Michael Bloomberg has been rising in polls, but the former New York City mayor is now coming under fire over newly surfaced audio in which he defended his stop-and-frisk policy. But the person in the audio sounds a lot more like the real and unapologetic Bloomberg that Democrats need in the presidential primary.
The audio was posted Monday on Twitter by liberal commentator Benjamin Dixon, and it purports to be a clip of Bloomberg speaking at a 2015 conference about the effects stop and frisk had on minorities.
He says in the clip that the vast majority of murder suspects and murder victims fit one description. “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops,” he says. “They are male, minorities, 16 to 25.” He also says it’s one of the “unintended consequences” that police then apprehend a disproportionate number of minorities for marijuana-related offenses but that it’s necessary to place more cops in minority-dense neighborhoods because “that’s where the real crime is.”
Bloomberg has since backed away from the policy, which he had previously championed for years on end. Speaking in November at a black church in New York, Bloomberg apologized for the policy he had instituted while running the city.
“I got something important really wrong,” he said. “I didn’t understand that back then — the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities. I was totally focused on saving lives, but as we know, good intentions aren’t good enough.”
Whether he’s really sorry is beside the point. He knows that in order to win the party’s nomination, he’ll have to pledge allegiance to the social justice mob that now runs it.
Stop and frisk allowed police officers to target crime-heavy areas in New York by stopping and questioning individuals whom authorities might suspect of wrongdoing. The theory was that crime rates would fall in areas where people know at any moment they might be apprehended.
In 2013, a federal judge ruled against the policy, which liberals said unfairly targeted minorities. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio formally ended it when he was elected.
But there’s evidence that it worked. The number of annual murders in New York City peaked at 2,245 in 1990. After a precipitous drop during the Rudy Giuliani era, many questioned how much lower the number could go. Yet in 2001, the year before Bloomberg became mayor, there were 649 homicides — and that number had dropped to 335 by 2013, his final year in office.
Liberals like to point out that the number of murders continued to remain historically low after de Blasio phased out the policy. Under his leadership, murders have ranged from 292 to 352 annually. But stop and frisk was a key part of a range of policies that helped dramatically bring down crime in New York City over the long term. This can still be true, even if it turned out that the policy didn’t need to remain in place forever or be used as widely.
Critics don’t know what murder rates would have been like had it never been implemented in the first place, nor do we know whether the number of murders would have declined more significantly had it still been employed but more sparingly. Even the liberal Daily News reported in 2014 that after East New York and Brownsville, “two of the city’s toughest precincts,” saw stops in those areas plummet, the number of shootings spiked.
Bloomberg has a compelling case to make that as mayor, he made public safety, for both whites and minorities, his biggest priority and used every tool at his disposal to cut the number of murders nearly in half as mayor. Bring back the Bloomberg in that 2015 audio. He cared more about saving minority lives than winning an election.
