This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," April 28, 2015. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: As we're watching all of this, I want to bring in former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is just literally shaking his head. A little lightweight bottle throwing, no big deal that's going on.
But more importantly, I want to go back to yesterday. I have known you and I watched you take control of New York City. And when you took control of the city, you had a rule. It was one bottle is thrown, one rock is thrown, those people are arrested immediately.
Yesterday, what we saw in Baltimore was the exact opposite, police in retreat. They kept backing up and backing up, empowering those people that were attacking them!
RUDY GIULIANI, R-FMR. NEW YORK CITY MAYOR: Yes, I don't understand how 20 -- you know, 20 years later, 15 years later, we're still making the same mistakes. I took over New York City after there had been two riots, four days each, in the last four years, including a pogrom in Crown Heights, where Jewish people were killed, a Jewish boy was killed and then other Jewish people beaten up.
And I vowed that there'd be no riots while I was mayor. You're just not going to get to riot in my city. And I read the report that was done by Governor Cuomo of the things that were done wrong, and the biggest thing that was done wrong was the cooling-off period, giving them a period of time to just vent, kind of like what the mayor here said, something like that.
HANNITY: Well, the mayor said she wanted to give them space to destroy.
GIULIANI: Well, I think she would -- I think she'd want to probably take that statement back now. But...
HANNITY: Well, she denies she said it, but the reality is, she did say it. And this was happening -- this happened on Saturday at Camden Yards, right outside where the Orioles play.
GIULIANI: Yes. I mean, you can't create a cooling-off period for rioters. So here is the rule I had with my police department and my police commissioner. First rock, get arrested. Second rock, get arrested. Third -- breaking of a window, you get arrested. We always had more than enough police. If we didn't show them all, we hid them. So if my police commissioner would tell me, I need 1,000 people to contain this demonstration, I would give them 2,000.
HANNITY: And -- and -- but you'd also -- strategically, you'd put 1,000 up front, and then you'd have a 1,000 reinforcements...
(CROSSTALK)
GIULIANI: ... hidden...
HANNITY: All over the place.
GIULIANI: ... hidden in places where we thought we were going to direct -- we were going to direct them.
HANNITY: Right.
GIULIANI: You protect the buildings. As a consequence, I had eight years of no riots after two riots in four years.
HANNITY: Because they knew better! They learned their lesson.
(CROSSTALK)
GIULIANI: I also had a community in New York called Washington Heights that had a terrible riot in 1992 and it has a blackout in 1999.
(CROSSTALK)
GIULIANI: ... there wasn't a single crime committed that night.
HANNITY: Amazing!
GIULIANI: That community went from being a very high-crime community to being a good community. Now, I would ask all those politicians you saw there talking about the terrible conditions...
HANNITY: Economic conditions...
(CROSSTALK)
GIULIANI: ... economic conditions...
HANNITY: Economic development, yes.
GIULIANI: They've been in charge of Baltimore for the last 30 years.
HANNITY: This is a...
GIULIANI: This is a Democratic city.
HANNITY: Since 1939!
GIULIANI: O'Malley was the mayor for eight years, right? O'Malley was the governor for eight years. Now, if those people are suffering from economic depravation, then what the heck have they done? What has Elijah Cummings done for his city that he's all complaining about? What has that state senator done for the city? What kind of economic development have they done? Did they do for that city what I did for Harlem or what I did for Brooklyn? You go take a look at Brooklyn today, and look at it after the things that I did and Mike Bloomberg did. Go take a look at Harlem today after the economic development...
HANNITY: Huge!
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: ... because we're running up on the clock here, I want to ask you this. Saturday night they saw this was coming. They did nothing on Sunday. Yesterday afternoon, early they saw the rocks being thrown at the officers and the officers in retreat. They didn't even put a curfew in effect last night. They didn't call in the National Guard last night.
GIULIANI: It's the cooling-off period. Let them vent. Let them vent. It's totally insane.
HANNITY: Do you see what's going on tonight that should have happened last night?
GIULIANI: I'll tell you another thing. When it got to be 10:00, that's when they should have been taken off the street. We shouldn't be at 10:30 working on this. When I said a demonstration was going to end at 4:00, and I'm thinking of one in particular, the Million Man march when ended up being the 20,000 man march, and the court gave them to 4:00 in the afternoon. About 10 minutes before the head of the demonstration came over to one of my police and said can I get a little more time. The answer was no, and it ended. It ended at 4:00. We don't draw lines and back off.
HANNITY: Mr. Mayor, thank you. Lessons to be learned from what you did in New York.
Content and Programming Copyright 2015 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2015 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox