Rudy Giuliani claimed that police officers are, by his assessment, having a “hard time” because “they can’t punch you”.
Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and a man once hailed as “America’s mayor” made the controversy-stirring remarks while appearing on conservative television and radio talk show host Joe Pags’s programme, The Joe Pags Show, in an episode where the pair of men discussed New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s response to crime.
Mr Pags began by citing a leaked memo from the mayor’s office, which revealed that NYPD officers were being asked not to “congregate or engage in unnecessary conversation with other members of the service while on post” unless absolutely necessary.
Mr Giuliani, who served as mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001, didn’t hold back when he was asked by the host what he thought about the policies being implemented by Mr Adams, who has held the same post as Mr Giuliani since November of last year.
“It shows a total misunderstanding of leadership. I mean this man shouldn’t be police commissioner, a mayor or lieutenant in the Marines,” said Mr Giuliani, who famously oversaw the notorious broken windows campaign of the 1990s that emboldened officers to crack down on petty crime, a practice that disproportionately targeted minority groups in the city.
Mr Giuliani continued in his tirade against modern policing in American cities, arguing that they were in fact making it “hard” for cops to do their jobs.
“You can’t use your gun. You can’t touch anybody,” he incorrectly stated, as police officers are generally allowed to use firearms after a pair of Supreme Court decisions from the 1980s — Tennessee v Garner and Graham v Connor — paved the way for a framework that determines when deadly force by cops is considered reasonable. The first instance is to protect their life or that of another innocent party, called the “defense-of-life” standard, and the second instance is to stop a suspect from escaping, but only if they believe that person poses a dangerous threat to others.
“They’re not allowed to touch you between here and here,” Mr Giuliani said while gesturing between his chin and chest, in yet another incorrect statement.
Only in recent years have some states and municipalities begun prohibiting officers from using the controversial neck chokehold that killed Eric Garner in New York and George Floyd in Minneapolis, though there are generally no rules stopping officers from touching people between their chin and chest as Mr Giuliani asserted.
“They can’t punch you,” the former Trump aide added, miming the act with a fist through the air.
“I had an uncle who was the most decorated police officer,” the former mayor continued, noting how his father’s brother had a “knockout punch”.
“Think of the people he didn’t have to shoot because of that?” Mr Giuliani argued, seeming to contend that if more officers were allowed to punch people, there’d be less officer-involved shootings.
According to the Statista Research Department, the number of officer-involved shootings has increased in recent years. In 2021, there were 1,055 fatal police shootings, and in 2020 there were 1,020 fatal shootings. With four months remaining in the year, the rate seems to be on track as there have been 631 fatal shootings by officers since the start of 2022.
Additionally, the rate at which Black Americans are killed by US police officers represents a disproportionate share, as of August 2022, the group accounted for 40 fatal shootings per million of the population.
