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FM
Former Member

The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg

His racist stop-and-frisk policy as New York mayor can’t be forgotten.

Charles M. Blow

By

Opinion Columnist

 
Michael Bloomberg at a news conference in 2013 about stop-and-frisk policies in New York City.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Let’s state some facts: Michael Rubens Bloomberg notoriously expanded stop-and-frisk in New York City to obscene proportions, violating the bodies and constitutional rights of mostly minority men and boys, and not only defended the policy, but mocked his detractors and bragged about it.

What Bloomberg did as mayor amounted to a police occupation of minority neighborhoods, a terroristic pressure campaign, with little evidence that it was accomplishing the goal of sustained, long-term crime reduction.

Nearly 90 percent of the people stopped were completely innocent. He knew that. They were the collateral damage in his crusade, black and brown bodies up against walls and down on the ground, groped in the middle of the city by strange men with guns, a vast expanse of human psychological wreckage about which he couldn’t care less.

A recording from a speech Bloomberg delivered at the Aspen Institute in 2015 underscores just how callous and cavalier he was in his thinking about this racist policy.

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“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg said. “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.”

He goes on to say: “One of the unintended consequences is, people say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana, they’re all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is.”

 
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Later he says, “The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them against the wall and frisk them.”

 

So many things to dissect here.

First, Bloomberg didn’t see individual criminals, many of whom happened to be minorities; he saw a class of criminals who were minorities. “They are male, minorities, 16 to 25.” Many of these were children.

He was articulating an explicitly race-based policy.

He spoke nonchalantly about giving these young people criminal records for marijuana, ignoring the enormous harm these criminal records cause to individuals and whole communities. And a vast majority of those people and communities were minorities.

 

As Daniel Nichanian, editor of The Appeal, wrote this week on Twitter: “Each year of Bloomberg’s 12-year mayorship, at least 50 percent of the people arrested for marijuana were black. And at least 85 percent were nonwhite each year, usually much higher. That’s tens of thousands of people each year.”

And Bloomberg defended the practice by saying that the only way to get the guns out of the kids’ hands was to throw the kids against a wall. But nearly 90 percent of these young people were completely innocent. They had done absolutely nothing wrong, let alone possess a gun.

The Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey Fagan produced a report that became part of a class-action lawsuit against the city in 2010. It found that “[s]eizures of weapons or contraband are extremely rare. Overall, guns are seized in less than 1 percent of all stops: 0.15 percent. … Contraband, which may include weapons but also includes drugs or stolen property, is seized in 1.75 percent of all stops.”

As Fagan wrote, “The N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk tactics produce rates of seizures of guns or other contraband that are no greater than would be produced simply by chance.”

Bloomberg didn’t care about any of this. He didn’t care about these innocent black and brown bodies. Somewhere in each barrel of good apples there was a bad one, and he was willing to spoil the whole batch to purge that rare bad one.

These minority boys were being hunted. Their neighborhoods were experiencing an occupation. Citizens wanted crime abatement, but they didn’t expect apartheid.

And yet in the same way that white people in New York City had turned away when Bloomberg was executing his racist policy, many Democrats — including some black ones — appear willing now to turn a blind eye to his past.

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Bloomberg is blanketing the airwaves with slick ads and glamouring liberals into amnesia and acquiescence. These liberals are then openly gaming out scenarios in which Bloomberg is the last, best option.

They don’t recognize that Bloomberg is the master of this sort of emotional manipulation. During his 2001 campaign for mayor, he ran ads that The New York Times noted focused on old crime fears.

“The scenes, set to dramatic synthesizer music punctuated by sharp blasts of percussion, come from what could well be called ‘N.Y.P.D. Bloomberg,’” The Times reported. “They seem calibrated to throw fear into the hearts of the citizenry at the thought of crime mushrooming again in a post-Giuliani New York City.”

During a campaign debate that year, Bloomberg, a Republican at the time, was asked how prevalent he believed racial profiling was in the New York Police Department. His answer is fascinating to examine in retrospect. He said: “In terms of the actuality, it is probably a very small number of police officers. Most police officers in this city work very hard. They are not racist thugs.”

But then he turned them into just that, making them part of a citywide system of racial profiling. Even the police objected. When Bloomberg was finally forced last fall to apologize for stop-and-frisk so he could run for president, Patrick Lynch, president of the city’s Police Benevolent Association, issued a blistering statement:

“Mayor Bloomberg could have saved himself this apology if he had just listened to the police officers on the street. We said in the early 2000s that the quota-driven emphasis on street stops was polluting the relationship between cops and our communities. His administration’s misguided policy inspired an anti-police movement that has made cops the target of hatred and violence, and stripped away many of the tools we had used to keep New Yorkers safe.”

In 2012, after million of stops, Bloomberg stood up in a church in Brownsville, Brooklyn, among the neighborhoods hardest hit by the policy, and declared that racial profiling was banned in the Police Department. “We will not tolerate it,” he said.

That was a Donald Trump-level lie.

The next year a federal judge ruled that the way the city used stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional because it amounted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...berg-stop-frisk.html

 

Replies sorted oldest to newest

Bloomberg did something idiot trump never does, he apologized. trump would have loved Bloomberg at the time he was for stop and frisk because trump himself is a racist.

Why could sean from the shithouse not place this article in the thread he already started with Cortez, same dam subject but I guess the plan is to flood the board with shit as he does in his bloomers.

cain
Last edited by cain
cain posted:

Bloomberg did something idiot trump never does, he apologized. trump would have loved Bloomberg at the time he was for stop and frisk because trump himself is a racist.

Why could sean from the shithouse not place this article in the thread he already started with Cortez, same dam subject but I guess the plan is to flood the board with shit as he does in his bloomers.

Ohhh my, ohhhh my, ohhhh my .....

He does that all the time ? 

FM

The message that Democrats are sending to Blacks is that they must stand down and accept a blatantly racist candidate. This will backfire on them. Shame on the Democratic Party. 

FM
Sean posted:

What a disgrace and insult to blacks and immigrants !!!!!!!!

images-10

Trump endorsed this policy and actually declared so in his debate with HC. They both agreed with this racist policy designed and deployed by Giuliani. 

FM
Sean posted:

The message that Democrats are sending to Blacks is that they must stand down and accept a blatantly racist candidate. This will backfire on them. Shame on the Democratic Party. 

Stop and Frisk is not a democratic policy plus blacks are unlike you who feed off the rabid agit prop from fox news and cannot deploy one brain cell to your own views.

FM

A drunkard Piwari sucking fool who has never made a valuable contribution to society or any political party and who called Shuman a game changer in Guyanese politics comes here with a lack of credibility and attempts to further disgrace himself by lecturing others !

Bai put that bottle away. 

FM
Sean posted:

A drunkard Piwari sucking fool who has never made a valuable contribution to society or any political party and who called Shuman a game changer in Guyanese politics comes here with a lack of credibility and attempts to further disgrace himself by lecturing others !

Bai put that bottle away. 

Bai Sean by the Koka Dam, why are you degrading the people? I met some of the Amerindians. They are decent people, better than some coolies. We all have a few bad ones in our midst. Those are the very people who will rest power from Granger.

FM

I am not degrading the people. I am addressing that drunkard fool who comes here attacking and who just cannot have a civil conversation. Read his post written in a drunken stupor. Alcohol has eroded his brain cells.

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Sean posted:

I am not degrading the people. I am addressing that drunkard fool who comes here attacking and who just cannot have a civil conversation. 

We all have our opinions. The Amerindians are more peaceful people. Any violence is limited to their communities. You don't see them in the streets of the cities. Leve the people to their culture.

FM

Bai, wat rass you na get. I am addressing the drunkard D2. I love Amerindians, they are PPP best friend. 

D2 cannot have a civil conversation without personally attacking. 

FM
Last edited by Former Member
Sean posted:

A drunkard Piwari sucking fool who has never made a valuable contribution to society or any political party and who called Shuman a game changer in Guyanese politics comes here with a lack of credibility and attempts to further disgrace himself by lecturing others !

Bai put that bottle away. 

Now that is your come back to a statement of fact? Do u know me? I on the other hand know you, where you live, and the bullshit tale  you sell that  you are some magnate is only in your head. Delusions come easy to fools. The fact remains you are a nit, a callow, shallow fool with pretensions above your station.

The bottle as a reference is local to you not me. It is clear my thoughts are succinct, grounded and original. Being a nasty low life you cannot help but being a racist.

And what if I called shuman a game changer? He has spawned a mushroom sprouting of small parties all joined together against the tribal powers and if good sense among the people takes the day they will win a couple of seats and save  us from the two corrupt predators.

Now go skulk in your corner and pretend you are sir Lancelot of the lake and king Midas to boot. It will not make it so.

FM
Last edited by Former Member
sSean posted:

Bai, wat rass you na get. I am addressing the drunkard D2. I love Amerindians, they are PPP best friend. 

D2 cannot have a civil conversation without personally attacking. 

What do you know of civil conversation? It is mere stilted diatribe stolen whole cloth from whatever conservative site from which you decide to purloin it. You as a PPP supporter demeans the party. As a Trump supporter you do fit the bill as a misogynist, racist puss.u grabber with no brains. 

FM

Sean you need any help to cross the street? the couple of posts you made got me worried about your Mental state. It's a lovely day , bright sunshine but cool, I suggest go for a walk more so it's Valentine  take the lady for nice lunch. 

 There is a lot more than GNI and politics. I am taking my lady for a beautiful lunch and a glass of wine. 

K

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