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March 6, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
45:24
Current Horrific Conditions of NYC | Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense Ep. 13
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It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking and brought to us the discovery of our freedoms.
Of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers, in which Thomas Paine explained by rational principles the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the gigantic Kingdom of England and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and he explained it in ways that were understandable to the people, to all the people, not just to the educated upper class.
Because the desire for freedom is classless.
The desire for freedom adheres in the human mind and in the human soul.
Today we face another time of turmoil, of anger, and very, very serious partisan division.
This is exactly the time we should consult our history, look at what we've done best in the past, and see if we can't use some of that to help us now.
We understand that they created the greatest country in the history of the world, the greatest democracy.
A country that has taken more people out of poverty than any other country on earth.
They weren't perfect men and women, and neither are we.
But a great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we're able to reason.
We're able to talk.
We're able to analyze.
We are able to apply our God-given common sense.
So let's do it.
Welcome back to Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense.
And today we have an interview with a very, very distinguished Hero.
Truly a hero.
I don't use that lightly.
This is a man who served his country in the military with great distinction.
Served the city of New York as probably its best corrections commissioner ever.
Reduced crime 90% in the prisons.
I'm not kidding you.
90%.
Go watch 60 Minutes.
And was police commissioner during the worst attack on the city of New York ever or at least since the war of 1812.
And in addition to bringing us through that, he did the remarkable task of reducing crime after 70 years or six and a half years of crime reductions when people thought it couldn't be reduced anymore.
He reduced it probably by the biggest percentage that we had in that period of time.
So this is an exceptional man who then volunteered to serve in Iraq after he had retired and we began working together.
I'm talking about Bernard Carrick, who has been honored by the Queen of England, by virtually every law enforcement organization in the world, and was a street-level police officer.
Which is one of the reasons I made him police commissioner, because he understood the whole department, right down to the street.
And I think this is really the best person you could talk to about something everyone is concerned about, which is the condition of New York City.
I can't go anywhere in this city without someone stopping me and saying to me, Mayor, what's going on?
Can you run again?
These are people who come up to me and say, we hate you because you're representing Trump, but you should run again.
It's a really strange thing.
So here's Bernie, who I think you all know is one of my good friends as well.
And Bernie, I want to ask you your general view, and then we'll go back, of the view of the city as it is today.
I mean, no one knows it much better than you do, and from all aspects.
What's your view of the city?
Well, you know, I have the privilege, if you will, or the distinction of being in the NYPD as a cop from 86 to 94 when you took over as mayor.
Seeing, you know, the crime, the violent crime, the murder, the filth, you know, how the city was run.
And I've also had the distinction of watching that renaissance under you, under your command,
where the city changed.
Now, since Mayor Bloomberg took over several years ago, I've watched the programs and policies that we put in place.
I think you mean Mayor de Blasio.
I'm sorry.
De Blasio.
I've watched the policies and programs diminish.
policies and programs that we put in place back in 94 to 2002
be completely disregarded.
And if you look around the city now, you see homeless like we haven't seen in 25 to 30 years.
Yes.
We see squeegee guys at the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, you know, washing people's windows, spitting on their windows, demanding money.
We see quality of life diminishment that we haven't seen in 25, 30 years.
And it's basically as a result of the mayor's leadership, Mayor de Blasio's leadership.
And I want to stress, it's not really leadership.
You know, he has handcuffed the cops.
He has precluded them from getting out and enforcing the law.
And you know, Mayor, here's the thing that I think, not only New York City, but all over the country, Whether it's Chicago or Baltimore or Milwaukee or any of these big cities, that they have not been able to clean up those cities and they continue to have poverty and violent crime.
When you came into office in 1994, you were adamant.
Nobody's going to come to live Work, visit, or go to school in a place where they're not safe.
Nobody's going to open a business in a community where mothers are putting their babies in bathtubs to prevent them from getting hit with random gunfire.
Remember Maria Hernandez?
That's right.
Certain people stand out.
Maria was in Brooklyn.
She was a beautiful woman, wonderful husband.
The drug dealers ran her block.
Right.
They'd get picked up, they'd be back in four hours.
That's right.
They were intimidating her kids, and she turned them in.
And then one night, they came by her house and shot her dead.
Right.
And that's the way it was.
It's like living in a communist or like a dictatorship.
Right.
For them, it wasn't New York.
Right.
And that all changed in your eight-year period, in your eight-year tenure.
And what we've seen now is we've seen a return to what I would say are the bad old days before you took over.
So we're going to talk about that, the broken windows theory.
We'll talk a little about stop, question, and frisk, and then ultimately ComStat.
So let's begin with the broken windows theory, which is very heavily debated.
Explain to people what basically that is, what the theory of that is.
It's really pretty simple and I don't know why the left gets all upset about it.
It comes from two professors.
One from Harvard, Professor Wilson and Kelly.
You know, in layman's terms, I like to put it to people like this.
If I purchased a brownstone in New York City, say down in the village, I buy a brownstone for five million dollars.
I put all my investment into that brownstone.
I have young children.
I don't want to walk out of that brownstone in the morning and have somebody defecating on the street, urinating in my hallway, painting the side of my building with graffiti.
And up until the time you took over in 1994, that was allowed.
That stuff was allowed.
It was commonplace.
The cops, they took no action.
They didn't think it was a real issue.
Because, you know, leadership comes from the top.
And you were very clear when you came in.
Quality of life is going to be repaired.
What are we doing?
You know, what does that mean?
You're going to go after all of the quality of life issues.
Jumping a turnstile.
You know, you're beating a $1.50 fare, right?
That's what people think.
But the reality is, during our tenure, when you took over, probably 45 to 50 percent of the people that jumped those turnstiles and we grabbed, they were wanted on violent crimes.
They were wanted on murders.
They were wanted for gun possession.
They were wanted on prior felonies.
They had warrants, outstanding warrants.
Nobody got it, except for you.
You got it, you understood it, and you made it clear to the commanders.
Well, you understood it also, and you understood it from the street level.
I mean, you were there when New York City set records for murder.
I think it was 91 and 92.
2,200, 2,400 murders in one year.
292, 2200, 2400 murders in one year.
These are war numbers.
I actually had a foot post as a cop in Midtown South, Times Square,
West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue.
One block.
What year?
87 to 89.
Okay.
One block.
You had eight foot cops.
a sergeant and a lieutenant on one block.
And for eight hours a day, for eight hours a day, we ran from one end of that block to the other.
Man with a gun, robbery in progress.
A stabbing.
Somebody threw somebody off a building.
Somebody pushed someone under a train.
All day long.
This is Times Square.
We're talking about Times Square.
The center of New York.
I call it the center of the world.
The center of the universe.
Right?
That's where the ball comes down.
That's where the ball comes down on New Year's Eve.
It was a crime infested... True.
Now, I have to admit, for a cop, if you're an aggressive cop and you like your job, I actually had a blast.
I was in uniform at one point.
I went to play in clothes.
I had hair down to the middle of my... I had hair, period.
But it was down to the middle of my back.
I had seven diamond earrings.
I remember pictures of you like that.
So, we had a blast.
But it was completely climate infested.
People should know that this guy is pure cop.
When he was police commissioner, which is really the second most important position in the city, or at least gets the most attention, right?
Very distinguished position.
He used to make arrests.
He'd stop his little entourage, they'd see a robbery or something in progress, and he'd go chasing after them.
You know, I don't know if you remember this, but one morning you called me.
I remember one morning I wake up to your making an arrest.
You called me after I briefed you about 6 o'clock.
And everybody thought I was going to be angry at you.
And I congratulated you.
And, you know, we stopped a guy up in Harlem, wanted for murder, attempted murder, carjacking out of Virginia.
You said, what are you doing?
I said, that's what cops do, right?
Yeah.
I was out with my guys.
Great from around.
Listen, there's no better inspiration for the men and women that work for you than for them to see that you're not going to ask them to do something that you wouldn't do.
It's like when I went up on the bridge.
When I was a U.S.
attorney, I used to try cases and argue appeals.
So when I was asking a kid to take on a tough case, I tried actually the toughest case.
Right.
That there was a good chance we were going to lose, rather than, you know, one of these, you've got 20 tapes and you're a disc jockey.
Right.
Oh, when you were up on the bridge, you've got to tell that story.
Because you were probably commissioner about a couple months at this point.
About three or four months.
It was a beautiful day.
It was a Saturday.
Joe Vigiano.
And I was working.
Joe Vigiano, who died on September 11th.
Before he died, he came into my office.
I was in the process of promoting him.
And he saw a picture of me when I was a young cop in a SWAT team in New Jersey.
And he said, Commissioner, is that you rappelling out of that helicopter and off that building?
I said, yeah.
He said, you know, every weekend we go up on the George Washington Bridge.
The Brooklyn Bridge, yeah.
He said, we go up on the Brooklyn Bridge and we go up there to train.
He said, you should come.
I said, why would I do that?
Spend your weekend climbing up the Brooklyn Bridge.
He said, it's a lot of fun.
You'll enjoy it.
I said, no, that's okay.
So he was walking out my door, my office, and he turned back and he said, listen, Commissioner, we've asked the last four or five police commissioners.
They never have the balls to do it.
No, that did it.
I knew my Bernie would immediately say, boom!
I said, OK.
I'm going.
Saturday morning, 10 o'clock, I'll be down there.
You'd rather be dead than turn that death.
That's right.
And I walked up on the pole of the Brooklyn Bridge.
My uncle took three people down from the Brooklyn Bridge.
That's why it's so meaningful.
And I'm going to tell you something.
I think that's the heroism.
That's the dedication.
So you walk up to the top of the bridge.
Walk up to the top.
Which is quite a hike.
And you called me.
And I answered the phone.
I called you to ask.
You sound like you're in a wind tunnel.
Yeah, I called you from my office, which is virtually right below it.
I mean, it's very close.
People might not know that.
I called you from my office to ask you some question or other.
Not that important, but whatever it was.
And I said, you sound like you're in a wind tunnel.
And I said, if you come out to the steps of City Hall and look up at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge,
I'm hanging out right now.
Can you imagine seeing, if you're the mayor, seeing your police commissioner on the top of the, that's where jumpers go.
I mean, I wonder, Bernie, am I treating you that badly?
I thought it was a good thing at the time.
And the cops loved it.
Was it a good thing?
To me, it's, I mean, I wrote a book on leadership.
I mean, getting out in front of the troops, I mean, that's what Patton did.
That's right.
That's what MacArthur did.
That's... They need inspiration.
They need motivation.
They need real leadership.
And when you do things that you would ask them to do, and they think, in their mind, they think, you know, he's got me doing this, he would never do it.
Yeah.
You know what?
There's nothing I've ever asked him to do.
That's how I think you, in addition to CompStat, which we're going to talk about, and the programs we did, I think the reason you were able to get crime down after Bratton and Safer had brought crime down like 40% or something, I mean, remarkable numbers that nobody ever believed.
And you were able to get it down another 20, 22 percent.
You got a tremendous reduction in crime while you were police commissioner.
People tend to forget that because of 9-11, because that was your great achievement.
But the underlying police commissioner job, I mean, you did superb.
We dropped crime another about 20 percent.
We dropped, for the first time in probably a decade and a half, the response time.
Right.
Which saves lives.
Which saves lives.
Well, think about it.
There's a robbery going on, or a burglary, or a holdup in a bar, and something may go wrong.
If you can interrupt that right away, you can probably prevent a shooting.
If you get there a little late—now, Bernie, I want to ask you this, because most people will not understand this.
And maybe we should show the picture right now of the police officer where the water was thrown all over him.
The very first one.
And he hunches over.
And obviously, he's just telling the world, this is a police department without morale.
Now, tell us the importance of morale to a police officer responding quickly.
He gets a call.
There's a robbery in progress.
Does he rush there?
Does he rush in while it's going on?
Or does he start thinking, oh, gee, I've got a family.
I've got a livelihood.
If I do anything wrong, The mayor's not going to protect me against the crazies who are going to try to crucify me, which they do.
You know what, Mayor?
When I watched that video... How important is that?
When I watched that video, that cop hunched over, basically cowering after they threw the bucket, threw the water on him.
I immediately thought of you, and I thought of Bradley, and I thought of Safer.
You know what?
It's not only about morale.
It's about overall leadership of the city.
If those men and women in the police department know that they're not going to be supported, they're not going to be indemnified, that the mayor is not going to have their back.
You know, I mean, think about this for a second.
We had our issues with the police department on the financial end, right?
Oh yeah, sure.
You know, we had issues.
You know, you were trying to scrimp for money.
Yeah, I had no money, I had a gigantic deficit.
I had a city that was getting close to bankruptcy and Dinkins had spent us into oblivion.
Right.
But I had to cut everything.
I had to cut the police.
You had to cut the police.
However, there isn't a cop that worked under my command.
Not one.
That worked under my command.
Out of 55,000 men and women that worked for me, they did not know under your command.
They got the benefit of the doubt.
They were going to be given the benefit of the doubt unless there was an investigation that proved they did something criminal or administratively wrong.
And they know that.
And I hear about it today, every single day when I'm in the city, when I'm making stops in the city, cops will constantly come up to me and thank me for that support that they do not have today.
And that's the factor that I think, even with CompStat and all the... You can't measure that.
That's the... Going beyond what you absolutely have to do.
Right.
Going beyond the call of duty.
Getting there a little bit faster.
Walking into a difficult situation.
Because, you know, God forbid, if it turns out wrong, the police commissioner's not going to turn on you, the mayor's not going to turn on you.
If you made a mistake, he's going to treat it as a mistake, not the worst crime of the century.
I remember my first couple shootings.
I had an undercover in Brooklyn that was involved in a shooting, and I was going.
I was actually going to the scene, and all my executive staff said, no, Commissioner, you shouldn't go.
You've got to wait until we find out.
It's a good shoot.
It's not a good shoot.
I said, no, no, I'm going.
We'll find that out later, but I need the men and women that's out there to know that I'm going to support them.
Unless they did something criminally wrong, they need to know I'm going to be there for them.
And I would show up at those events, those various events.
Well, you know, one of the things that has gotten revived because of the presidential campaign, Right.
I guess flip-flop, we'd have to call it, on stop.
He calls it stop and frisk.
We call it stop, question, and frisk.
And in most of America, the police call it the Terry stop, because it comes from Terry versus the United States.
So we utilize that.
We utilize that.
And we utilize that, I think, very effectively.
So when we come back from the break, I'd like us to talk about that, because I think it's a very important thing that people don't understand.
Absolutely.
We'll take a short break, and then we'll be right back with Bernard Kerrick.
For those of you who know me, in addition to law and politics, I'm passionate about the Yankees, baseball, football, all sports to watch, golf to play, history to read, opera, classical music to listen to and watch, and cigars to relax, and socialize.
And I have definite opinions on the best cigars for the right time and the right place.
And you'll hear about that, too.
But the revolution in cigars took place in the 1990s.
Most cigars then were machine-made with foreign ingredients.
Now it's just the opposite.
Most are heteroamino man-made.
All organic, natural, The Revolution was led by one man and one man alone, Marvin Shankin and Cigar Aficionado magazine.
Marvin had been rating wines quite successfully for Wine Spectator magazine and he brought the rating system to cigars.
The first cigars rated in the 90s were gone in a flash.
Even now the first thing I do when I get my magazine is I go right to the ratings page.
There it is.
93.
91.
Oh yeah, I'll go for that one.
Then there'll be 94.
92.
Problem is, you gotta get there fast.
Because they go fast.
This revolutionized the cigar industry.
And quality rose to the top.
Then there's the Cigar of the Year.
Try to get them as fast as possible, because they're gone pretty quick.
This magazine revolutionized the industry.
And I'll tell you what, this month is Cigar of the Year.
Cigar of the Year.
One of these four is Cigar of the Year.
You better get this magazine quick, because these cigars are going to be gone very, very quickly.
Go to the link on our website and order it.
And you'll be able to get down to your cigar store and get to smoke a few of these and you'll let me know which ones you like better.
Because we can have a really good conversation about it.
Sometimes I do agree with Marvin.
And when I don't, I let my opinion be known.
And Marvin usually says, stick to the law.
Also, along with rated cigars, there are articles on politics, sports, interesting profiles.
And Marvin also has Wine Spectator, Spirit Advocate.
If you like wine, if you like scotch, if you like bourbon, if you like rye, if you like vodka, if you like gin, they're the magazines for you.
You know what?
Subscribe to Cigar Aficionado right now through the link on our website.
Welcome back to Common Sense with Bernie Kerrick.
And as I said before the break, we're going to talk about stop-and-frisk, stop-question-and-frisk, Terry Stop.
Tell us, Commissioner, what that is.
Everybody talks about stop-and-frisk.
They say it prevents crimes.
They say it's unconstitutional.
There are all kinds of First of all, the Terry stop was something that came out of a court decision that basically gave police the authority and the ability to stop someone, question them, and if there was reasonable suspicion that they had committed a crime or were in possession of a weapon or something that could harm the cop, the cop had the right to pat them down.
Now, historically, we hear stop and frisk.
It is not stop and frisk in New York City.
This is extremely important.
It's stop, question, and frisk.
As a plainclothes officer, as a uniformed officer, I've stopped and questioned hundreds of people on 42nd Street, in Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights.
And basically, these are drug-prone locations.
This is at a time when the crack epidemic was out of control.
Violent crime was out of control in 1990.
We had 2,400 homicides.
2,400 homicides?
2,400.
And when we left, under you?
Homicides night 2400 when we left We were down under about 650
Yeah, so And then Bloomberg eventually got it down about 350.
About 350.
And how did he get it down?
He got it down by continuing Stop Question and Frisk.
We'll talk about that.
Not just continuing it, but exponentially growing it.
His problem was that he just went overboard.
Let's get to that.
I don't think people understand that completely.
But we did, meaning during my administration, we did Stop Question and Frisk for eight years.
And I always think that was the difference in many ways between New York and Chicago.
You know, we have the same gun control laws, New York and Chicago.
Right.
And they have per capita three, four times the murders that we have.
Right.
Because we aggressively go out and take the guns from the bad guys.
I always tell people, gun control, whether you agree with it or not, Right.
nothing to do with crime because criminals are not controllable.
Right.
A stick-up man, an organized criminal, a drug dealer doesn't go get a license.
So you're controlling legitimate people's behavior.
So to bring crime down, particularly when you have shootings, you've got to go get the
Right.
And where do you go?
This is extremely important.
Where do you go get the gun?
You go to places where the violent crime is the harshest, is the most aggressive.
Now, this is another thing that's really, really important.
Since you were there, how did we determine where we were going to go?
Did we say, oh, we're going to go to black neighborhoods or Hispanic neighborhoods?
Mike gave that impression in that tape.
He basically gave the impression that we go to black neighborhoods, we put black kids on the wall, we search them, we find guns.
All right.
One, that's illegal.
Two, that's not true.
Okay?
Basically what we did is we took a map of New York City.
Right.
And we pin-mapped those maps.
In other words, violent crime, murder, rape, grand larceny, burglary, all the seven primary crime indicators got pin-mapped onto a map.
Wherever the most violent crime was, that's where the saturation of cops was.
I don't care what, I don't ask what color is that community?
Right, of course.
What color are the people that live there?
What religion are they?
I don't give a damn.
And the reason you know about the numbers of crimes, let's say in the South Bronx as opposed to the west side of Manhattan, are the people there are reporting The people who are committing the crime and telling you their race.
So if it happens to be a black area, the reason you're finding out about a lot of crime there is black people are calling up and telling you the man who did it is a 6'4 black person or a 6'4 white person or Asian.
You're following the stats.
And what's that program called?
ComStat.
ComStat.
And would you say that ComStat was the key to our being able to reduce crime and also to hold the police department accountable?
It was.
It was.
It is.
It is today.
Still, nationwide, it is the most substantial program in reducing violent crime in the United States.
There's other cities around the country that have implemented it.
None as aggressively as you did.
You know, a lot, when I look at that, a lot of them do the statistics right.
But I say critical to it is the CompStat meeting every week.
No, no, yeah, but it's beyond that.
It's the CompStat meeting and it's the management.
Yes, of course.
It's the accountability.
It's me, it's the police commissioner sitting in that room saying, I want to know what you did, how you did it, why you did it.
When it first started it caused grown men to faint.
One guy came in drunk.
He was totally smashed.
He was so nervous the night before.
The commander came in and he was slurring his words.
When I was in correction and I used to do meetings, my team's meetings in correction, they'd be sweating.
Tommy Van Essen, the fire commissioner, I took him one time and the next morning you asked him, you said, well how'd it go?
He said, well it makes a hell of a difference when, you know, they take a ten minute break and five empty seats are in the room and somebody's been fired.
You know, okay.
That gives you the ability to hold people accountable for either their successes or their failures.
Successes are rewarded.
Failures are punished.
And if you can't do the job, in my opinion, you know, I'm not a big guy on moving failure.
So if you can't do the job, you gotta go, and I'll get somebody else to do it.
And what CompStat gave you was an objective measure.
of failure and success, as opposed to the politics.
I mean, you know the police department before, but who did you know?
Your friend gets promoted, and then he brings along all his buddies.
Here, you couldn't do that.
If the guy had a bad record, he wasn't going to be brought along.
It was critically monitored.
Everything was critically monitored.
And you can make a determination whether this was a good manager, a good commander, And if he wasn't?
And if he wasn't, he just can't stay there.
Well, you took that program, the ComStat program, which started in the police department.
And I think you were the first one.
Eventually, 20 other places did it.
And you applied it to the corrections department.
Right.
Because before you were police commissioner, you worked your way up in the corrections department to commission.
Right.
And just tell us the result in the prison, really.
Tell us the result.
When you took over... Yeah.
We had 133,000.
We're talking about Rikers Island.
The worst jail system in the country at the time.
We had 133,000 inmate admissions a year.
We averaged 150 stabbings and slashings per month.
The worst jail system in the country at the time.
We had 133,000 inmate admissions a year.
We averaged 150 stabbings and slashings per month.
We had about a $112 million a year overtime bill.
And in the six years I was there as first deputy and commissioner,
we dropped inmate on inmate violence by 93%.
We dropped overtime spending by 60.
We dropped staff assaults by 40.
Every indicator... This is why you became Police Commissioner, you know.
I would think.
I would think.
Exactly.
You understood... Look, not everybody understands ComStat.
Right.
We tried to teach it in different departments and some of them got it some of them didn't get it right and
Now in private life you and I have done this we teach other police departments, right?
Some of them get it some don't get you you were someone who intuitively got it
But we're able to apply it to corrections that helped the city because then we applied it every place else
We did health and hospitals We got children covered.
We did transportation.
We did sanitation.
We did it for Child Care Plus.
Right.
We went and figured out where are the children that need to be covered.
Exactly.
We put it on a pin map and we went and found them.
But the point that I want to make, the connection between Stop Question and Frisk and ComStat, is that CompStat makes sure that your stop, question, and frisk is colorless.
And what I feel bad about is, among other things, Bloomberg never made that point, but I know Ray Kelly understood CompStat, but I don't know if Mike ever really understood CompStat.
No, I don't think he understood it either, based on his description.
Based on the fact that he has now stood publicly and said, I disagree.
Really?
You disagree?
For 12 years, you were in the position as mayor.
You supported it.
Enormously supported it.
You indemnified it, even three years after that.
He argued in court for it.
Argued in court.
And all of a sudden... He had me file a supporting affidavit.
Right.
And now he's going to run for president and all of a sudden, oh, it was a bad idea.
No, it wasn't a bad idea.
You abused it, but that was a bad idea.
Explain, you were the last police commissioner, the last year.
Under you.
Right.
So, we were going to be sued by the Justice Department.
Right.
The Eastern District of New York had actually Prepared it.
Right.
And we're ready to sue us.
Yep.
And I asked for a meeting with Janet Reno and Eric Holder.
Three days into my new job as police commissioner, we got on a train and went down to Washington, D.C.
We met with Janet Reno.
We met with Eric Holder, who was the deputy attorney general at the time.
And very active in the meeting.
Very involved in it.
Right.
And we basically showed them our stats on how we were operating.
There was nothing they could say.
There was no, you know, it wasn't racist.
It wasn't based on race.
It was based on the complaints that we got, then put into a computer, separated as to where.
So basically the people The people in New York were telling us where we should be policing, as opposed to politics, making people happy, or whatever reason, some predetermined.
It's basically the people in New York were calling out to us and saying, come here, we've got a lot of crime here.
Go after black people, go after white people, go after... Mayor, I just want to key on this for a second because remember you used to do town hall meetings, right?
We'd go to a town hall... One a month.
One a month, yeah.
It was torture.
You loved it, right?
But at these town hall meetings, you would get somebody to stand up and say, you know, we need foot cops in my neighborhood.
And I would be able to look at their specific neighborhood and tell them, there's no crime in your neighborhood.
But six blocks away, there's a lot of active crime.
You don't really need two cops on a footpost.
They need them.
We took police officers away from the areas, basically, that voted for me.
Right.
And put them in the areas where maybe I got 10% of the vote.
Didn't matter.
Somebody said that about four years into it, five years into it, one of the Republican One of the Republican leaders said, you're really crazy.
I mean, you've cut in half the number of police in the areas where that's your base, and you put them elsewhere.
I said, well, I don't have a base.
My base is in the city.
Yeah, but you know what?
Here's the reality.
And this is what people tend to, they don't understand.
The biggest benefactors, the most substantial benefactors of crime reduction, violent crime and murder in New York City were the black communities.
Our overall average was a 65% reduction in violent crime and a 70% reduction in homicide.
But in areas like Bed-Stuy, there was an 80% reduction in homicide.
Because that's where the concentration was.
Because that's where the concentration was.
And almost invariably, Almost invariably.
And this is just a statistic.
This is not racist.
And if you don't understand the statistic and operate on it, then you are a racist.
And you're getting a lot of black people killed.
Virtually every year, no matter if there were 2,400 murders or 300 murders, About 70% of the murders are African-American.
Right.
And it's African-American on African-American.
Exactly.
About 80% of the time.
If you don't address that...
If you don't address that, and you leave those murders happening because it's racist... That's racist.
That's the worst kind of... That's letting people die!
It's letting people die because of some kind of a ridiculous, unfounded theory.
I never got that.
So, the other point I want you to make is...
Because I think this also helped in Holder and Reno basically saying our program was constitutional.
What was the largest number of stops that we did in a year?
About 90,000.
We averaged about 90,000.
And what did Bloomberg take it to?
550, 600,000.
I think 650.
I think almost, I think, 650. 650. 650,000.
650.
650,000.
And, and what did we do, what did we do to make sure that each one of those was
justified in terms of the paperwork and the...
This isn't something you just do.
This is a constitutional procedure.
I also thought they didn't respect enough the constitutional privacy that's involved and what you're invading.
So you better have a good record.
Right.
And if you recall, one of the reasons that Eric Holder and Janet Reno basically said, okay, I think they're okay, I think this is good, is because we got extremely transparent.
We gave them access to all our CompStat records.
We gave them access to all the command records.
We gave them access to every stop, question, and frisk notification.
Unlike anybody else before us.
Right.
And when you look at that data, The data is what it is.
And they got it.
They understood it.
And that's why they chose not to move forward with the lawsuit.
And then at $650, the solution rate, or the rate on which they got a gun or drugs, was down to 5%.
Right.
Which means 95% of the people who were searched had nothing on them.
You're going to leave a lot of angry people behind.
You leave a lot of angry people behind, and you're also doing something that really is borderline illegal.
Yeah.
Illegal searches.
So what you would advocate for the city...
The police officer has to have reasonable suspicion.
He has to record it.
I see a bulge.
I see a guy looking at doors the way, in my experience, burglars look at doors.
principles. The police officer has to have reasonable suspicion. He has to record it.
I see a bulge. I see a guy looking at doors the way, in my experience, burglars look at
doors. I see a guy being abusive toward a woman. Some reasonable suspicion. And taking
that. Writing it down. Keeping it a record. Taking that with an overlay of the Comstac
complaints. What are the 911 calls telling us?
The 911 calls are telling us this one area is saturated with violent crime, burglaries, robberies, rapes, whatever the case may be.
When you take that and you look at your stop and frisk material, it better match.
And that's how you can hold the commanders accountable.
So we began with the question of morale and the police officer who was hit by the water and submitted to it.
And then nothing really was done.
I don't think those people were ever arrested, if I recall.
I think they were arrested later, sometime later.
Someone was arrested for it.
And then there were other incidents that followed it.
Right.
And now we have a police department That virtually openly disrespects the mayor.
Right.
How does that affect the police commissioner?
It's a major negative impact on the police commissioner.
Look, I don't know Dermot Shea, the police commissioner now.
I don't really know him.
He seemed like a professional.
He was a captain or a deputy inspector when I was police commissioner 20 years ago.
However, I think he's a consummate professional.
I think he's got the experience needed to do the job.
I feel sorry for him.
But he works for a mayor that is not a real leader.
He works for a mayor that is not supportive of his own department.
And you can get up at a press conference and say, oh, I support the NYPD, you know, as the mayor.
But I go by his actions.
When Governor Cuomo was releasing, paroling cop killers from prison, Where was de Blasio?
Where was he?
He should have been screaming.
Agreed with it.
He should have been screaming at the top of his lungs, you cannot do this.
There's a number of things that he should have done, should be doing to support his men and women and he doesn't do it.
And I think the point we will end with is, this is not just stroking the police and making them feel good.
I think I know this because I come from a family of four cops and a firefighter.
You know I was very close to my uncle.
Right.
You knew my uncle.
Yep.
He was my hero.
It actually plays a role in how efficiently they enforce the law.
That's right.
And how quickly they enforce the law.
And how many risks they're willing to take.
Because in order to really reduce crime, you've got to take risks.
Right.
And you've got to walk into a situation where God Almighty, you may get killed, or you may kill somebody.
That's what violent crime's about.
This day and age, police officers, they want leadership.
You know, when a commander or a police commissioner or a chief says charge, they want to be able to follow that person and know that no matter what happens, they're going to be supported and indemnified and taken care of.
And they just don't have that because of the mayor.
Not because of the police commissioner.
Because of the mayor.
And if you look at our old cities, where there's a heavy amount of crime, a great deal of deterioration, I mean a lot of them, New York may be the symbol, but a lot of them are suffering from the same problem.
Exactly the same problem.
And it's never going to get fixed.
It's never going to get fixed.
Never in a hundred years.
You can say it's socioeconomic.
You can say we need jobs.
You can say we need schools.
Bottom line is, as long as they have violent crime and they have murder rates like they do, Nobody is going to build businesses, open schools, go to visit, live in a place... And the mayor has to be the one to make it clear because, look, in Chicago, in Newark, they hired some really good people as police commissioners at different times.
But if a police officer knows that the mayor could turn his back on him, he's the political leader.
He's the one that either allows all these people to ruin the reputation of the cop and build a whole community against him, or fights back to say, at least the cop should be given the benefit of the doubt, and lets quiet down and shut up.
before we have a trial. I mean we had a very famous case in which we had
demonstrations for weeks and weeks and weeks. People went to jail stupidly.
Jesse Jackson actually called up Howard Safer and asked for a scheduled
arrest. And Howard said what should I do? I said tell Jesse we don't
schedule arrests. We'll arrest him when we want to. And it turned out the
police officers were acquitted by a jury with four black people on the jury.
Right. Acquitted? Not only acquitted. They wanted me to...
They were acquitted in a state trial. They were acquitted in a federal trial. And
they were acquitted in the trial room in the police department.
Yeah, and I want to make a point that there were African Americans on the jury.
Right.
And an acquittal is unanimous.
Right.
Well, Commissioner, I neglected on purpose to go over one subject because I want...
First of all, I want to cover this condition, which I think is a very relevant one right now.
And a lot of cities need to know about this so they don't follow the example of de Blasio.
But a big part of your career is September 11.
And I want to devote just a special interview to that.
And I want to tell people that this man saved my life.
And he saved the life of a lot of other people on September 11.
We were stuck in a building.
We were stuck in a building for 20 to 30 minutes.
The governor thought we were dead.
And he was like a rock and he helped me to be a rock.
It was a team.
I'd look at him and I'd say, I'm not going to be afraid.
He's not afraid.
Bernie, I love you.
Thank you, Mayor.
We're shaking hands.
Thank you, and we'll be back with our next episode, and we hope you enjoyed this one, and you will subscribe to Rudy Giuliani Common Sense.
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