For those of you have been on blind-democracy for a long time and have long
memories will remember that I once talked about that police riot and was called
a liar and told to shut my mouth by a poster who is no longer on this list. I
have for a long time been warning of the dangers of Rudy but I get the feeling
no one takes that seriously.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2016 10:53 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Rudy Giuliani: Divisive New York Past Has Many in
Fear of Trump Cabinet Post
Excerpt: "Rudy Giuliani may soon be the first western diplomat of the modern
era to have stoked a racist police riot."
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks at a rally for Donald Trump in
Bangor, Maine, last month. (photo: Sarah Raice/Getty)
Rudy Giuliani: Divisive New York Past Has Many in Fear of Trump Cabinet Post By
Spencer Ackerman, Lois Beckett and Jamiles Lartey, Guardian UK
17 November 16
He was hailed as 'America's mayor' after 9/11, but black residents who remember
his time in New York believe his record of fueling racial tensions should
disqualify him from serving as the US's top diplomat Rudy Giuliani may soon be
the first western diplomat of the modern era to have stoked a racist police
riot.
The former New York mayor has shamelessly promoted himself as a key member of
the Donald Trump administration first as a potential attorney general, then
openly touting himself to become secretary of state.
But Giuliani's one-man campaign is already facing a backlash - including from a
Republican senator who said several of his colleagues believe Giuliani is
unsuited to a key cabinet position.
Black residents who remember his time in New York with dismay believe his
divisive record should disqualify him as the US's chief diplomat.
Giuliani's approach to policing created "an environment of terror for
communities of color", said Lumumba Bandele, a lifelong New Yorker and police
reform advocate. If he takes on a national role, "We should all be preparing
for worst-case scenarios," he said.
His record on police abuses and freedom of expression is "frightening", said
Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.
In the wake of September 11, Giuliani was seen as a uniter, hailed as
"America's mayor" and a trustworthy leader for all New Yorkers. But Giuliani
has a fraught history with New York's black and brown residents. For decades,
he has defended police killings and abuse of black men and fueled racial
divisions.
Giuliani set the tone for his mayoralty before his election, on a hot summer
morning in September 1992. The largely white New York City police force was
angry with the city's first black mayor, David Dinkins. Dinkins had proposed
removing police representatives from a board that hears complaints about police
brutality, a position unacceptable to the police and its powerful union.
A protest march by 10,000 off-duty police officers blocked traffic on the
Brooklyn Bridge as uniformed officers stood aside. By the time it reached City
Hall Park, it had taken an angry turn. Officers chanting "Dinkins Must Go!"
pushed through the barricades and climbed the municipal steps. The New York
Times described it as a "beer-swilling, traffic-snarling, epithet-hurling
melee". Newsday compared city hall to an "embassy in some far-off hostile land
. under siege".
The signs the police waved labeled the mayor a "washroom attendant", claimed he
was "on crack" said his "true color [was] yellow bellied" and asked if he had
hugged a drug dealer that day. A subsequent official NYPD report, which
recommended discipline for 42 officers and called the march an "embarrassment",
conceded some protesters used racial slurs and said the rally was "unruly,
mean-spirited and perhaps criminal".
Nearby, Giuliani, the man whom Dinkins beat in the 1989 election and who was
waiting for a rematch, waited to address the crowd. Channeling its momentum,
Giuliani addressed Dinkins' policies by chanting "Bullshit!" He laid the "low
morale" of the NYPD at Dinkins' feet. The police, returning the sentiment,
chanted: "Rudy, Rudy, Rudy."
Giuliani would later say he had attempted to calm the fury of the protesters
and that he had tried to move them away from city hall. He did not respond to
requests for comment on Wednesday through his spokeswoman, Jo Ann Zafonte. The
New York Times reported at the time that, during the city hall protest, "at
least one Giuliani supporter circulated through the crowd handing out voter
registration cards".
A recently elected city councilwoman from Flatbush, Brooklyn, attempted to
cross the barricades. "I try to forget the police riot at city hall," Una
Clarke told the Guardian this week.
But 24 years later, she remembers clearly what the white officers who blocked
her path said to one another when she explained she was a councilwoman on her
way to a meeting: "One guy looked at the other and he
said: 'This nigger is a council member, do you believe her?' And I was stunned
and taken off by it. Because I'm a Jamaican, frankly, I decided I was not going
into my pocketbook to give him an ID."
In Giuliani's opinion, he was not the one playing incendiary racial politics in
a confrontation with his political rival. "The mayor plays the racial card when
he thinks it is to his advantage and then he condemns other people when he
believes they're doing it and that is very phony," Giuliani said afterwards. He
would later suggest that outrage at police officers using racial slurs against
city officials was a distraction.
"The real question is, has the relatively minor occurrence of racial epithets,
if they occurred at all, been made the major focus of this rally for political
purposes?" he said in late September 1992.
Clarke remembered Giuliani telling her that she made up her encounter with
police during the riot. "Rudy Giuliani said I was lying," she said.
As mayor, Clarke continued, "he played every ethnic group against every ethnic
group. For me, racially, he's not changed."
At the time, Dinkins' chief political aide compared Giuliani to the Ku Klux
Klan leader David Duke, accusing him of trying "to flame racial tensions rather
than try to bring people together, and then make excuses about it".
Dinkins walked back the comparison on 23 September but kept the pressure on
Giuliani, reminding the New York Times of "the kinds of comments that Rudy
Giuliani made out here with a mob of police, drinking beer, behaving in an
unruly fashion, and then egging them on".
The city hall riot was the most dramatic episode in a long career marked by
tension over police violence towards Americans of color - and Giuliani's fierce
defense of police officers and law enforcement. Patrick Lynch, the current
president of New York City's police union, did not immediately respond to a
request for comment on Giuliani's record as an advocate for law enforcement.
Bandele, an activist with Communities United for Police Reform, said that the
riot set the tone for Giuliani's eight years as mayor, from 1994 to 2001.
"In our communities, folks knew him for what he was. His nickname was 'Adolf
Giuliani', so that gives you a sense of how people saw him. In communities of
color, in LGBT communities, in immigrant communities, his presence was
unwelcome and we were glad to see him go," Bandele, a lifelong New York City
resident said.
"The idea of Giuliani becoming the secretary of state, that's frightening and
it's also really clear about the direction that Trump is going in," said
Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder. "Giuliani represents the old: an
archaic system that systematically devalues black life."
From the start of his mayoralty in 1994, Giuliani signaled dismissiveness to
the city's black leadership. After longtime Harlem congressman Charles Rangel
claimed that year Giuliani was not reaching out to black New York, the
first-year mayor suggested black New Yorkers needed to watch their mouths.
"I want to reach out to all of the communities in the city. It has to be a
two-way street. And they're going to have to learn how to discipline themselves
in the way in which they speak also," Giuliani said.
In the summer of 1997, after an altercation at a nightclub, four Flatbush
police officers beat and sodomized a Haitian immigrant in the 70th precinct
house. The broomhandle officers forced into Abner Louima's rectum tore his
colon and perforated his bladder. Louima claimed, and later retracted, that the
police torturing him told him: "It's Giuliani time."
The invented quote became a slogan for Giuliani's opposition. Taking on a life
of its own, it became a shorthand to describe the brutality of the Giuliani
era, from actual police violence against black New Yorkers to the dismissive
tone the mayor took with his critics. As soon as Giuliani handily won
re-election and Louima recanted the comment, Giuliani said his critics "owe the
people of the city an apology".
One of those critics was Dinkins, who retorted that Giuliani had missed the
point. "The problem is not what was said but what was done. The mayor continues
to insist that only police officers can investigate police officers," Dinkins
said.
In 1999, Bronx police officers, apparently carrying out a stop-and-frisk, shot
and killed immigrant Amadou Diallo in his apartment building vestibule.
The officers shot at Diallo 41 times after he reached for his wallet to show
ID. The killing attracted national attention right as Giuliani was nurturing
national political ambitions. He called it "unfortunate" but pleaded that the
police "should be given the benefit of the doubt".
The officers who killed Diallo were acquitted. Giuliani told the Today show
that the Diallo killing "does not reflect the overall record of the New York
police department". Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about Diallo and defiantly
performed it at Madison Square Garden amid police protest.
Giuliani criticized Springsteen for the song, as he would later criticize
Beyoncé for her songs and performances referencing police violence.
The next year, on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, an undercover cop solicited a man
named Patrick Dorismond for a drug sale. A fracas ensued, and a different
officer shot Dorismond dead.
The mayor began by unsealing Dorismond's police record, to include his juvenile
file. The formerly secret documents shed no light on what happened on Eighth
Avenue that night. But Giuliani harnessed innuendo, infamously saying Dorismond
"isn't an altar boy".
As it happened, Dorismond literally was an altar boy. When this was pointed out
to Giuliani, he shot back: "I think that's not a correct juxtaposition of
statements, nor intended for any kind of decent or useful purpose." It would
take until May for Giuliani to concede he had made "a mistake".
Fourteen years later, when the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson
inspired a nationwide movement against police violence, Giuliani re-emerged as
a defender of law enforcement, and a critic of black protesters, whom he deemed
"racist".
Giuliani used his record on fighting violence in New York City to add luster to
an old conservative talking point: that black Americans were wrong to protest
about state violence by police officers because a larger percentage of murders
were caused by black men killing other black men.
"Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to see
the attention paid to that that you are paying to this," Giuliani said in
widely criticized remarks on Meet the Press in November 2014, an exchange one
New York City reporter dubbed "vintage Giuliani".
"White police officers wouldn't be there [in black neighborhoods] if you
weren't killing each other," Giuliani went on to tell Michael Eric Dyson, a
black Georgetown professor on the show with him.
"This is a defense mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind, sir,"
Dyson told him.
In 2016, he called Black Lives Matter "inherently racist" and said asked why
activists never protested about the deaths of everyday black residents of
Chicago."Where are they then? Where are they when a young black child is
killed?" he asked.
In fact, Black Lives Matter activists had held protests over gun violence in
Chicago, including over the brutal murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee. In
March, Lamon Reccord, one of the most prominent and controversial young
activists in protests against the police killing of Laquan McDonald, organized
his own protest in honor of Tyshawn, one of many ongoing community protests and
interventions led by black Chicago residents to address neighborhood gun
violence.
Giuliani has frequently pushed back against potential critics by arguing, as he
did on Fox and Friends in August talking about Beyoncé, that "I saved more
black lives than any of those people" and adding that "maybe 4,000 or
5,000 were African American young people who are alive today because of the
policies I put in effect."
New York's crime rate did fall dramatically, starting in Dinkins' era and
continuing in Giuliani's: violent crimes declined 43% from 1990 to 1996.
Homicides in the city dropped 66%, ahead of the national average decline of
50%, from 1990 to 1997. A narrative took shape that propelled Giuliani's
career: he had made New York safe. While it's true that Giuliani presided over
a historic decrease in violence, it's less clear how much of the credit for
this should go directly to the mayor and his policies.
"Not a lot," said Frank Zimring, a prominent criminologist at the University of
California Berkeley, and the author of The City That Became Safe: What New York
Teaches About Urban Crime and Its Control.
The credit for the financial investment in increased New York City police
manpower goes to Dinkins, Giuliani's predecessor, and to the New York governor,
Mario Cuomo, Zimring said. The credit for new police strategies goes to police
commissioners Bill Bratton - who Giuliani, to his credit, hired, and then, not
to his credit, fired, Zimring said - and Ray Kelly.
(Bratton's public approval ratings had been higher than Giuliani's, which the
mayor reportedly disliked.) Zimring has argued that New York's precipitous
crime decline was driven in part by changes in policing, including a more
data-driven focus on crime hotspots, though he called the much-discussed "zero
tolerance" and the "broken windows" strategies "little more than slogans".
"Unfortunately, New York's successes in crime control have come at a cost,"
he wrote. Although declines in violence benefited black New Yorkers, as
Giuliani argued, "Police aggressiveness is a very regressive tax: the street
stops, bullying and pretext-based arrests fall disproportionately on young men
of color in their own neighborhood," he wrote.
A report by the New York state attorney general found a massively
disproportionate racial impact in the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics after
examining 175,000 of these incidents from January 1998 to March 1999. Black New
Yorkers, 25.6% of the city, comprised 50.6% of stops. Hispanic New Yorkers,
23.7% of the city, comprised 33% of stops. White New Yorkers, 43.4% of the
city, comprised 12.9% of stops. "In the most strongly white neighborhoods in
New York," the study found, "the disparity between minority and white 'stop'
rates is most pronounced."
The report stopped short of calling Giuliani's favored police tactic racist,
something that would take a judge's ruling in 2013, which concluded that "the
city's highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers
are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner."
At times, Giuliani has taken inclusive stances with regard to immigrants and
Muslim New Yorkers. After 9/11, Giuliani was dubbed America's mayor by Oprah
Winfrey in his finest hour as a politician.
In a sweeping speech to the United Nations in October 2001, Giuliani praised
New York's "very strong and vibrant Muslim and Arab communities" as "an equally
important part of the life of our city".
"I've urged New Yorkers not to engage in any form of group blame or group
hatred. This is exactly the evil that we're confronting with these terrorists,"
he said. "And if we're going to prevail over them, over terror, then our ideals
and principles and values must transcend all forms of prejudice."
"This is not a dispute between religions or ethnic groups. All religions, all
decent people, are united in their desire to achieve peace."
Yet by 2010, the political winds had shifted, and Giuliani shifted with them.
That summer, outrage grew from the fringes of the right after a local Muslim
leader had proposed building an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan,
within walking distance of the former Twin Towers. The project, strongly
defended by Giuliani's successor, Michael Bloomberg, as a religious-freedom
issue, became the target of a smear campaign, which dubbed it the "Ground Zero
Mosque" or even the "Victory Mosque", suggesting that the American Muslims who
would go to the center for a moment of reflection were celebrating 9/11.
Giuliani joined in. Calling into a radio show in early August, he called the
cultural center a "desecration" and falsely asserted that the imam behind the
project, a man who had written a book called What's Right With Islam Is What's
Right With America, had supported "radical causes". In a later interview with
the Today show, he suggested the project itself was radical:
"If you're a healer, you do not go forward with this project. If you're a
warrior, you do."
In the years since, and particularly since joining Trump's campaign, Giuliani
has intensified his stance. He has boasted of placing undercover agents in New
York mosques and stated "good Muslims" would benefit from surveillance in their
communities. On Fox & Friends, Giuliani implied that only mosques with
something to hide would object to police infiltration: "If you've got nothing
going on there but a beautiful religious service, why in His name would you not
want to have police officers there?"
"All I can say is God bless Rudy Giuliani," said Una Clarke, who was at the
police riot decades ago. "It's a bundle of racists getting together to see if
they can take us back to the old age."
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks at a rally for Donald Trump in
Bangor, Maine, last month. (photo: Sarah Raice/Getty)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/17/rudy-giuliani-new-york-mayor
-trump-cabinethttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/17/rudy-giuliani-
new-york-mayor-trump-cabinet
Rudy Giuliani: Divisive New York Past Has Many in Fear of Trump Cabinet Post By
Spencer Ackerman, Lois Beckett and Jamiles Lartey, Guardian UK
17 November 16
He was hailed as 'America's mayor' after 9/11, but black residents who remember
his time in New York believe his record of fueling racial tensions should
disqualify him from serving as the US's top diplomat udy Giuliani may soon be
the first western diplomat of the modern era to have stoked a racist police
riot.
The former New York mayor has shamelessly promoted himself as a key member of
the Donald Trump administration first as a potential attorney general, then
openly touting himself to become secretary of state.
But Giuliani's one-man campaign is already facing a backlash - including from a
Republican senator who said several of his colleagues believe Giuliani is
unsuited to a key cabinet position.
Black residents who remember his time in New York with dismay believe his
divisive record should disqualify him as the US's chief diplomat.
Giuliani's approach to policing created "an environment of terror for
communities of color", said Lumumba Bandele, a lifelong New Yorker and police
reform advocate. If he takes on a national role, "We should all be preparing
for worst-case scenarios," he said.
His record on police abuses and freedom of expression is "frightening", said
Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.
In the wake of September 11, Giuliani was seen as a uniter, hailed as
"America's mayor" and a trustworthy leader for all New Yorkers. But Giuliani
has a fraught history with New York's black and brown residents. For decades,
he has defended police killings and abuse of black men and fueled racial
divisions.
Giuliani set the tone for his mayoralty before his election, on a hot summer
morning in September 1992. The largely white New York City police force was
angry with the city's first black mayor, David Dinkins. Dinkins had proposed
removing police representatives from a board that hears complaints about police
brutality, a position unacceptable to the police and its powerful union.
A protest march by 10,000 off-duty police officers blocked traffic on the
Brooklyn Bridge as uniformed officers stood aside. By the time it reached City
Hall Park, it had taken an angry turn. Officers chanting "Dinkins Must Go!"
pushed through the barricades and climbed the municipal steps. The New York
Times described it as a "beer-swilling, traffic-snarling, epithet-hurling
melee". Newsday compared city hall to an "embassy in some far-off hostile land
. under siege".
The signs the police waved labeled the mayor a "washroom attendant", claimed he
was "on crack" said his "true color [was] yellow bellied" and asked if he had
hugged a drug dealer that day. A subsequent official NYPD report, which
recommended discipline for 42 officers and called the march an "embarrassment",
conceded some protesters used racial slurs and said the rally was "unruly,
mean-spirited and perhaps criminal".
Nearby, Giuliani, the man whom Dinkins beat in the 1989 election and who was
waiting for a rematch, waited to address the crowd. Channeling its momentum,
Giuliani addressed Dinkins' policies by chanting "Bullshit!" He laid the "low
morale" of the NYPD at Dinkins' feet. The police, returning the sentiment,
chanted: "Rudy, Rudy, Rudy."
Giuliani would later say he had attempted to calm the fury of the protesters
and that he had tried to move them away from city hall. He did not respond to
requests for comment on Wednesday through his spokeswoman, Jo Ann Zafonte. The
New York Times reported at the time that, during the city hall protest, "at
least one Giuliani supporter circulated through the crowd handing out voter
registration cards".
A recently elected city councilwoman from Flatbush, Brooklyn, attempted to
cross the barricades. "I try to forget the police riot at city hall," Una
Clarke told the Guardian this week.
But 24 years later, she remembers clearly what the white officers who blocked
her path said to one another when she explained she was a councilwoman on her
way to a meeting: "One guy looked at the other and he
said: 'This nigger is a council member, do you believe her?' And I was stunned
and taken off by it. Because I'm a Jamaican, frankly, I decided I was not going
into my pocketbook to give him an ID."
In Giuliani's opinion, he was not the one playing incendiary racial politics in
a confrontation with his political rival. "The mayor plays the racial card when
he thinks it is to his advantage and then he condemns other people when he
believes they're doing it and that is very phony," Giuliani said afterwards. He
would later suggest that outrage at police officers using racial slurs against
city officials was a distraction.
"The real question is, has the relatively minor occurrence of racial epithets,
if they occurred at all, been made the major focus of this rally for political
purposes?" he said in late September 1992.
Clarke remembered Giuliani telling her that she made up her encounter with
police during the riot. "Rudy Giuliani said I was lying," she said.
As mayor, Clarke continued, "he played every ethnic group against every ethnic
group. For me, racially, he's not changed."
At the time, Dinkins' chief political aide compared Giuliani to the Ku Klux
Klan leader David Duke, accusing him of trying "to flame racial tensions rather
than try to bring people together, and then make excuses about it".
Dinkins walked back the comparison on 23 September but kept the pressure on
Giuliani, reminding the New York Times of "the kinds of comments that Rudy
Giuliani made out here with a mob of police, drinking beer, behaving in an
unruly fashion, and then egging them on".
The city hall riot was the most dramatic episode in a long career marked by
tension over police violence towards Americans of color - and Giuliani's fierce
defense of police officers and law enforcement. Patrick Lynch, the current
president of New York City's police union, did not immediately respond to a
request for comment on Giuliani's record as an advocate for law enforcement.
Bandele, an activist with Communities United for Police Reform, said that the
riot set the tone for Giuliani's eight years as mayor, from 1994 to 2001.
"In our communities, folks knew him for what he was. His nickname was 'Adolf
Giuliani', so that gives you a sense of how people saw him. In communities of
color, in LGBT communities, in immigrant communities, his presence was
unwelcome and we were glad to see him go," Bandele, a lifelong New York City
resident said.
"The idea of Giuliani becoming the secretary of state, that's frightening and
it's also really clear about the direction that Trump is going in," said
Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder. "Giuliani represents the old: an
archaic system that systematically devalues black life."
From the start of his mayoralty in 1994, Giuliani signaled dismissiveness to
the city's black leadership. After longtime Harlem congressman Charles Rangel
claimed that year Giuliani was not reaching out to black New York, the
first-year mayor suggested black New Yorkers needed to watch their mouths.
"I want to reach out to all of the communities in the city. It has to be a
two-way street. And they're going to have to learn how to discipline themselves
in the way in which they speak also," Giuliani said.
In the summer of 1997, after an altercation at a nightclub, four Flatbush
police officers beat and sodomized a Haitian immigrant in the 70th precinct
house. The broomhandle officers forced into Abner Louima's rectum tore his
colon and perforated his bladder. Louima claimed, and later retracted, that the
police torturing him told him: "It's Giuliani time."
The invented quote became a slogan for Giuliani's opposition. Taking on a life
of its own, it became a shorthand to describe the brutality of the Giuliani
era, from actual police violence against black New Yorkers to the dismissive
tone the mayor took with his critics. As soon as Giuliani handily won
re-election and Louima recanted the comment, Giuliani said his critics "owe the
people of the city an apology".
One of those critics was Dinkins, who retorted that Giuliani had missed the
point. "The problem is not what was said but what was done. The mayor continues
to insist that only police officers can investigate police officers," Dinkins
said.
In 1999, Bronx police officers, apparently carrying out a stop-and-frisk, shot
and killed immigrant Amadou Diallo in his apartment building vestibule.
The officers shot at Diallo 41 times after he reached for his wallet to show
ID. The killing attracted national attention right as Giuliani was nurturing
national political ambitions. He called it "unfortunate" but pleaded that the
police "should be given the benefit of the doubt".
The officers who killed Diallo were acquitted. Giuliani told the Today show
that the Diallo killing "does not reflect the overall record of the New York
police department". Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about Diallo and defiantly
performed it at Madison Square Garden amid police protest.
Giuliani criticized Springsteen for the song, as he would later criticize
Beyoncé for her songs and performances referencing police violence.
The next year, on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, an undercover cop solicited a man
named Patrick Dorismond for a drug sale. A fracas ensued, and a different
officer shot Dorismond dead.
The mayor began by unsealing Dorismond's police record, to include his juvenile
file. The formerly secret documents shed no light on what happened on Eighth
Avenue that night. But Giuliani harnessed innuendo, infamously saying Dorismond
"isn't an altar boy".
As it happened, Dorismond literally was an altar boy. When this was pointed out
to Giuliani, he shot back: "I think that's not a correct juxtaposition of
statements, nor intended for any kind of decent or useful purpose." It would
take until May for Giuliani to concede he had made "a mistake".
Fourteen years later, when the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson
inspired a nationwide movement against police violence, Giuliani re-emerged as
a defender of law enforcement, and a critic of black protesters, whom he deemed
"racist".
Giuliani used his record on fighting violence in New York City to add luster to
an old conservative talking point: that black Americans were wrong to protest
about state violence by police officers because a larger percentage of murders
were caused by black men killing other black men.
"Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to see
the attention paid to that that you are paying to this," Giuliani said in
widely criticized remarks on Meet the Press in November 2014, an exchange one
New York City reporter dubbed "vintage Giuliani".
"White police officers wouldn't be there [in black neighborhoods] if you
weren't killing each other," Giuliani went on to tell Michael Eric Dyson, a
black Georgetown professor on the show with him.
"This is a defense mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind, sir,"
Dyson told him.
In 2016, he called Black Lives Matter "inherently racist" and said asked why
activists never protested about the deaths of everyday black residents of
Chicago."Where are they then? Where are they when a young black child is
killed?" he asked.
In fact, Black Lives Matter activists had held protests over gun violence in
Chicago, including over the brutal murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee. In
March, Lamon Reccord, one of the most prominent and controversial young
activists in protests against the police killing of Laquan McDonald, organized
his own protest in honor of Tyshawn, one of many ongoing community protests and
interventions led by black Chicago residents to address neighborhood gun
violence.
Giuliani has frequently pushed back against potential critics by arguing, as he
did on Fox and Friends in August talking about Beyoncé, that "I saved more
black lives than any of those people" and adding that "maybe 4,000 or
5,000 were African American young people who are alive today because of the
policies I put in effect."
New York's crime rate did fall dramatically, starting in Dinkins' era and
continuing in Giuliani's: violent crimes declined 43% from 1990 to 1996.
Homicides in the city dropped 66%, ahead of the national average decline of
50%, from 1990 to 1997. A narrative took shape that propelled Giuliani's
career: he had made New York safe. While it's true that Giuliani presided over
a historic decrease in violence, it's less clear how much of the credit for
this should go directly to the mayor and his policies.
"Not a lot," said Frank Zimring, a prominent criminologist at the University of
California Berkeley, and the author of The City That Became Safe: What New York
Teaches About Urban Crime and Its Control.
The credit for the financial investment in increased New York City police
manpower goes to Dinkins, Giuliani's predecessor, and to the New York governor,
Mario Cuomo, Zimring said. The credit for new police strategies goes to police
commissioners Bill Bratton - who Giuliani, to his credit, hired, and then, not
to his credit, fired, Zimring said - and Ray Kelly.
(Bratton's public approval ratings had been higher than Giuliani's, which the
mayor reportedly disliked.) Zimring has argued that New York's precipitous
crime decline was driven in part by changes in policing, including a more
data-driven focus on crime hotspots, though he called the much-discussed "zero
tolerance" and the "broken windows" strategies "little more than slogans".
"Unfortunately, New York's successes in crime control have come at a cost,"
he wrote. Although declines in violence benefited black New Yorkers, as
Giuliani argued, "Police aggressiveness is a very regressive tax: the street
stops, bullying and pretext-based arrests fall disproportionately on young men
of color in their own neighborhood," he wrote.
A report by the New York state attorney general found a massively
disproportionate racial impact in the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics after
examining 175,000 of these incidents from January 1998 to March 1999. Black New
Yorkers, 25.6% of the city, comprised 50.6% of stops. Hispanic New Yorkers,
23.7% of the city, comprised 33% of stops. White New Yorkers, 43.4% of the
city, comprised 12.9% of stops. "In the most strongly white neighborhoods in
New York," the study found, "the disparity between minority and white 'stop'
rates is most pronounced."
The report stopped short of calling Giuliani's favored police tactic racist,
something that would take a judge's ruling in 2013, which concluded that "the
city's highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers
are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner."
At times, Giuliani has taken inclusive stances with regard to immigrants and
Muslim New Yorkers. After 9/11, Giuliani was dubbed America's mayor by Oprah
Winfrey in his finest hour as a politician.
In a sweeping speech to the United Nations in October 2001, Giuliani praised
New York's "very strong and vibrant Muslim and Arab communities" as "an equally
important part of the life of our city".
"I've urged New Yorkers not to engage in any form of group blame or group
hatred. This is exactly the evil that we're confronting with these terrorists,"
he said. "And if we're going to prevail over them, over terror, then our ideals
and principles and values must transcend all forms of prejudice."
"This is not a dispute between religions or ethnic groups. All religions, all
decent people, are united in their desire to achieve peace."
Yet by 2010, the political winds had shifted, and Giuliani shifted with them.
That summer, outrage grew from the fringes of the right after a local Muslim
leader had proposed building an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan,
within walking distance of the former Twin Towers. The project, strongly
defended by Giuliani's successor, Michael Bloomberg, as a religious-freedom
issue, became the target of a smear campaign, which dubbed it the "Ground Zero
Mosque" or even the "Victory Mosque", suggesting that the American Muslims who
would go to the center for a moment of reflection were celebrating 9/11.
Giuliani joined in. Calling into a radio show in early August, he called the
cultural center a "desecration" and falsely asserted that the imam behind the
project, a man who had written a book called What's Right With Islam Is What's
Right With America, had supported "radical causes". In a later interview with
the Today show, he suggested the project itself was radical:
"If you're a healer, you do not go forward with this project. If you're a
warrior, you do."
In the years since, and particularly since joining Trump's campaign, Giuliani
has intensified his stance. He has boasted of placing undercover agents in New
York mosques and stated "good Muslims" would benefit from surveillance in their
communities. On Fox & Friends, Giuliani implied that only mosques with
something to hide would object to police infiltration: "If you've got nothing
going on there but a beautiful religious service, why in His name would you not
want to have police officers there?"
"All I can say is God bless Rudy Giuliani," said Una Clarke, who was at the
police riot decades ago. "It's a bundle of racists getting together to see if
they can take us back to the old age."
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
