgements made about it are incomplete and frankly - incorrect. This chart includes the following caveat.
Single Victim/Single Offender.
This chart, which is widely quoted and used by Law Enforcement, lazy journalists, and particularly right-wing pundits to argue that Black-on-Black crime is so much worse than any minor little occurrences where a White Officer just might be forced - by those black people's inherent criminality - to kill one of them, for his own safety and the greater good, even when they have their hands up, even when they have a toy weapon and are talking on the cell phone, even when they holding a non-lethal practice sword, even when they're just standing and sitting or doing nothing particular at all - this chart that people like Joe Klein and Giuliani have hung their rhetorical hat upon only includes about half of the murder cases in the country.
It only has the one-on-one cases, so anytime there are multiple victims or multiple offenders, that information is not included.
So what's the real number?
To be honest, nobody seems to know. So I did on my own digging in an attempt to get more correct info on this from the Supplemental Homicide Report, which includes case involving multiple offenders and multiple victims. When you do this the total number of murders goes from 6,000 to over 12,000 per year.
This is what I found.
For the five years between 2008-2012 in cases where the first victim is White, the oldest Offender arrested tends to also be White in 62% of the cases, Black in 12% of cases and Unknown in 24% of the time.
When you reverse that for the same years where the first victim is Black, the oldest Offender tends to also be Black in 55% of cases, White in 4.7% and Unknown in 40% of the cases.
So what is shown here is that the 92% Black on Black and 83% White on White Murder percentage claimed by Klein and others is literally Backwards to what we really know [62% White on White, 55% Black on Black] when we include all the available data we have and readily admit what we don't know at the same time.
So Guiliani's core argument, that we have to have so many White Officers patrolling in Black Neighborhoods because they just kill each other so much
is a complete load of bunk , while Dr. Dyson's argument that
some people who kill black people simply
don't go to jail as often seems to be fairly correct when you have nearly twice as many cases (40% vs 24%) where their is no arrest and the suspect remains unknown.
Looking at the work of John Roman on the bias in "Stand Your Ground" cases, the percentage of those situations where a White person killing a Black person claims they are "Justified" [because the black person was scary or maybe begging for help or something] is just staggering.
Third Problem: Exactly why are these murders happening? Guiliani says apparently that more attention should be paid to crimes against black people [and frankly, more attention should be paid to the killing of white people, particularly using guns but then again it's rare you're going to find a conservative who really wants to even take the very
first step with dealing with that such as closing the background check loophole, and dealing with domestic violence & murder suicides which is where most of these crimes occur - let alone deal with black people] - but ok, so what's the source of this crime?
One could surmise that these killings are related to gangs. And what is the rate of gang murders in the U.S.? According the FBI's Expanded Homicide Tables it goes like this.
Top 5 Felony Murder Circumstances:
Robbery 734, Other Not Specified 494, Narcotic Drug Laws 390, Burglary 92, Suspected Felony Type 60.
Total 5,976 with the remainder, 4,812 Unknown.
Top 10 Non Felony connected Murders:
Other Arguments 3,128, Other Not Specified 1,647, Juvenile Gang Killings 523, Argument over money or property 155, Gangland Killings 150, Brawl due to influence of narcotics 115, Brawl due to influence of alcohol 111, Romantic Triangle 85, Child killed by babysitter 39, institutional Killings 22.
So Gangs, which is ostensibly what Giuliani is focusing on, only account for (523+150=) 673 Murders in 2011. That's out of over 12,000, which is about 5%. Perhaps there other larger issues and forces at work here?
[By comparison the number of person killed by Police via "justifiable homicide" for 2011 was 404, and with "justifiable homicide by citizens" that adds another 266, so that's a total of 670, meaning almost exactly as many people were killed by police and gun totting citizens like George Zimmerman than were killed by Gangs in 2011] .
Gangs of course, are criminal commercial enterprises who use violence and intimidation to maintain and spread their financial influence in the areas of drug trafficking, prostitution, extortion and protection rackets. Kinda like Walmart would be without Lawyers. Gangs also, are not something that is unique to Black people, and someone named Guiliani should be well aware of that IMO. Could it be that gangs are able to find more willing recruits to carry out their illegal business - and one could argue whether some of these should be illegal, Gangs used to "Run Numbers" now we call that "The Lottery" - when the community is under extreme economic stress where legal and legitimate small businesses find it difficult to flourish?
As it stands right now the Unemployment Rate in Ferguson MO, is over 9%. For African-Americans in the that city, it's over 13%.
Perhaps if towns like Ferguson didn't have a history of Racial Redlining in Housing which sucked in black residents while locking them out of other neighborhoods where they would be closer to better paying jobs, then things might be different there.
I'm not exactly sure what Elder Wand of Power that Guiliani thinks Michael Eric Dyson can wave to undue decades of housing discrimination, lending discrimination and employment discrimination (I mean, seriously - is someone who believes and think like Guiliani, that young black men are more prone to violence, crime and murder likely to hire a young black man even when they're record is absolutely spotless? Yeah, right!) - but if he really wants to have that discussion, I don't it's going to go anywhere near where he thinks it should go.
The issue here isn't that blacks are "more prone to crime and murder" which is an argument that simply can't be proven especially once you look at all the arrest stats.
They claim Blacks commit most of the Crime, but FBI Arrest numbers show that White People are arrested (6.5 Million in 2012) more often than Black people (2.6 Million) by a factor of almost 2.5 to 1.
And then when you take into account the well documented police bias that tends to generate
20% more stops, 100% more arrests 20% longer sentences and a 200% greater chance of being subjected to violent use of force for black people even when they are accused of the exact same offense or even when they've
done nothing wrong at all, this "crime disparity" essentially collapses completely.
White people commit plenty of crime, perhaps we should be looking more closely into that, but one stat we can fairly predict Guiliani won't ask be looking into further is this one.
Young Black Men are 21 TIMES More Likely to be Killed By Cops.
Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.
The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.
The black boys killed can be disturbingly young. There were 41 teens 14 years or younger reported killed by police from 1980 to 2012. 27 of them were black; 8 were white; 4 were Hispanic and 1 was Asian.
Even if Giuliani's interpretation of the black crime stats were correct, it
Still couldn't possibly excuse or justify THIS level of disparity in how police respond to suspects with greater fear, greater suspicion and
greater force.
This is the reason situations like Ferguson get the attention that they do, Rudy.
Vyan