Hours after a national poll showed Michael Bloomberg gaining among black voters, a 2015 video surfaced in which Bloomberg made troubling comments about racial profiling and how it affected New York’s stop-and-frisk policy.
“Ninety-five percent of your murders, murderers and murder victims, fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg said, according to the audio. “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. “They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city. And that’s where the real crime is.”
He continued, “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. You want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets. Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods. So one of the unintended consequences is people say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”
Bloomberg’s campaign has not yet commented on the audio, which appears to be taken from a speech Bloomberg made at a 2015 Aspen Institute conference. But reporting at the time of the speech does seem to confirm that Bloomberg did, in fact, say these things — and that he then tried to cover it up.
Bloomberg’s representatives asked the Aspen Institute not to distribute footage of his appearance, according to a 2015 report by the Aspen Times. The Aspen Institute and GrassRoots TV, the organization that filmed the appearance, agreed to respect Bloomberg’s wishes but noted that Bloomberg “did not give a reason, nor did we have any reason to ask for one.”
The audio is also substantiated by past comments Bloomberg has made. In a radio interview, for example, Bloomberg defended New York’s stop and frisk policy and argued that if anything, “we disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little.”
There’s a lot that can and should be said about Bloomberg’s comments. First, the stop-and-frisk policy Bloomberg was advocating for was of questionable necessity. When New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio did away with the policy a few years ago, many conservatives expressed concern that de Blasio was effectively handicapping the city’s law enforcement. But as National Review’s Kyle Smith pointed out, crime in the city continued to decrease significantly — even without stop and frisk.
And it should go without saying that Bloomberg is engaging in deliberate racial profiling and that this is wrong and shameful. This mindset should give any reasonable person pause, and it should call into question Bloomberg’s ability to lead a diverse country that is already divided.
With that said, the timing of when this audio was released reveals something about the Democratic Party and the war for the black vote among its presidential candidates. Just yesterday, Bloomberg had shot up to second among black voters at 22%, behind Joe Biden at 27%. Biden has long been considered the favorite among black voters, but Bloomberg’s sudden spike suggested that this could change. We don’t know who released the audio of Bloomberg’s 2015 comments, but it’s quite possible it came from another Democratic camp.
The internal Democratic battle for the black vote doesn’t bode well for the party or its nominee. Several of the presidential candidates are already struggling to win over black voters, namely, Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders. (Buttigieg’s recent campaign events among black voters reveal that he’s still struggling.) Meanwhile, black support for President Trump remains stable.
Trump won’t win a majority of the black vote, but he doesn’t need to. In 2016, Trump was elected despite winning just 8% of the voting bloc. Were he to chip away, it would make his task even easier. At 20%, the White House would likely be out of reach for any Democrat. Bloomberg’s disturbing history, Buttigieg’s ineptitude, and Biden’s collapsing campaign are making it that much easier for Trump to do just that.
