Rudy Giuliani yesterday said his comments about the city potentially going in the “wrong” direction were “historical” fact, and said some supporters of Democratic mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson called them racialized “because they’re losing.”
The “comments were accurate,” Giuliani told The Post, suggesting they didn’t refer simply to the 1990s but also to 2001, when he was leaving office and Mayor Bloomberg took charge.
“There are books that have been written about this, about how difficult things were, how bad the city was, about how a lot of the programs I started . . . turned the city around,” he said, adding they were also about “the concerns that I had when I was mayor that we [not] go back to the old Democratic political machine.”
The flap came after Giuliani, stumping with Bloomberg, told a legislative breakfast among Hasidic Jews in Borough Park that he worried about the city going back “to the way it was before 1993 — and you know exactly what I’m talking about.” He also cited fears of “this community.”
That was blasted as coded language meant to stoke fear and evoke memories of the Crown Heights riots between African-Americans and Hasidic Jews during Mayor David Dinkins’ term.
“I think it is exceedingly unfortunate that Rudy made those comments in the particular community in which he made those remarks, it’s sad,” Dinkins told The Post, adding, “He seems to forget that crime started to go down in 1991 under me and [then-Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly.”
Bloomberg seemed to distance himself from the comments while not specifically denouncing them, saying he tries to “lower the temperature.”