Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones (R) took to Twitter on Monday in support of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R), who suggested that white police officers are needed to prevent black-on-black crime.
Jones began tweeting on the topic just hours before a Missouri grand jury was expected to announce its decision on whether to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in August. The incident set off weeks of protests with tension between demonstrators and police this summer.
Appearing on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Giuliani said the media hadn’t focused enough on black-on-black crime, which he claimed was responsible for the presence of more white police officers in black communities.
Jones tweeted Monday:
Michael Eric Dyson, who also appeared on "Meet The Press" with Giuliani, immediately disagreed with the former mayor on Sunday.
"First of all, most black people who commit crimes against other black people go to jail," he said. "Number two, they are not sworn by the police department as an agent of the state to uphold the law. So in both cases, that's a false equivalency that the mayor has drawn. ... Black people who kill black people go to jail. White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail."
On Monday, Jones also retweeted a quote suggesting that black elites were a bigger threat to the black community than the Ku Klux Klan. The tweet was originally from an account linked to Unhyphenated America, which says on its website that it opposes "Leftist" policies because they have "disproportionately damaged minority families."
The tweet included a link to a Breitbart News story that focused on black leaders' support for President Barack Obama’s immigration executive action, but quoted a U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner saying that the order could actually hurt black workers.