Former Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani criticized his successor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday for his implementation of New York City’s polarizing stop-and-frisk program.
The program started under Giuliani and continued for a dozen years under Bloomberg before current Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ended it. Bloomberg has repeatedly apologized for overseeing the program since his entry into the Democratic presidential primary. (RELATED: De Blasio On Campaigning During NYC Blackout: ‘It Doesn’t Matter Where You Are’)
“I don’t know how he runs away from it. He was a passionate supporter of it,” Giuliani said. “He even asked me to write a…amicus brief in support of it.”
Giuliani then accused Bloomberg of having “changed the program” that he initially implemented in the 1990’s.
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“The program that (William) Bratton, Schaffer, and (Bernard) Kerik…and I developed was a much more careful program,” Giuliani said.
“Crime was coming down and that we kept it carefully limited to about 95-100,000 cause that’s what we can manage,” Giuliani. “You just can’t make a stop, which is what it kind of became. We understood the law.”
Giuliani defended the program, but said Bloomberg’s administration was not reliant on statistics like his was.
“You should not put police officers in places where there’s no crime. Otherwise, you’re not gonna have the police officers in the places where there are crime,” Giuliani said. “My use of stop, question, and frisk…it was statistical. If there were 50 complaints against whites that day, then police officers would go look for whites.”