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May 16, 2022 - Rudy Giuliani
31:49
Biggest Crime Reduction in History, how it can Happen Again | Guest: Bernie Kerik | Ep 238
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Hello, it's Rudy Giuliani.
Welcome to Rudy's Common Sense.
And as you can see, I'm on location, and I think you know who that gentleman is to my right.
That's Commissioner Bernard Carrick.
He was New York City Commissioner of Corrections before he was New York City Police Commissioner.
He was Police Commissioner during a tumultuous time of crime, which You know, he, he took over after we had had some pretty substantial crime reductions at a point where the belief was we couldn't go down any further.
And he took it down much further.
And in corrections, I don't know, did miracles, 90% reduction in violence.
They could sure use them now, couldn't they?
Well, that's what we're going to try to do.
We're going to use them now because I can't think of anybody else who could quickly analyze the crime epidemic that we have.
Which in this particular case, it has a few little peculiarities here and there, but it's pretty much everywhere in the country where there's a big city and maybe other places.
So Bernie, welcome.
Thank you, Mayor.
And you agree that this is A crime epidemic unlike anything we've ever seen before in terms of so many different cities involved at the same time?
Well, I don't think we've ever seen it like this where it's systematic in every one of these major Democrat-run cities, whether it's in New York, New York City, the major cities in New York State, upstate, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Baltimore.
Minneapolis, every one of the cities run by Democrats, we've seen substantial increases in violent crime, shootings and murder.
And, you know, it's ironic that a lot of these mayors, they either intentionally are not doing anything about it or they don't know what to do.
And for us, for me, for you and people like us that have lived through this, It's kind of weird to watch this because we know better.
It is.
It's frustrating.
You have to wake up, whether it's the tremendous increase in murder last year, 16, 17 cities set a record, most murders in the history.
Right.
Or now the massive increase in property crime.
New York City had one client on the ComStat who was up 100% in auto theft.
Yep.
Well, listen, auto theft and carjackings were pretty much eliminated across the board.
By the time I was police commissioner, you know, in the aftermath of us leaving the city, nobody ever heard of carjacking, with the exception of maybe Newark, where Joe works.
But at the end of the day, carjackings were gone.
Today, There's major carjacking teams all over these major cities.
Like, it's nuts.
You know, and it's, you know, you got to ask yourself, why aren't they addressing it?
I think, and I think the problem, it's probably, it's a four prong problem.
I always say three, but there's, it's four prongs.
And the first prong comes out of the White House.
The White House and this administration under Joe Biden emboldens the bad guys, right?
You know, they've supported BLM, they've supported Antifa, they've ignored, you know, billion dollars worth of damage that they did in 2020.
The vice president of the United States was supporting getting Antifa and Black Lives Matter people out of jail after they committed violent assaults and all this other stuff.
So you have them emboldening the bad guys.
You have governors.
Like Governor Cuomo and the present governor of New York that support these bail reform laws, that in New York, for example, 83% of the people locked up on gun charges, illegal gun charges, are immediately released back into the communities.
83?
83%.
And that comes from the PC's office in New York.
So any kind of bail reform that does that, that lets bad guys back on the street, That doesn't hold them accountable.
That prevents judges from looking at their pedigree, their prior arrest, before they make a bail judgment.
Anything that does that is horrible for society.
So you've got the governors.
You've got the district attorneys, many of them, you know, funded by George Soros and groups like his, where they're not prosecuting the bad guys that do bad things.
And then the last thing is the mayors, the mayors that they've defunded their departments, their police departments.
They don't support and endorse their own cops.
They don't indemnify them.
They've taken away immunity in many cases.
Listen, this defunding issue, take New York City, and we were talking about this earlier.
Yeah, tell them, give people, because New York is so much national news also,
and I'm sure it's a microcosm in other places.
Tell the difference between when, about when you left, take out the September 11 oddity, which they don't have to deal with, but basically right before you left, right before September 11, The resources you had, the resources you had to use, and how it compares to recent times.
So, when I left, when I left, when we left office, December 31st, 2001, I had 55,000 people under my command.
41,000 were uniformed officers, 14,000 were civilians.
I had a $3.5 billion budget.
my command. 41,000 were uniformed officers, 14,000 were civilians. I had a three and a
half billion dollar budget. Today, the NYPD has almost a $6 billion budget. Um, de Blasio
took a bunch of that money away and put it into social programs. But what's concerning
to me, it's 21 years later, 21 years.
And almost twice as much money.
Almost twice as much money.
And they have 6,000 to 7,000 less staff than I had in 2001.
What were their COPS numbers?
I always hear around 35,000, 34,000.
35,000, right?
And I had 41.
34,000. 35,000, right? And so then the balance. And I had 41. Now the balance is, the balance
would then be civilians, right?
Right, the balance would be civilians.
But here's the problem.
And they have twice as much money, but they have... You have a substantial increase in the population in New York City over the last 20 years.
You've got the illegals in New York City over the last several years.
Could be double the number.
Could be double the number that was there prior.
And you have all of the terrorism, the counter-terrorism issues that we didn't have to deal with prior to 9-11.
Guess what?
Why is there less cops today than there was in 2001?
If Eric Adams was serious about addressing crime, one of the first things he would do?
Go to the governor and get the bail reform thing repealed.
Go to the governor and tell him, get rid of the DAs in New York City that's not prosecuting the bad guys and doing what they're supposed to do, what they're sworn to do, by law.
And then, Take the money, and you've done this, take the money from social programs and other city programs, put that money into the police department, get the numbers where they should be, listen to the chief of department, listen to the first deputy commissioner, the police commissioner, give them what they want.
And I'm going to tell, for the viewers out there, This is, the reason I say this is because of this.
When I ran Rikers Island, before, again, just to explain a bit, before Bernie was police commissioner, he was commissioner of corrections, which meant he ran the largest corrections department in the United States.
And at the time you came in, because originally you started as a deputy, right?
Right.
From the time you came in, you had quite a career there.
From the time you came in until the day you left as, to become police commissioner, You went, without any doubt, to being the most dangerous,
Correction system in the country, which it may be today, I don't know, to being, without any doubt, the safest.
And the reason everybody can believe it is 60 Minutes reported.
60 Minutes and the New York Times.
And the New York Times!
They may not be there anymore.
We may not find them there anymore.
If you became a Trump supporter.
But I'm going to tell you something.
You know, it's funny you mentioned 60 Minutes because I didn't, you know... And they came into it ripping apart.
Right.
Well, I'm going to tell you this story.
New York Times ran a front page story, top of the fold, an iron hand at Rikers dramatically reducing violence.
That was the article.
Gee, I wonder how that was?
And it was two and a half pages in the Times.
It works better than when I do anything wrong.
Listen, I just, I did what I was supposed to do.
But Mike Wallace called me, Mike Wallace, and I didn't know.
Father of Christmas.
Mike Wallace called me and I answered the phone and he says, Commissioner, I'm, uh, I'm looking at this, I'm looking at this article here in the, uh, in the New York times.
And he says, he goes just like this.
He says, personally, you know, I did a story on Rikers back in the nineties.
He said, I'm reading this article.
He said, I gotta be honest.
I think you're full of shit.
And I was like, You know, it is what it is.
The numbers are what they are.
And he said, you know, I want to come and see.
I remember you talking to me about it.
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So, I remember you were asking me should I do the interview with them, and you told me that the numbers can't be...
You can't lie about it.
We're going to surprise them.
I said, yeah, but they'll change it up.
We're going to destroy you.
But you did it.
I did it.
And what he did is he took all of the footage from 1990.
Right.
And he compared it to the investigation they were doing then.
And he basically came away with, this is the man that tamed Riker's Island.
Sometimes I get numbers too low, too high in the length of time.
I seem to recall the violent numbers, I mean all the numbers were like in the 75 to 94 percent region, but the general violence was down 90 percent.
93 percent.
We took, we dropped the slashes.
But listen, here's the other thing.
Today they have 4,000 prisoners at Rikers.
I had 133,000 admissions per year and my daily population was 22,000.
Today they have 4,000 prisoners at Rikers.
I had 133,000 admissions per year.
My daily population was 22,000.
They have 4,000.
Today they have 4,000.
And they've got corruption, they've got stabbings.
And I had 22.
You had 24 down?
22.
And I had 22.
So you almost had 6 down.
22.
So we had, overall, we had a 93% reduction in violence, the slashing, stabbings.
We had a 50% reduction in overtime spending.
We had a 40% reduction in assaults on staff.
And we had a 60% increase in searches found, in searches and weapons found.
And you were holding a lot more people.
I mean, a lot more dangerous people were hanging around there.
Now, Two-thirds go out in the street.
Right.
I mean, that's the reason.
Which is why when I watch this stuff today, and people say, well, it can't be fixed.
It's too corrupt.
They told me that in 89.
It's exactly what the New York Times said about you when you came in and said, look, nobody wants to live, visit, work, or go to school in a place where they're not safe.
So we're going to clean up New York City.
And everybody laughed.
Everybody said it could be done.
But at the end of the day, here's the bottom line.
For every percentage point we reduced violence and violent crime and murder in New York City, we saw substantial increases in economic development, tourism, real estate values, decreases in the welfare rolls, a better quality of life all over New York City.
So don't tell me That it can't be done because then we had five times the amount of crime going on in New York City than they do today.
And they're having a hard time today.
Yeah, it's going up.
What they have, however, for each of the last three years, they have crime increases that are historic and epic.
There was one year in which shootings went up 100%.
Right.
I mean, that's unheard of.
Right.
I went back over the crime statistics in New York City, which is only about 60 years old, so you can't go way back.
So, de Blasio had the highest increase in homicide of any mayor in history.
Right.
50%.
Yep.
The homicides built up over a period of years when they got to 2,000 under Dinkins.
But that, to get to 2,000, it was a 10% increase.
But Mayor, when you took over, The year before you took over, we were at 2,200 murders.
We had more murders in New York City than they have today in L.A., Atlanta, and Chicago.
And they're all falling apart.
And they're falling apart.
These things can't handle it.
So I have to get even for a political lie that's told.
The New York Times always says, well, the reduction started under Dinkins.
The city council required Dinkins to go hire more cops, against his will, which he did.
Crime went down briefly for one year.
But the year before I came into office, it went up.
So when I took over from them, particularly murder, when I took over from them, it was a rising crime rate.
And unlike Adams, where crime went up, what, 40% now?
The first quarter, we had murder down 20% and rising crime down 12% immediately.
Right.
And there were times, for example, when your predecessors, when Bill Bratton left, they did an article, you can't bring crime down any more than this.
Now, how would you say for these?
And I picked Bernie Garrett.
And in a way, it was like they would be sympathetic with you.
Wait a minute.
Let me clear it up.
It wasn't only them.
It wasn't only them.
It was the mayor himself said, look, just drop it 2%.
Don't let it go up.
Everybody's going to say it's going to go up.
Don't let it go up.
Just whatever.
2%, 3%.
By the end of the next year, before 9-11, I had reduced violent crime in the city by close to 15%.
It was the most substantial increase.
That got us to our 65%.
The point that I made is when you took over, it was already down 50%.
Right.
Everybody cut in half.
That's exactly right.
So, as you and I know, Bernie and I, I should tell you, have done this in foreign countries.
Yep.
Where it worked.
We got fired in Mexico because we were affected.
Right.
We got in the middle of a political squabble.
We had crime down two years in a row.
Well, one year, and then the beginning of the second year.
They were afraid the mayor, the police commissioner, who may have been the only legitimate guy in the country.
Yeah.
The police commissioner.
Who ended up becoming the mayor later.
Yeah, was going to be the mayor, so the president fired him.
Right.
And then crime started to go up again.
And he did become the mayor.
I think he's now maybe the secretary of state of Mexico.
And the mayor we worked with was a raving communist, the president of... Who became the president.
But on crime, you couldn't have had more support.
Yeah.
Right?
He wasn't like DeBlasio, Adams... No, no, no.
He was a raving left-wing lunatic, but he wanted crime reduced.
Yeah.
Everybody should have the same amount of money.
There's a good example.
He was a left-wing lunatic like all the left-wing lunatics here, but this was Mexico and he wanted reductions in crime.
No crime. No crime. No crime. There's a good example. He was a left-wing lunatic like all
the left-wing lunatics here, but this was Mexico and he wanted reductions in crime.
Here, they don't give a damn. So fast forward history and people are so surprised.
How did Mexico agree with Donald Trump to hold the people of Mexico, to remain in Mexico policy, which brought the border crime down like 30-40%?
Not like now, which the border is probably worse than New York was back then.
Same guy.
The guy became the president of Mexico.
He's a big, crazy left-winger.
They say he and Trump are not going to get along.
The only conversations they ever talked about were crime.
right-wingers, maybe he was hard-headed than Trump because he took in the Remain in Mexico policy,
he dealt with the drug dealers on the border, he didn't ask, they always asked for money for that,
all he asked for was logistics support. President Donald Trump would tell you that this
communist, whatever I should call that, he's a communist, was probably the most cooperative
president that he dealt with and certainly the most cooperative on crime.
And it was good for us.
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Joe Biden has done what every Democrat has done in this country.
He reverses, he goes more left than the communist mayor of Mexico.
He reverses the remainder of Mexico.
But think about it for a minute.
Joe Biden has done what every Democrat has done in this country.
For some reason, when the Republicans come in and they fix stuff, the Democrats come
in, no matter how good it is, no matter how good it got, no matter how great it works,
Democrats come in and they completely tear it apart.
It's an intentional... Nothing like this.
This is unprecedented.
Yeah, well, we've never seen it like this.
So let's go over the four things before we get into it.
So any police commissioner who wants can follow this and any one of them can call this guy and get advice.
It's totally crazy that Adams Who I think holds the record for the largest increase in crime in his first three months in office.
I don't think anybody's ever been close to the 34.
And you know what?
I gotta tell you, Mayor.
I didn't know him.
I know.
Listen, he was a lieutenant.
He worked for us.
Eric Adams has a better chance, had a better chance to become an icon of New York City.
Being a black mayor coming in with crime on the rise after de Blasio, he could have in three months, in three months, he could have knocked it through the floor.
And I told him, I said, you can, you can.
You could be an international rock star if you do what you have to do.
And the crazy thing is, he knows how to do it.
He knows what we did.
He worked for us.
And he starts it, but then he doesn't finish it.
Mike, for example.
It's all theater, right?
But he begins with, I'm going to reconstitute.
Right.
Right.
Almost like undercover police officers.
Right.
which was ultimately our real secret to getting the guns, right?
Right.
Okay. And everybody knows that.
Won't touch your clothes.
And the key to that is being in plain clothes, being part of the neighborhood.
Nobody knows who you are.
You're a chameleon. You can get into the neighborhood and nobody knows who you are.
They're almost like undercover police officers.
They are.
Right.
Right.
He said, he adopts it right away.
Not so bad.
Then he puts them in uniform.
Doesn't he get to not play clothes when it says New York City Police right across here?
I don't know who's bright idea that was.
It takes away the effect, the impact.
The first movie, Bernie, the first one.
You've got 25 guns in an hour.
Yeah, we used to do 25, 30 a day.
That's the first.
Yeah.
So now they're giving out tickets.
Well, that's really going to reduce crime.
And the traffic unit.
We got a separate non... They're not armed, I don't think.
We have separate traffic units.
But you know what?
It's just a bunch of stuff that they're doing.
You know, you're attacking the cops because he saw a cop on his phone looking at his cell phone.
I don't think the mayor understands that probably the majority of the reports that the cops have to use, they're in their phone somewhere.
A bunch of the radio networks are in their phone.
There's a bunch of stuff that they can do in their phone while they're in the field, and we want them to do that.
So to go around, and then instead of calling the chief and saying, what's up with these guys being on the phone, what does he do?
He holds a press conference and tells the public, if you see a cop on the phone, take a photo and send it to me.
Oh, come on.
What are you, a tough guy?
It demoralizes the cop.
So crime's going up, right?
Three weeks into it, he says, oh, I'm going to sit down.
I'm going to establish my plan.
So for the first three weeks, we get my open city.
No new plan.
We get people stabbed in the subways, subways are absurd.
Subway is 68% increase in crime.
Nobody takes it.
The guy goes to galas, parties, clubs every night.
clubs every night.
He's definitely in it for the nightlife.
I mean, when does he have time to do crime play?
All I know is when I became police commissioner, I got yelled at for going to one, one night thing.
I had my problem with Randy.
Every time I called him, he was in a lane.
Half the time.
And it was Tony Corbin.
Your chief of staff got me in trouble.
Took me to some night thing.
He might have gotten Brandon in trouble.
Who knows?
But I would, sometimes, God forbid, a cop was shot, I would always have to go.
And I'd reach Bratton, and he's in a lane.
It's the third time I said, you can't be a police commissioner and be in a lane.
I don't want to be nasty, but that isn't because I'm against bars or restaurants.
My father owned a bar.
Doesn't it drive you nuts that people are dying?
And that if you could just do a little bit more, a little bit more, fewer people will die.
I remember when we had the first bad shooting, a terrorist shooting.
I told Bratton we're going to solve it in 24 hours.
And we're going to solve it in 24 hours because that's how we stop the city from getting, you know, when one of those things happen and the terrorist is out there, everybody in the city is nervous until you catch him.
You can reverse it if you do.
And we put his picture out everywhere.
We went on every television station.
We caught him in 12, 13 hours.
But I don't see that spirit anymore.
And many times with you, up and you had already done it. I can distinctly recall my
usual pestering that I used to do.
I'd call this guy up and I was friendly with him. I was friendly with Howard Savior too,
but just about friendlier than anybody else. And I would call him up and he'd say,
boss, we already got the guy. I said, well, I just got the report. He said, could you wage
us? So I'd get a chance to go in. I mean, but it was so great. He also used to make his own arrests.
He used to make his own arrests.
Seven.
I know I got the record.
But what the heck happens to the morale of the police?
As opposed to saying, I'm going to look at your, I'm going to go check on your, on your phone.
I'm going to go take a look at your phone.
Give me that phone.
Give me that phone.
I'm going to get that phone.
He went out and made arrests.
And they said, man, he's a cop.
Like us.
This guy's a cop like us.
He might even get a civilian.
I'm surprised he didn't get a civilian.
That one was handled.
So here's what I want you to do.
I want you to look in the cameras.
Again, I'm here.
You're talking to all the police commissioners and mayors, the ones that are employed by Soros, which unfortunately includes our city, DA.
Tell them the four changes that they could make right away.
And then if they want, call you and you'll give them the other time.
I think the big thing is ignore the Department of Justice.
Ignore the President.
Ignore the politics coming out of Washington.
Focus on your city, number one.
Number two, get your governors on board.
Governors have to be on board.
Stop the bail reform issues.
Make sure the governors are putting money into the budgets, the state budgets.
They're going to help those local departments where they can.
Um, get the governors to go after the DAs.
If the DAs are elected and they're in your jurisdiction and they are these Marxist left-wing radical lunatics that are going to allow people, you know, to go out and do things and not hold them accountable, not prosecute them.
They got to go.
Can't keep them there because they're destroying your department and they're endangering your cops, the men and women that work for you.
And lastly, The mayors.
The mayors have to do the job they're sworn to do.
Stop cowering to the left.
That's Eric Adams' biggest problem.
He's cowering to the left.
If he put the money into the department, the men and women in the NYPD, they know how to reduce crime.
They know how to reduce crime.
They do it better than any department in the entire world.
Absolutely.
Right?
We've trained people all over the world to do this.
The bottom line is they know how to do it.
Give them the money they need to do it.
Give them the support they need.
Indemnify them.
And always give them the benefit of the doubt.
And that's the one thing I can say about Mayor Giuliani.
We had shootings.
We had negativity.
We had bad things happen.
But the cops always got the benefit of the doubt until there was an investigation where it was proved otherwise that they were wrong.
And then they're held accountable internally or they're locked up.
We lock them up and we've done plenty.
But the bottom line is this can be fixed and it's not a big nut to fix.
It can be done.
Well, you know, if I were a police commissioner, I'd say to myself the following.
No police commissioner, anywhere other than in New York, reduced crime anywhere near the way he did.
And he did the most of the three great ones that I had.
And Commissioner Kelly, who came after him, was a great police commissioner.
And also, I respect his reductions, even though percentage-wise they were less than ours.
Because he had the same problem you had.
You know, you don't talk about this, and nobody really does.
Keep in mind, Ray Kelly worked for David Dinkins.
And Ray Kelly was not reducing crime.
There were no reductions like there were under Giuliani.
Ray Kelly was there, wasn't reducing crime, crime wasn't dropping.
Then Giuliani came in.
We put in the programs to do what had to be done to change the dynamics and reduce crime, and it dropped.
Then Ray Kelly worked for Bloomberg, and Bloomberg let him do his job.
Bloomberg gave him the money to do the job.
So the importance of what I'm trying to say here is, The police commissioners can go out there and do what they have to do.
They know the job.
The cops know the job.
But you have to have a mayor that will give them the money, do what has to be done, indemnify them, support them, get them the resources they need.
They'll get the job done.
And I think that's where we see a distinct difference.
David Dinkins?
Kelly couldn't get it done.
Under Bloomberg, Kelly got it done in a major, major way and remained that way for 12 years.
So that demonstrates the leadership out of the mayor's office is extremely important.
So this is doable if you have the right people.
It's as simple as that.
And you have the right approach.
And I would say this is as clearly a Democrat Crime pandemic as you've ever had because it comes right out of their policies and it can be fixed.
I don't say quickly, but a lot quicker than people think by just changing the law.
Quick.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Anybody that needs help.
He's done it elsewhere, by the way.
We could go through that another time.
And he could tell you how you take these and apply them to South American and countries all over the world and make it work.
So long as they're willing to, you know, follow the rules.
Well, thank you, Bernie.
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