There was "no excuse for" two nights of rioting in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a black police officer who shot and killed 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott had "every right to shoot" if it turns out the deceased man had been holding a gun, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Thursday.
"If in fact the police commissioner is correct, and I have no reason to believe that he hasn't, and he may have come out holding a gun, then the police officer had every right shoot," Giuliani told Fox News' "Fox & Friends."
Further, he thinks it is important the video from the scene be shown, even if it is evidence in a case.
Using a taser or a non-fatal shot might not have worked, Giuliani argued, as that might not have stopped Tate from shooting Officer Brentley Vinson, the officer who fired the fatal shots, or killed him, or other law enforcement on the scene.
"Let's take 'Black Lives Matter,'" Giuliani said. "How come the black life of that police officer didn't matter? That police officer could have been dead had he not acted, and his black life matters as much as the person failing to listen to the instructions of the police officer."
As for the rioting itself, there's simply "no excuse for it," said Giuliani, no matter the reason for the shooting.
"Why should some person's store get ruined, who had nothing to do with the shooting, who might be an African-American himself?" Giuliani said. "Why should his store get ruined because a cop did something right, wrong, or ambiguous?"
Giulani agreed there is "every right" to wage protests, but he pointed out he inherited a city that had had two four-day riots, and there is a way to stop them.
"You throw a rock, the first one that does it gets arrested," Giuliani said. "Break a window, first one that does it, gets arrested. I said, 'If you want to test me, test me.' They never did."
If the rioting continues tonight, then there is a "real responsibility" on Mayor Jennifer Roberts to stop it.
The situation in Tulsa is more difficult, however, said Giuliani, and he believes officials should let the investigation play out.
"I had situations where police officers acted illegally," the former mayor said. "Put them in jail."
Giuliani, who instituted a stop-and-frisk policy in New York City along with former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, said he agrees with the GOP nominee about the need to institute stop-and-frisk policies, particularly in Chicago, where 3,000 people have been shot this year.
"I started it for the same reason that Donald Trump is talking about," Giuliani said. "I started it in 1994. We had years of 2,200 murders, seven murders a day. Numbers we're talking about, war zone murders and shootings. In my tenure, I brought it down 65 percent and Michael Bloomberg, between the two of us, 85 percent."
The practice of stopping suspicious people for frisking and questioning is often effective, and if the officer ends up discovering a person has a gun or drugs, an arrest can be made, and that gets guns off the streets and away from criminals who have them illegally, said the former mayor.
"Fat Tony doesn't get a gun permit," Giuliani said. "The hood on the street doesn't get a permit. The gun control laws are on the books, but they don't affect anything. They are not worth anything where the criminal is concern. You got to get the gun away from him. You've got to take it away."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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