Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday and said the black community needs to take more responsibility for their role in police violence rather than always shifting the blame to police officers.

A research poll was presented that indicated a large majority of blacks who say they are treated less fairly by police than whites. Wallace asked, "Do you think that blacks have a legitimate complaint about racial discrimination by police in their communities?"

Giuliani replied:

Yes, I do. I do believe that there is more interaction and more unfair interaction among police officers, white and black, in the black community than in the white community. And I think some of that responsibility is on the police department and on police departments to train their police officers better and to make their police departments much more diversified.

But I think just as much, if not more, responsibility is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community. It's because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society.

When he was mayor, Giuliani explained that police were assigned to areas with high murder rates, not to areas based on race. "If I had put all my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem," he said, "thousands and thousands more blacks would have been killed during the eight years that I was mayor."

Wallace turned to the case of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy from Cleveland, Ohio, who was recently killed by police for waving a realistic-looking plastic pellet gun. Wallace wondered if this was the type of situation that is causing the black community to complain that cops have "a hair trigger" against them.

Giuliani agreed that in individual cases, there are those situations that end in unjustified shootings. "But," he says, "you have to put it in proper context." He added:

Why is it happening? Why is it happening more often in the black community? And doesn't it actually, logically make sense that it's going to happen more often in the community where there is five, six, seven, eight, nine times more violence than in another community?

The problem stems from both sides, Giuliani explained. He went on to say that he is behind the president, who called for better training for police officers. But he insists that better trained police are just one side of the story:

This is not a one-sided story and it is presented, always, as a one-sided story and that is exceedingly unfair.

Similar comments uttered by Giuliani during last Sunday's Meet the Press brought him charges of harboring white supremacist thoughts.

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