Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani Has Forgotten What a Democracy Is

by Robert Emmett Murphy Jr.

This week, New York City Police Officers Liu and Ramos were murdered in an ambush by Ismaaiyl Brinsley. Brinsley appears to have had a long history of mental illness and acted alone, but this is clearly a terrorist act, as his tenuous motive was political. He killed the Officers in retaliation for the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man killed by a White New York City Police Officer last July. Liu and Ramos, who were Asian and Hispanic, had no role in Garner’s death. Brinsley, who is Black, appears to have never known Garner in life.

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio

In an interview on Fox News, former New York City Mayor Giuliani gave his thoughts on the tragedy, but he was not especially thoughtful about it, and succeeded in nothing but fanning the flames of the already burning controversy. Giuliani made some attempt to be tempered in his statements, “Now is not the time to call for…the [current] Mayor’s [Bill de Blasio’s] resignation. It is not the time to say there is blood on his hands. A lot of other police officers were killed under a lot of other Mayors…” But just as clearly he failed in his tempering, spending most of the four minutes indulging in his own inflammatory and misleading flights of fancy.

He laid blame for the murder of the two Officers on the protests over Garner’s death and accused de Blasio of “letting” protests “get out of control.” This is clearly false; though the protests were gigantic, they also were mostly peaceful and the Police presence at these protests, ordered by de Blasio, was substantial. Also the shooter was not a resident of this city and does not seem to have taken part in them. (A similar dynamic appears to have emerged in Ferguson, Missouri, where, in the wake of the Police killing of an unarmed Black teen named Michael Brown, there was protests and looting. It seems most of the looters were mostly not from Ferguson community though most of the protestors were).

Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giulianai

Giuliani further said that in the “community serious violent crime is a much bigger part of the problem,” ignoring the fact that New York City is now the safest major city in the USA, and that nationwide, we may be living in the least violent period in this nation’s history – clearly the least violent period in my life-time (which more-or-less corresponds with the era of the keeping of accurate metadata regarding American crime). Giuliani gave a command politicians should preach about lack of “father figures” in the Black community – something no politician can direct — rather than suggesting that politicians institute reforms within Police Departments — an institution that the politician has direct authority and responsibility for.

Michael Brown and Eric Garner, who never knew each other and lived in different parts of the country, are now inextricably linked by how they died. Giuliani refered to Brown, not by name, but by having high praise for former Basketball star’s, Charles Barkley’s, statements regarding Brown’s death and the related protests. But Barkely’s statements had been hugely hypocritical, scolding the life of the dead teen, but Brown had no serious criminal record while Barkley has arrests for both DUI and assault.

And then Giuliani went straight off the deep end:

“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence…all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”

The “hate” “propaganda” he claims is being spread against Police doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t exist in the words of the leaders he vilifies. Giuliani does nothing but demonstrate that he has his head in the sand regarding something that has gone monstrously wrong and needs to be dealt with.

Death of Eric Garner

In a short four-month period, NYPD killed two unarmed Black men, the other was Akai Gurley. Neither man was engaging in any violence. Gurley was wholly innocent — not even accused of a crime — while Garner was accused of the most trivial of misdemeanors. Both deaths were a direct result of the Police Officer in question’s incompetence/misconduct. Yes, in neither case was there an intent to do harm by the Officers involved, but that lack of intent simply isn’t good enough. If you want to make that case, I volunteer you to be to one to go to the dead men’s families and say, “Ooopsie.”

And it should also be impossible for Giuliani to dismiss that this a real crisis – as opposed to a propaganda creation – that has led to protests over Police violence across the country. Nation-wide, the same four-month time-frame gave us another four Police shootings of unarmed Black men and boys, three of which were fatal. We have to recognize that something is fundamentally wrong with our policing and that this is exposed primarily in the relationship between Police and poor communities and/or communities of color (each year about four Blacks are killed by Police for every one White, adjusted for population sizes; that means that a Black is 20 times more likely to die by the hands of the Police than a White).

Giuliani’s remarks also show a profound misunderstanding of what authority in this country really is, and this is especially shocking given that he was once Mayor of this, one of the world’s most populous cities. In a Democracy we, meaning all Americans collectively, like those Americans protesting, have some authority over the relationship the Police present to poor communities and/or communities of color – because ultimately those Police are the servants of the people. But we don’t have that same collective authority over the relationship that poor communities and/or communities of color present to the Police – because they are not our servants.

I know which end of this relationship has the mechanisms to enact direct reforms, the Police end. I am confident that if the Police modify their relation one way, the relationship will naturally modify itself in the other direction as well; reducing Police violence will in turn reduce the communities-at-risk’s resentment of Police.

Eric Garner at his graduation

We’ve been through this before: in the 1960s violent Police tactics in poor communities and communities of color was a central issue to the Civil Rights Movement. Emerging from that, in the 1970s, there was a string of terrorist attacks against Police in several American cities by groups like the Black Liberation Army. It seems that targeted Police Officers rarely, or never, had any involvement in any of specific acts of violence that the terrorists based their resentments on. In the fifty years since, Police killings of Americans have steadily reduced, and of Black Americans specifically have dropped a whopping 70%. During that same period, acts of deadly terrorism in the United States have dropped even more precipitously, and deadly terrorism based on home-grown ideologies, like Black Nationalism, has all but disappeared.

Terrorists don’t last long, death or long prison sentences wait around every corner, and their ideologies are generally abandoned as others move forward with their lives. Policing is a permanent institution, as permanent as the communities the Police work within. As Police are the servants of those communities, it is a fact that the Police have the greater responsibility for maintenance of that relationship.

The full interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZGP-eUp6Cc