NEWT GINGRICH SOUNDS OFF ON THE DIVIDE BETWEEN COPS AND BLACKS

Gingrich says that despite us having the first black president and first black attorney general, whites and blacks are further apart than before Obama and Holder took office

Newt Gingrich, a frequent guest on TV news shows, appeared on Sunday’s CBS Face the Nation. After host Bob Schieffer had finished interviewing Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) on the divide between the police and the black community, he brought on Gingrich.

From the Face the Nation transcript:

SCHIEFFER: Next up, former speaker of the House and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. He is also a CNN contributor.

I just want to get the Republican take on what we have been hearing and what we have been talking about this morning.

GINGRICH: Well, look, first of all, I think we do need criminal justice reform. We have seen people like Rick Perry in Texas and Nathan Deal, the governor of Georgia, do it.

The system doesn't work right. We have people locked up who shouldn't be. We tear apart communities that need young men to be able to go back home. So, I think we need serious hearings at the federal level. Second, there has to be some recognition -- and this will probably get me in trouble -- young people should be told, when a policeman tells you to stop, stop.

There's a dual requirement here. You have to first African- American president. You have an African-American attorney general. And six years into their effort, we're in some ways further apart, not closer together. That's a tragic failure of leadership at the very top.

You have -- the community has to respect the police. And the police have to respect the community. And both have failed.

SCHIEFFER: Well, are you somehow saying that this is the fault of Barack Obama?

GINGRICH: I'm saying that the president spends a lot of his time using language which is divisive, automatically jumps to conclusions about things he doesn't know. I'm saying the attorney general clearly has given speeches that are divisive. And I'm just suggesting to you this is a tragic lost opportunity. You would think that six years into the first African- American president, there would be a sense in the community of us coming closer together. That hasn't happened.

And 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 policing techniques, led by Chief Bratton, who invented them, actually have saved thousands of lives by focusing on crime in a very intelligent way.

And, candidly, if Chicago were being as aggressive about it as New York, you would be saving hundreds of African-American lives a year in Chicago.