Giuliani stands by comments on black-on-black violence

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Sunday stood by comments about violence in the African-American community that ignited a firestorm last week.

{mosads}Giuliani said on “Fox News Sunday” that there is more “unfair” interaction with police officers in African-American communities, adding that “some of that responsibility” is on the police departments, which must train their officers better and become more diverse.

However, “more responsibility” lies with the communities themselves, he said, arguing that African-Americans murder over eight times more than any other ethnic group.

“If I’d put all my police on Park Avenue instead of Harlem, thousands more blacks would have died during my time in office,” Giuliani said.

“If you want to solve on the problem, you’ve got to work on both sides,” he added.

Giuliani said last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that a larger issue that hadn’t been discussed during the fallout from Ferguson, Mo. was the issue of African-Americans committing violence against one another.

“The white police officers won’t be there if you weren’t killing each other,” Giuliani said during the heated exchange with Michael Eric Dyson, a civil rights author.

Giuliani’s most recent comments come days after a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, for killing unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown.

The Justice Department is conducting a civil rights examination into the shooting and a separate examination of the Ferguson police department’s tactics in the wake of the incident.

“It’s an impossible case to present to a grand jury,” Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor said, noting that the accounts of several witnesses had been found to be false at the local level.

“I don’t see how this kind of case was even brought to a grand jury” in the first place, Giuliani said.