WASHINGTON — Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has some advice for Attorney General Eric Holder as he weighs a legal response to the Michael Brown shooting: Don’t make a federal case out of it.
“It’s an impossible case to present to a grand jury,” Giuliani said.
“Attorney General Holder’s going have to take a case in which a jury couldn’t find probable cause to indict, and he’s going have to try to find probable cause in front of a federal grand jury,” Giuliani said, appearing on “Fox News Sunday.”
Giuliani also blamed “racial overtones” for local prosecutors even taking the case to a grand jury in response to police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an event that rocked Ferguson, Mo.
“Having read the transcripts of the grand jury, and having been a prosecutor for thirteen years, I don’t see how this case normally would even have been brought to the grand jury,” Giuliani said.
“This is the kind of case, had it not had the racial overtones and the national publicity, in which the prosecutor would have come to the conclusion that there was not enough evidence to bring to the grand jury.”
A St. Louis grand jury on Monday decided not to indict Wilson in Brown’s killing. The US Justice Department is investigating possible civil rights violations.
Giuliani also revisited some of the issues he brought up about policing in mostly black neighborhoods last week on NBC’s “Meet the Press” with Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson.
“White police officers won’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 percent of the time,” Giuliani said then, in remarks that stirred the pot while racial tensions were running high in Ferguson.
View videoHis language was more muted Sunday, as he reeled off crime fighting stats from his time as mayor.
“Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society,” Giuliani said.
“If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would’ve been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.”
“I do believe that there is more interaction and more unfair interaction between police officers, white and black,” in black neighborhoods, he said. “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 defended body cameras for cops, something he said he used to oppose, and trumpeted stop-and-frisk policing – though he said it was wrong to deploy it on a “massive” scale.
“If you overdo it — and some police departments have — it’s wrong,” he said.
Daryl Parks, an attorney for the family of Michael Brown, blamed the prosecutor for failing to forcefully seek an indictment before the grand jury.
“From his action it appears he does not want an indictment. Thus they don’t indict,” Parks said, also appearing on Fox.
“About 84 percent of whites are murdered by other whites and the concern about violence in the black community is pervasive,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, who also appeared on Fox. “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.”