Giuliani: Michael Brown's Death Shouldn't Have Gone to a Grand Jury
After days of nation-wide protesting and rioting over the grand jury decision to not indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Sunday that prosecutors shouldn't have tried to indict him in front of a grand jury in the first place. Doing so, according to Giuliani, was political theater.
"I don't see how this case normally would even have been brought to a grand jury," said Giuliani, a former prosecutor, on Fox News Sunday. "This is the kind of case—had it not had the racial overtones and the national publicity—where a prosecutor would have come to the conclusion that there is not enough evidence to present to the grand jury."
"Attorney General Holder’s gonna have to take a case in which a jury couldn't find probable cause to indict, and he's gonna have to try to find probable cause in front of a federal grand jury,” Giuliani said. "It's an impossible case to present to a grand jury.”
Giuliani also doubled down on controversial comments he made last Sunday on NBC's Meet The Press, in which he said so-called black-on-black crime was "the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community" and suggesting that "the danger to a black child ... is another black." In a heated exchange with Michael Eric Dyson, a noted Georgetown University professor and civil rights activist, Giuliani said, "the white police officers won't be there if you weren't killing each other."
When asked about a Pew Research Center survey which found that 70 percent of black Americans believe they are treated less fairly than whites in their experience with police, Giuliani ceded to Fox host Chris Wallace, "I do believe that there is more interaction and more unfair interaction between police officers, white and black."
However, he insisted that reality is in the hands of the black community, saying, "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," He added: "It's because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society."
"If I'd put all my police on Park Avenue instead of Harlem, thousands more blacks would have died during my time in office," Giuliani said.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/rudy-giuliani-michael-brown-death-never-should-have-gone-to-a-grand-jury/383269/
