Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich (pictured) appeared on “Face the Nation,” applauding former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg for the policing strategies they help put in place. The former failed Republican presidential candidate also suggested that President Barack Obama also fueled racial tensions in this country and that the former mayors had “saved” African-Americans lives more than anyone else by ordering the police department to profile Blacks in the city.
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Gingrich sat down with the show’s host, Bob Schieffer, to discuss how when law enforcement tells a young person to “stop,” they should obey without question. Gingrich took his usual anti-Obama stance as he went on to pick apart the President stating, “You have the first African-American president, you have an African-American attorney general six years in to their effort,” he opined. “We are in some ways further apart, not closer together. That’s a tragic failure of leadership at the very top.”
“Are you somehow saying this is the fault of Barack Obama?” Schieffer laughingly chimed in.
“I’m saying the President uses a lot of his time using language which is divisive, automatically jumps to conclusions about things he doesn’t know,” Gingrich replied. “I’m saying the attorney general has clearly given speeches which are divisive. And I’m just suggesting to you, this is just a tragic lost opportunity, that you would think that six years in to the first African-American President, there would be a sense in the community of us coming closer together. That hasn’t happened.”
Gingrich then went on to praise the polarizing and controversial police tactics that were a hallmark under both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. “Let me just remind you, the two people who have done the most to save African-American lives in New York City were Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, their [stop and frisk] policing techniques, led by Chief William Bratton who invented them, actually have saved thousands of lives by focusing on crime in a very intelligent way.” Gingrich then suggested that the unconstitutional tactic be adopted in the crime-ridden city of Chicago.
The invasive stop-and-frisk policing tactic was deemed unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court Judge in 2013 and was referred to as a form of “indirect racial profiling” because it targeted racially defined groups, resulting in the disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of tens of thousands of Blacks and Hispanics while the city’s highest officials “turned a blind eye.”
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