Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani comments on the death of Michael Brown and Daren Wilson Non-Indictment in Ferguson, Mo.

Comments by Mayor Giuliani during a November 23, 2014, “Meet the Press” interview with Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson:

• The white police officers won't be there if you weren't killing each other," Giuliani said during the heated exchange in which the two men spoke over each other.

• "Why don't you cut down your crime so many white police officers don't have to be in black areas?" Giuliani asked. "Ninety-three percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. We are talking about the exception here [in Ferguson]... I would like to see the attention paid to that -- that you're paying to this."

• "Black people who kill black people go to jail," said Dyson during the exchange. "White people who are policemen and kill black people do not go to jail."

• "It's hardly insignificant. It is the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community," Giuliani said. "Why don't you cut it down so that so many white police officers don't have to be in black areas?"

Responding to a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Sunday that the black community is more responsible for the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police than the officers themselves.

“I do believe that there is more interaction and more unfair interaction between police officers, white and black,” he admitted during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “But I think just as much, if not more, responsibility is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community. It’s because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society.”

Giuliani gave this answer in reaction to a Pew Poll showing 70 percent of African Americans saying that they are treated less fairly by police. Only 37 percent of whites made the same complaint.

The week prior to these comments, the former mayor made headlines for claiming that black-on-black crime was “the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community” and arguing that “the danger to a black child…is another black.”

But in these comments, Giuliani seems to be going further, implying that police are justified in assuming that all black people are criminals because of the high crime rates in their communities. During the show, Giuliani also claimed that Darren Wilson was justified in killing Brown and that prosecutors shouldn’t have even tried to indict him in front of a grand jury.

“I don’t see how this case normally would have even been brought to a grand jury,” he said. “This is the kind of case — had it not had the racial overtones and the national publicity — where a prosecutor would have come to a conclusion that there is not enough evidence to present to a grand jury.”

Later in the program, Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, pushed back against the argument that protests in Ferguson are ignoring the real problem of so-called black-on-black crime.

“About 84 percent of whites are murdered by other whites and the concern about violence in the black community is pervasive,” he said. “But the protests are directed as a response to the system of the killings of unarmed black men and the lack of accountability when those events take place.”

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Glen Anthony Watson Jr.

Graduate Assistant

Unversity of the District of Columbia