Giuliani complains about all the crime in New York under Trump

Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City and Donald Trump’s personal attorney, told the Republican National Convention on Thursday that crime has never been so bad as it is now. He neglected to mention that the problems he described all happened on Donald Trump’s watch.

“New York City, once described as America’s crime capital, had become, by the mid-nineties, America’s safest large city,” he said. “Now today, my city is in shock. Murders, shooting, and violent crime are increasing at percentages unheard of in the past. We’re seeing the return of rioting and looting.”

While he tried to pin the responsibility for this solely on New York’s current mayor and prosecutors, the situation has happened under Donald Trump — the very man whose reelection Giuliani was attempting to support.

Trump too has made a big deal about rising crime in American cities since he took office in 2017, oddly making this an argument for a second term.

In 2016, he ran on a promise to end a mostly imaginary wave of violent crime.

“The crime rate is through the roof. People can’t walk down the street without getting shot. I’ll stop that,” Trump claimed at the time.

In his January 2017 inaugural address, he promised that crime and poverty in inner cities would be a thing of the past.  “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said.

But while most violent crime in America has been on a steady decline since the early 1990s, Trump is again running on mostly false claims that America’s cities are violent wastelands where “anarchy” reigns.

According to a recent BBC fact check, while violent crime is mostly down, there have been more murders this year in a few places, like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Much of this, experts say, could be related to the coronavirus pandemic.

And according to the New York Police Department’s own data, felony crimes in New York City have significantly declined between when Giuliani left office at the end of 2001 and 2019.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.