All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 12, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
54:17
HERE Is How You COMBAT America's Crime EPIDEMIC | Rudy Giuliani | Ep. 111
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome back, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm here with Rudy's Common Sense.
So today's episode is going to take a look at a very broad problem and an even broader solution.
So we're now about a little over one month into 2021.
Enough time to absorb The effect of 2020, which was a traumatic year in all respects, maybe one of the most traumatic that we've had since 2001.
So let's look at it from the point of view of the fact that this will be, this year, the 20th anniversary Of the worst foreign attack on American soil in our history, the attack of September 11, 2001.
And at the time, one of the most shocking experiences that any of us ever encountered.
One of those experiences I equated to a people who lived through Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
You always remember where you were when you heard about it.
Having been in the middle of it, I've heard numerous, thousands and thousands of descriptions, whether it's New Yorkers who were right here, or even Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans from all over will just come up to me.
At times in airports or streets and say, as if we know each other, Mr. Mayor, I know you because I remember September 11 and that day I was in my office and all of a sudden my secretary walked in or some lady will say I was a nurse.
We were about to operate and we held up the operation and then we felt guilty.
We did the operation and then we came out and we were so shocked.
We couldn't work just about for the rest of the day.
Questions about it.
Similarly, I can tell you where I was on the day that John Kennedy was shot.
I remember exactly the spot I was standing at Manhattan College.
I was in an ROTC uniform that day and went to the ROTC office to hear the words of Walter Cronkite.
And my parents used to tell me exactly where they were when they heard of Pearl Harbor.
So it's one of those One of those days that has an effect on our country, dramatic, long-term, and I don't know if we ever really figure out all the implications from it.
But this is the 20th anniversary.
And it's also, for New York City, like 2001, a mayoral election year, a transitional year.
And for our nation, It follows one of the worst years in our history, one of the deadliest years in our history, both because of coronavirus, but also because of the murders that took place and homicides that took place in 2020.
So it's a year in which we can either reset our course or we can continue moving where we're moving.
And here's the danger of that.
I spent a lot of time in my life studying crime statistics, was in charge of them at one point in the Justice Department.
And there's a very alarming pattern that I worry about.
Somewhere in the late 1960s, Crime went way up in New York City.
The murders had always been below 1,000, and all of a sudden, they went over 1,000.
Well, that was 1967, 68, something like that.
They didn't go below 1,000 until, well, we went through the 70s, the 80s, almost 30 years.
We couldn't get below 1,000.
Oh, 1,000 until, well, we went through the 70s, the 80s, almost 30 years.
We couldn't get below 1,000.
Most of the time, we couldn't get below 1,500.
There was an incredible number of people who died, and the city became the crime capital of America
in many ways, because murder from the top and broken windows type crimes from the bottom
are the things that drive crime rates.
It's hard to just solve it right in the middle.
So New York City tried and tried and tried but for 30 years it couldn't bring down crime until my administration.
which had the advantage of my having devoted my life to law enforcement.
I had been an assistant U.S.
attorney.
I had been the third-ranking official in the Justice Department.
I was the U.S.
attorney for the Southern District in New York.
And then I was the mayor who was in charge of the police department.
And I came from a family of four uncles and cousins also that were police officers and firefighters.
And I probably knew the city better than most mayors.
Many of the mayors were born elsewhere, or I was a New Yorker from the day I was born.
A little time in the suburbs, but I went to grammar school, mostly, high school, college and law school, completely in New York.
So it was my life's dedication to make New York City safe.
This would be a good time to take a short pause.
I accomplished a lot in 2020 exposing the truth, establishing the relationship with you, working tirelessly for America.
And I came to know the work and value of the people at American Hartford Gold.
You see, you buy gold, not only for what you know, but you buy gold for what you don't know.
American Hartford Gold is the company you can trust when it comes to buying gold.
They sell physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside of your IRA.
In the precious metals industry, they are the highest rated firm in our country with an A-plus from the Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients.
Give them a call and tell them Rudy sent you.
And be sure to ask them what I bought.
And if you call them right now, they will give you up to $1,500 of free silver on your first order.
Folks, these are uncertain times.
The one thing you can count on to protect what you have worked so hard for is physical gold and silver.
So don't wait.
Call them now.
Call 833-GOLD-777.
That's 833-GOLD-777.
Or text RUDY to 65532.
Again, that's 833-GOLD-777.
Or text RUDY to 65532.
Thank you for returning.
Rudy to 65532. Again, that's 833-GOLD-777 or text Rudy to 65532. Thank you for returning.
Well I think to bring our country together, we're going to have to have a common purpose.
.
That's what happened to us on September 11th.
We had a common purpose.
But remember that year, that year, I'm talking from New York now, crime was at the lowest that it had been in 30 or 40 years.
30 or 40 years.
Murder, auto theft had almost disappeared.
Nope.
Places where stores and people wouldn't go were flourishing, whether it be Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant or parts of Brooklyn.
There was an optimism.
Optimism registered as follows.
There was a poll that was taken at some point that year.
75% of the people in the city were happy to be there and 80% thought the future was going to get better.
Contrasted with a poll in 1994, which was almost exactly the opposite.
75% thought the city was going down and 75% wanted to leave.
I always wondered if we could have made the strong recovery that we made if we were in a condition of depression.
Rather than a condition of optimism when we were hit with the worst attack in the history of our country.
And then I say to ourselves, what if it happened again?
You know, the forces that attacked us then are still there.
They're still planning to do it.
There are other forces now added to it.
I don't know if it's more dangerous from that point of view now or not, but it certainly is still very, very dangerous.
And a strike like that would come to a city that has some of the highest crime rates in a long time.
Historic increases last year in crime.
And it would come to a country that had its most violent year last year in decades.
And a country that I think we have to say is More divided than it's ever been.
So let me see if I can give you some narrow examples and then really devote some of it to an outline of what can be done.
And during the course of this year, we're going to spend a lot of time on getting ready for September 11th and try to take the strength of that And see if we can't find a way to forge a unity similar to what we had.
It would have to be different.
Things are different.
But I do believe when rational people get together, even if they completely disagree with each other, they can sometimes find solutions that others can't.
That's why I have such a great emphasis on common sense.
So if we go right to the immediate, just the day I'm talking to you, it's the fourth out of five days in which we've had a subway assault.
The most recent one was a 28-year-old strap hanger.
He was punched, he was slashed, he was beaten.
And there it was, right in the middle of the village, West 4th, Washington Square Park.
That was my subway stop when I was in law school.
I lived two blocks away from there for three years.
Most places we mention in New York City, I'm going to know really, really well.
The day before, a man in the Bronx was shot, and there was one in Brooklyn.
There was a gang that walked into a store and just beat up the entire staff.
No one yet knows why.
And we read these things in our newspapers every single day.
Or it doesn't have to be just New York.
We can go to Chicago.
Chicago weekends have become news items.
I mean, everybody wants to know how many people were killed over the weekend in Chicago.
How many people were shot?
And the numbers become staggering.
Sometimes we have 10 dead, 20 shot, sometimes 15, sometimes 30. We want to look at both of these
like an overall point of view.
In New York City, the shootings between 2019 and 2020 were up almost 100%, 99-something percent, meaning they doubled.
In fact, there were 1,531 shootings.
That was more than 2018 and 2019 combined in New York.
percent, meaning they doubled.
In fact, there were 1,531 shootings.
That was more than 2018 and 2019 combined in New York.
Like a shooting gallery.
And there were 432 murders, which is a roughly 40 percent plus increase in murder.
That's the largest increase in any one year in murder in the history of New York City.
So immediately, it should call for drastic reform in action.
And it hasn't.
Chicago, maybe even a worse experience.
Chicago, which is About one third the size of New York.
Chicago had 769 murders in 2020 to the 462 in New York per capita.
That's a ridiculous difference.
And that's a 50% increase in the number of murders they had in 2019.
And roughly a 50% increase in the number of shootings.
This is a terrible, terrible direction for Chicago because this has been going on in Chicago for years.
New York at least has a recent experience of having reduced these numbers, and for quite some time being the safest large city in America.
But in the case of Chicago, this is a long-term, built-into-the-political-process problem.
Philadelphia, like Chicago, Unfortunately, he has a Soros district attorney.
His name is Larry Krasner.
What comes along with that is non-enforcement of serious laws, a sort of criminal-friendly district attorney, which is a strange thing because now you have two people on the criminal side, his lawyer and the prosecutor.
Nobody represents the victims or the city.
And, you know, there's plenty of literature on that.
If you want to take a look at property crime and all kinds of things going up under this guy, Krasner, who I have no idea what he's doing as a district attorney other than the fact that Soros put in millions to elect him, as he did about 24 other DAs that similarly don't prosecute large percentages of crimes and have terrible relationships with the police department.
So what's the result of that in Chicago?
The result of that is there was, I mean, since 2016, murders have gone up every year.
Every year.
I mean, it's like clockwork.
2016, there were 277.
2017, 315.
2018, 353.
2019, 356.
And almost 520.
One less than that.
2017, 315, 2018, 353, 2019, 356, and almost 520.
One less than that.
That's not the direction your city should be going if you want to maintain a city.
And this is indicative of crime throughout America.
That's about a 55% increase in homicides in Philadelphia year over year.
Much larger if you look at it during Krasner's inept stewardship as a district attorney.
Some of the others, I'm just picking a few out so you get an idea.
It's not a singular problem.
This is a national problem.
It is somewhat located and worse in certain places, and we'll point that out.
St.
Louis was about 32 percent.
Chicago, 50 or more percent.
L.A., 30 percent.
Baltimore, about 40 percent.
Jacksonville, Florida.
I don't even believe this is true, but this was an unofficial number of 400%.
And the District of Columbia, 55%.
And the result, 2020, was the deadliest year in US history.
Of course, a lot of that is attributed to COVID.
I call it CCP virus.
But it also was the highest for a homicide in two decades.
19,000 homicides.
That's a lot of homicides.
A lot.
So...
I think I've laid out the problem.
I could spend a lot more time doing it.
I'll just go over this chart that I have right here, which we'll put up on the screen, because I think this is an excellent analysis of what we're looking at for 2020.
2020. Seattle 74.1%, New Orleans 61%, Atlanta 57%, Chicago 55%, Boston 54%, Portland 51%, Houston 42%,
New York 40%, 39%, San Francisco 32%, Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, 30, Washington, DC, 20, 19.5, and Las Vegas.
I don't know.
I may be wrong, but I am going to make a point because politics intersects this.
It really does.
Political philosophy has a lot to do with it.
As I look at that chart, I don't think I see a Republican mayor.
Thank you.
If I do, it's one.
So I think this would be a good time for a short break.
If you want a good cigar, go to a good cigar shop.
You want the best, go to Famous Smoke Shop.
Let Famous Smoke deliver your favorite cigars Right to your doorstep at America's lowest prices.
Famous opened in 1939 as a small shop in New York City.
Today, it's the largest privately held, American-owned cigar business in the country.
That's 80 years experience in the cigar business, and they're putting that experience to work for you, making deals on the cigars you love, from affordable everyday smokes to high-end luxury cigars for your next special occasion.
Go to famous-smoke.com slash Rudy.
And click the activate button to apply the promo code.
Pick from more than a thousand cigar brands, fresh and ready to ship from Famous Smoke's climate controlled 24,000 square foot humidor.
Check out with the promo code Rudy20.
That's Rudy, R-U-D-Y, 2-0.
And get $20 off your order.
Every cigar purchase you make is backed by the Famous Freshness Guarantee.
Get real cigars from a real cigar shop.
Shipped direct to you from Famous Smoke Shop.
Go to famous-smoke.com slash Rudy.
That's famous-smoke.com slash Rudy.
Welcome back to our overall analysis of crime for 2020 and as it has implications for 2021.
So now let's turn our attention to what can you do about it that would unite?
Or how about what can you do about it that would have results?
In other words, how can you bring that percentage down?
I mean, for 30 years in New York, the attitude was you can't.
When I became mayor, I was told I couldn't do it.
I was told I was sacrificing my political career.
Everybody had tried.
People that knew more than me had tried.
And they had all failed.
And I was going to fail.
And I'd be a one-term mayor.
And I don't know what it was, but I just knew somewhere that I could do it.
I've been thinking about it for years.
I've been writing little articles to myself and little charts and been thinking about crime statistics and crime strategies and watching some of them work from the high position of U.S.
attorney where you get involved in some local crimes, but not all of them.
So I had a program and I spent 18 months developing it, having seminars with almost all the key experts.
I did have the experience of having been in charge of the Task Force on Violent Crime between 1981 and 1983 when I was Associate Attorney General for Ronald Reagan.
And that task force, which was made up of Professor James Q. Wilson and Governor Thompson of Illinois, came up with very, very deep, very useful recommendations on what to do about crime that had a profound effect on the next 20 years.
And they did it, at my request, in two sections.
The first was, what can be done immediately right now by the federal government to help, because it's
not the federal government's major role to reduce violent crime. But how can we help? And let's
get that report out in about four or five months so we get some immediate action and
some immediate results. I believe in that, by the way, when you're dealing with a big problem.
And then a much more long-term report, which took about another year and a half, which became
ultimately the basis for the crime bill of 1994, which was so heavily debated during the last
election, became the basis for a lot But it began that long process of debate that ultimately ended up in that bill.
And it also introduced lots of ideas into law enforcement.
And the person who took it the most seriously was me.
So when I became mayor, Remembering that, having spent a year and a half talking to police chiefs all over the country, social workers, professors, I had a plan.
And the plan was this.
I was going to govern the police department by statistics.
I was going to use statistics to determine, was I using my resources correctly?
Because given the fact that crime was never going down and never staying down, it just occurred to me that even though we needed more police officers, we had 35, 34,000.
We should be doing better than this.
And we must not be using them wisely.
So I developed, along with Bill Bratton and Jack Maple, We developed jointly a CompStat system.
Very simple to describe.
We measured crime every day in every part of the city and then we reviewed it the next day quickly and then once a week.
This is the most important part of CompStat.
It works when people do it.
It fails when they don't.
We'd have a meeting on Thursday mornings and we would confront the statistics.
We'd pick a portion of the city.
We have eight borough commands.
We'd pick one each week.
We'd look at the overall city, and we'd look at that borough with the borough commanders there.
Where did crime go up?
Where did crime go down?
Why did it go up?
Why did it go down?
If it went down, what were we doing there that we could be doing somewhere else?
It could lead to things like the borough commander saying, well, domestic violence is going down in the precinct next to me because you gave them five people from that newly trained domestic violence task force and I didn't get any.
Well, say that's true.
That switched accountability, didn't it?
It switched accountability to the police commissioner.
Or, if I weren't giving enough police officers, it switched accountability to the mayor.
Because the police commissioner could say, gee, Jack, I wanted to, but I don't have enough cops for that.
I've got this, I've got that, I've got this, I've got that.
So now it shifts to me.
And I have to make a decision.
Is that an honest evaluation by the police, or is it an alibi?
And I didn't have police commissioners who alibied.
We didn't always get along, but we always had a common purpose.
So Bratton told me, gee boss, maybe you can find a few for me, but I haven't been able to find them.
And then we'd engage in a process in which we would try to see if we could reorganize, or I would go figure out how to fund more cops.
Then we'd get the more cops, I'd give them to Bratton, Bratton would give them to the commander, the commander would give them to the guy in charge of the precinct, and we'd say, now you got what you want!
But he knew he'd be back a month later or two months later, and that domestic violence had better go down.
Because if it didn't, we'd have a new commander.
See how it works?
I used that as an example.
Happened throughout.
It was not easily accepted by the police department.
We had numerous resignations.
We had emotional outbreaks.
We had tremendous criticism in the press.
It took about two years for it to really settle in.
And now it's been used continuously, and I can speak for during my administration, And Bloomberg's.
And there hasn't been a year in which crime hasn't gone down.
The overall numbers, you're not even going to believe them.
I mean, homicide down about 80 percent.
Auto theft down 95 percent.
The city went from the most dangerous city in America to the safest large city in America for about 15 years in a row.
I can't speak for the de Blasio administration, because for a while he lived off Comstat, particularly when he had Bratton back.
And then he started to veer away from it, and now they're off in some never-never land that I can't even figure out.
Well, that's Comstat.
You need it.
Got to be accurate statistics.
There's got to be a meeting every week.
You've got to confront the statistics, which is how I teach it.
And then you have to set up accountability.
You have to have strategies for each one of the major crime groups, and for the really big ones, sub-strategies.
How are you going to handle it?
Like for homicide, and for shootings, and for assault, and for rape, and for domestic violence, and for auto theft, and for larceny, and for street crimes.
We used to call them muggings.
And of course, for drugs.
They're not the same thing.
They're not dealt with the same way.
The same police officers are not good at one and the other.
You've got to have strategies for that.
You gotta figure out your priorities and you have to train them for that specific type of crime.
And then as one goes down and it starts shifting, you gotta start your retraining and move them into another area.
It's not easy to do, but we accomplished that in less than a year.
It took a year to do that.
And we accomplished that in less than a year.
We figured out where the most crimes took place.
We figured out what borough had not only the most crimes, but exported more crimes to the rest of the city.
And we changed the way in which that command worked.
We made the borough commander virtually the police commissioner for that area and gave him more autonomy because not only did it reduce crime in Northern Brooklyn, it reduced crime in the rest of the city.
And I kept looking for small successes Because when you're doing a big thing that people feel can't work, they're constantly against you, and things do go wrong.
I remember one of the first times that Bill Bratton and I were going to go out and announce a reduction in crime.
There had been two subway muggings or stabbings.
That's all the press was talking about.
It almost sounded silly.
We're talking about a 5% or 10% decrease in subway crime.
And here we have these two subway crimes.
And Bill and I, I sat back and said, Bill, we're just going to have to go through this for a while.
Eventually, the power of this will take over and they'll start to see it differently.
But we're going to have to go through this humiliation for a bit.
It's just going to happen and we're going to explain it.
And trust me, it'll work.
First two years, not everybody trusted me until it started to work.
And now, it's probably considered one of the greatest innovations in law enforcement.
And I've used it in cities all over the world, including in Colombia, where we brought crime down by 50%.
I can go over and over where it's used.
And the strategies and the CompStat together, very, very important.
Let me see if I can illustrate strategies just for a moment.
I always use this.
I think it's the easiest.
And since we have subway crime returning, for years and years and years, we were afraid of subway crime in New York City.
You know, there have been movies about that, Death Wish and some of those.
And it isn't so much that there's so much crime on the subways, or has been.
It's so frightening on the subway because you're locked in.
You're locked into that subway.
We had to get it down.
So Bill, who had been Who had been in charge of the transit police that had the specific responsibility for subways.
And I believe he had that responsibility in Boston.
I mean, a lot of our ideas at Comstack came out of that.
But also the idea of looking at crime anew.
Let's pretend we don't know anything about it and let's just look at the statistics.
So here's what we found out.
75% of our police officers were riding on the subway trains, and 25% of our police officers were on the platforms.
And lo and behold, 75% of our crimes were taking place on the platforms, and 25% of our crimes were taking place in the subway cars.
Well, we had them in the wrong place, didn't we?
We just made a switch, and crime went down by 30-40% right away.
We had to keep changing, we had to keep working.
I'm oversimplifying, but I'm trying to tell you that you've got to use science.
You gotta use every tool you can get to give you information about crime.
And I remember in one of the Colombian cities, we did hotspots.
We couldn't get more cops, but we figured, where are the 90 worst places?
We're gonna concentrate on that.
We brought crime down by 40%.
Also, you have to review your process for police complaints.
People have to be able to complain about police behavior.
And they have to get a fair and quick hearing of that.
Some of them are going to be correct.
Not all cops are perfect.
Some cops are even worse than not perfect.
But most cops are good men and women.
And you have to realize in this process that a lot of criminals are going to lie.
After all, who are we arresting?
By and large, we're arresting the right people.
We make incorrect arrests.
But by and large, we're arresting someone, particularly in those days, who stole a purse, beat a woman over the head, took a wallet, did a stick-up, had a long record of these things.
I used to throw it out like this when I had a press conference.
People like that, they're liars, right?
So when they get arrested by a police officer and they know there's a review process, every one of them was beaten up or tortured or lied to.
So you have to be able to give the police officer the benefit of the doubt.
Think about this.
In the criminal justice system, we give any accused person, the worst terrorist, The worst murderer?
Small criminal?
We give them the benefit of the doubt.
We've got to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
We've got to extend that at least to the men and women who put on that uniform and get killed for us to keep us alive, huh?
And we know they're motivated to a job that's very, very dangerous.
There must be some good in them.
And there's a lot more good in them than bad.
And the people they're arresting are a lot more bad than good.
Doesn't mean that they don't make mistakes and that has to be dealt with.
And it doesn't mean that we don't make mistakes in hiring them sometimes.
But that's the rare situation.
The normal situation is that a cop makes a good arrest and a criminal has every incentive to lie about it.
Please remember that as we talk about these review processes that now in New York, they want to make it even more complicated and look over the policeman's shoulder more and more.
The fifth thing you have to do, you got to support the police.
Almost saying the same thing, but I mean morale support.
You got to let them know that you appreciate the job they're doing.
When they get shot, the mayor's got to be there at the hospital, holding their hand, making sure they're okay.
Because I was getting the credit for bringing down crime and they were losing their lives.
And I belonged at that hospital.
And I belonged to that hospital to make sure they got the best of care.
Otherwise, I wasn't going to get the kind of morale that I needed, and people operating above and beyond the call of duty.
Because that's how you deal with a difficult problem, like they operated on 9-11, above and beyond the call of duty.
I don't think if we didn't have years of that, it would have happened quite the same way that it happened.
But they knew that I supported them.
They also knew if they did something terrible, I'd put them in jail, like I did with one who did a horribly despicable act, almost a perverted act, in order to get even with a criminal.
We immediately turned the precinct, got him, prosecuted him, and put him in jail as an example.
We don't tolerate this.
But we also supported our police when the entire community You know, it was looking at one side of it, and then a tape would come out and show that the police officer was being beaten, and that's why he had to act the way he acted.
If the police aren't supported, if the police are worried, crime will go up.
Again, one practical example.
I'm in my police car with my partner.
I get a call.
Robbery in progress.
When I was mayor, after a few weeks, I guarantee you, my police officers ran there to stop the robbery.
And they knew that if something went wrong, but they were still acting correctly, I was going to be right there with them.
And I wasn't going to let the New York Times or Al Sharpton or anybody else make my decision for me.
I was a lawyer for many years.
I know how to evaluate facts.
I can make my own decision with my conscience.
And if I felt they were right, or the facts were ambiguous, I stood there with them.
They knew it.
And that's why they went there quickly.
Alter that situation.
They know the mayor plays a political game against the police.
They know the mayor likes Black Lives Matter.
That calls for the killing of police officers.
They know that the mayor would like to have a review process that basically convicts every cop and reviews it 15 times.
And they know that the chances are that with the media and everything else, whether they did it properly or not, there's going to be cries for them to be fired, prosecuted.
These are people with families.
They gotta think about, I'll lose my job.
I'll be disgraced.
I won't be able to get another job.
They're human beings.
I mean, some are superheroes.
Most are good human beings.
Doesn't take a lot for that police officer to slow that car down, wait just a little bit, and show up after robbery is over.
Much safer for the cop.
He takes names, writes down names, takes pictures, turns it over to the detectives.
But the person that he could have prevented from being shot, maybe gets shot and killed.
You don't think that happens?
You don't understand policing.
We'll be back in a few minutes.
My friends, if you want to help preserve America right now, while you still can, join AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens, the fastest growing conservative group in America, especially for those age 50 and up.
Joining AMAC gives you access to money-saving benefits, Cutting-edge news and a great bi-monthly magazine.
More importantly, AMAC fights for you.
A socialist storm is brewing.
Our constitutional republic has rarely faced the perils we do today.
Edmund Burke said it best.
All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.
If you care about our future like I do, then join AMAC today.
Over 2 million conservatives like you and me have already joined AMAC.
Stand with us by joining right now.
Just go to amac.us forward slash Rudy.
That's amac.us forward slash Rudy.
The benefits of AMAC membership are great.
But the cause is even greater.
Join today at amac.us forward slash Rudy.
Let's continue our analysis of what can be done to reduce crime.
So those are the first five points.
The sixth point is police should be encouraged to be involved with the children, with the young people, things like PAL and programs like that throughout the country.
Where the police go into schools, where the police do athletic things with the children, particularly the children that are at risk, where we break down the barrier that these are separate human beings.
I mean, it's this, you know, we lost a police officer in the crazy year of 2020, Captain Dorn in St.
Louis.
He wasn't one of mine, but I feel like he was.
Captain Dorn was retired and he was shot and killed by looters who were looting a store somehow in some perverted demonstration because of the Floyd murder.
Because it wasn't about Floyd, it was about stealing things from the store.
And he was there to try to prevent it and they ambushed him and executed him.
Captain Dorn had a long, long career.
From the bottom to the top, he had been a police commissioner, And his dedication was to go into schools on his own time with his wife, who was also a police officer, Ann, and they would get to know young people.
They would get to know the ones who were prone to crime and the ones that were, and they'd give them a different way of looking at life.
And he sort of did it on his own.
He's established a whole group of other people who did it.
This has got to be encouraged in every city in America.
The police have to, Kind of get out of that uniform a bit and show people that they're human beings and they're fathers and they love people and they care about people.
And the reason they're there is to save their lives.
Then you need the broken windows theory.
Don't let anybody tell you it doesn't work.
The broken windows theory means you have to focus on some of the smaller crimes.
Because that's the way you create an atmosphere of respect for the law.
People who are just slapping graffiti all over the place.
They're committing crimes.
It's not their property.
They're defacing the property of other people.
I go into a city and I see graffiti all over the place.
I know it has a terrible mayor.
I know it has a lot of crime.
Because he can't even establish respect for property rights.
You establish respect for property rights, you go a long way to reduce crime permanently, which is why we became the safest large city in America for a long time.
We once caught a serial murderer because when they jumped over turnstiles and didn't pay the toll, my predecessor didn't have them fingerprinted and identified.
He just gave them a little ticket, like the current Democratic mayor.
We went from one Democratic mayor to another and they're doing the same mistake.
Well, because we had taken that guy's fingerprint and his picture, we caught the serial killer after two and an aborted third.
I always wonder what would have happened if we didn't do that and how many murders that would have resulted in.
And broken windows improves the quality of life for people.
The neighborhood that was filled with drug dealers now is not filled with drug dealers.
125th Street, which is filled with illegal peddlers, they're all gone and real businesses can come in.
You've got to improve the quality of life.
Statistics are one thing, but people have to see things getting better in their sphere of life.
They've got to see less prostitutes, less drug dealers, Less graffiti, more new businesses coming in.
That's how you turn a city that was 75% believing it was going in the wrong direction to 80% thinking it's going in the right direction.
Then you have to have, number eight, rewards.
Rewards beyond just money.
Yes, you should pay bonuses.
Yes, you should pay the right amount of money.
Yes, you should do promotions.
But rewards are important.
Police officers are I don't know if quasi is the right word.
Not even suitor, that's false.
But they're a military organization, and a lot of it is honor and prestige.
Gosh, I remember how proud my uncles were of their uniforms and of their badge, and when they got a medal, how proud they were of that.
It's got to be done a lot.
You've got to reward the good things, because the press exaggerates the bad things so much.
And when citizens participate, you got to reward them and you got to be attuned to that.
It's not all negative reinforcement.
You got to balance that with positive reinforcement.
And finally, no riots.
Zero tolerance for riots.
No riots.
Hear what I said?
No riots.
How do you accomplish that?
You accomplish that by training your police department.
You do exercises.
You do tabletop exercises.
You figure out the strategies that will stop a riot before it gets started.
They're all different.
It's a complex science.
We had the best people in America for doing it because we had the most riots when I came in.
When I was running for office, I made a promise there'd be no riots.
When I got into office, I wondered how I'd keep that promise.
But what I did was, I set up an emergency management office.
We not only got ready for riots, we got ready for terrorism.
And we trained, and we trained, and we trained, and we improved, and we improved.
Then I'll give you one simple little piece of advice about riots.
Don't let them get started None of this venting, or they have a right to throw a couple of things, or if you stop them throwing things, it's going to get worse.
Just the opposite.
You have to have tremendous respect as a police officer for the First Amendment rights of people.
I had to defend the Ku Klux Klan when they came to New York and they wanted to hold a demonstration.
I went to court and made sure they had to take their Dawn masks off.
They didn't like that, and a lot of them didn't show up.
But I had to defend them.
I don't want to defend them, but I called my police officers together and I said, it's the mark of whether we're a civilized, good police department if we defend them.
And we had something like 12 Ku Klux Klan people and about 3,000 counter demonstrators who I think would have loved to have smashed them into the ground.
But we protected them even though we didn't want to.
So you have to train your police officers to be counterintuitive very, very often.
And the riot situation is real simple.
I never had any riots, even though there were two major ones right before I came into office.
And lo and behold, as soon as we get a Democrat mayor back, we have riots again after 20 years.
They knew because I told them.
You can demonstrate all you want.
You can yell, you can scream.
You can call me all kinds of names and you can burn me in effigy.
The minute you throw a rock, you get arrested.
The minute you spit on somebody, you get arrested.
The minute you push a police officer, you get arrested.
I'm not waiting for you to break into a store to arrest you.
You break into a store, you're done right, you get arrested.
And my cops don't stand around watching you loot like we saw in 2020 all over America.
We're a country of laws.
We're a country that protects the rights of criminals, but we also protect the rights of innocent people.
We lost that in 2020.
We're gonna have to reestablish that.
So very, very quickly, here's what has to be done.
Here's what has to be done.
I'm gonna review it quickly.
CompStat, strategies for each crime.
Courtesy, professionalism, and respect.
Number four, a review process that's fair.
Number five, support the police.
Number six, involvement with children.
Number seven, broken windows.
Number eight, morale rewards.
Number nine, an anti-terrorism unit.
Anti-terrorism is enormously important.
When I came into office, we had had the first terrorist attack a few, actually some months before I got elected, the attack on the World Trade Center.
And I realized that although I had the best police department, the best fire department, In the world, they weren't trained for these new attacks.
They weren't trained for sarin gas and they weren't trained for...
for these chemical agents and biological agents and massive shocking attacks.
So we established the mayor's office of emergency management and we trained and we trained and we trained and we trained and we trained again and we trained again.
We went out on the street and we pretended there were attacks.
We sat around big conference tables and played a game.
The tabletop exercise, and people played the mayor, and people played the bad guys, and people played the governor, and people played the police officers.
God, we revealed a lot of mistakes.
The first exercise we did on the outside, it was a sarin gas attack near the World Trade Center.
Just about every one of my cops and firefighters would have died if they went in the way they wanted to go in without the proper equipment.
We made sure we got the proper equipment.
And that's why on September 11, the commission, said one thing that I remember forever and is a great testament to them.
It said that my firefighters and police officers rescued every person that it was possible to rescue.
Remember them forever.
Never forget them.
Any of them.
The ones who were the uniformed ones and the ones who died the silent heroes.
Just remember them.
The more we can try to remember September 11, maybe the more we can bring ourselves together.
And the final thing is Zero tolerance for riots.
No riots.
Simple.
Don't let the first crime happen without addressing it.
Throw a rock, you go find that guy, cuff him and take him.
Spit on somebody, you go find him and cuff him and take him away.
You don't wait for them to break into the store and start stealing the televisions.
And my goodness, what was I watching this summer when I watched police officers observe Thousands and thousands of pieces of property being taken out of the stores of honest, decent people.
Gotta change.
Those are a couple of the suggestions.
They're not Republican suggestions.
They're not Democrat suggestions.
They're common sense suggestions.
And I can tell you something.
They worked.
And I say this for fear that I'm going to be thought of as a bragger or whatever.
But there's nobody in America that reduced crime the way I did.
The percentages don't lie.
They're real.
Reduced it by percentages that no one else has even matched.
Some continued it well.
Some ruined it.
But I did it.
And I didn't do it by myself.
I did it with my police officers.
And the reason I went every time one of my police officers was in the hospital, even if it was four o'clock in the morning or Christmas Eve, was I knew they were doing it.
I was getting the criticism and the glory.
But I was home in Gracie Mansion with cops guarding me and they were out on the street.
And even with their vests, they were getting shot and killed.
And maybe it's because I had, you know, uncles that were in that situation.
And maybe it's just because I understand the quid pro quo that goes on in life.
The honest quid pro quo, which is if I care about you, you're going to care about me.
But the mayor, has to show with his actions, not his words, that these are some of the most important people in our city.
When they wake up the next morning and they hear, Officer so-and-so was shot and Mayor Giuliani was there at his bedside for five hours, all of a sudden Officer, Officer McCree, let's say, wow, he must be pretty important.
These are the things you have to do.
We've got to start doing them.
Our country is going in the wrong direction.
Fast.
The statistics last year were some of the most violent in the history of our country and the changes in New York City, the most violent.
Things being done about it now, not being done on a systemic level.
We need leadership and we need people to rethink their political prejudices.
Think about common sense.
How do you reduce crime?
We'll be talking about this subject all throughout the year as we come closer to September 11 and subjects like this.
That helped us to recreate and bring back the spirit that we had that allowed us to work together as Republicans and Democrats and not constantly blame one side or the other for the attack, since the attack actually happened by a group of Islamic extremist terrorists who hate us and killed us in the distorted view they have of their religion.
A lot of that's happening now, too.
Let's stop the blaming ourselves.
Let's start the working together to solve these problems.
This is Rudy Giuliani, and I'll be back with you in a few days.
▲
Export Selection