2020 Democratic presidential hopeful former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s 2015 comments on “stop and frisk” resurfaced Monday night.
The audio clip has the potential to blow apart his campaign.
From Fox News (emphasis mine):
In an audio clip of a 2015 speech, the billionaire gave to the Aspen Institute, Bloomberg acknowledged that “stop and frisk,” targeted minority “kids” who cops must throw “up against the wall” to disarm. The Aspen Times reported at the time that Bloomberg representatives asked the Institute not to distribute footage of his appearance.“Ninety-five percent of murders- murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops,” he said. “They are male, minorities, 16-25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city (inaudible). And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of people that are getting killed.”Bloomberg also said urban crime-fighting required cities to “spend the money” and “put a lot of cops in the streets,” particularly in “minority neighborhoods,” where he said the crime is. He also acknowledged the “unintended consequences” of the policy.“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 minority neighborhoods,” Bloomberg is heard saying on the recording. “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 wall and frisk them… And then they start… ‘Oh I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”
Stop and frisk allows police to “temporarily detain, question and search civilians or suspects for weapons.”
The NYPD used this policy on 685,725 people in 2011. Over 88% of those people came back innocent.
NYC still uses stop and frisk. The New York Post reported the number for 2019 jumped 22%, which is the highest since 2015. The NYPD stopped 13,459 people:
In 2019, arrests were made in about one of every three stops — with counts of robbery, petit larceny, criminal possession of a weapon and assault accounting for the majority of the charges, the data shows.Police found around 1,200 weapons — including 415 firearms — in just over 9 percent of stops, according to the report.Cops collared 14 people on murder charges last year, the data shows.Black or Hispanic people accounted for 88 percent of the people stopped last year, according to the data.
Bloomberg has addressed the policy on the campaign trail. He apologized to the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, saying he realizes he was wrong.
He stressed that all he wanted to do was reduce gun violence.
Bloomberg has been gaining among black voters after spending a quarter billion dollars on advertising. That gain came at Biden’s expense. Let’s see how this oppo research dump plays out.
Meanwhile, Trump tweeted the video with the headline that Bloomberg was a “total racist.” But the tweet was taken down quickly.
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