Today in the New York Times, columnist Charles Blow wrote a scathing critique of Bloomberg, based on his “stop and frisk” policy.
He wrote:
Let me plant the stake now: No black person — or Hispanic person or ally of people of color — should ever even consider voting for Michael Bloomberg in the primary. His expansion of the notoriously racist stop-and-frisk program in New York, which swept up millions of innocent New Yorkers, primarily young black and Hispanic men, is a complete and nonnegotiable deal killer.
Stop-and-frisk, pushed as a way to get guns and other contraband off the streets, became nothing short of a massive, enduring, city-sanctioned system of racial terror…
In 2002, the first year Bloomberg was mayor, 97,296 of these stops were recorded. They surged during Bloomberg’s tenure to a peak of 685,724 stops in 2011, near the end of his third term. Nearly 90 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked were innocent of any wrongdoing.
A New York Times analysis of stops on “eight odd blocks” in the overwhelmingly black neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn found close to 52,000 stops over four years, which averaged out to “nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks.”
In 2009, there were more than 580,000 stop-and-frisks, a record at the time. Of those stopped, 55 percent were black, 32 percent Hispanic and only 10 percent white. Most were young, and almost all were male. Eighty-eight percent were innocent. For reference, according to the Census Bureau, there were about 300,000 black men between the ages of 13 and 34 living in the city that year.
Not only that, but those who were stopped had their names entered into a comprehensive police database, even if they were never accused of committing a crime. As Donna Lieberman, then the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in 2010, the database became a place “where millions of completely innocent, predominantly black and Latinos have been turned into permanent police suspects.”
The state outlawed the keeping of these electronic records on the innocent, over the strong objections of Bloomberg and his police chief…
Bloomberg’s crime argument was dubious. 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…”
A federal judge ruled in 2013 that New York’s stop-and-frisk tactics violated the constitutional rights of racial minorities, calling it a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”
Yet, a little over a month before that ruling, Bloomberg said on a radio show, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
It is Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policy that explains Republicans wanting an opportunity to
vote for a person like him in the Democratic primary. The Republican primary will have a single candidate, Trump. Why waste a vote there?
I’d support this move by Bloomberg. I LOVE Borowitz!! [Remember it’s satire.]
………………………….
From newyorker.com: Bloomberg Offers Trump Ten Billion Dollars to Leave White House by End of Day
The former New York City mayor also told Trump that he would cover the moving expenses of Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Kellyanne Conway.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg upended the 2020 Presidential race on Friday by offering Donald J. Trump ten billion dollars to leave the White House by the end of the day.
“I will deposit ten billion dollars into your account in Moscow, Riyadh, or wherever you do your banking these days,” Bloomberg announced. “All you have to do is go.”
In addition to the ten-billion-dollar offer, Bloomberg told Trump that he would cover the moving expenses of Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, and any other associates “that you haven’t already gotten rid of.”…
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/bloomberg-offers-trump-ten-billion-dollars-to-leave-white-house-by-end-of-day
Someone suggested on this blog that the best thing Bloomberg could do for the country would be to buy FOX News.
Exactly. Bloomerg & Tom Styer could buy Fox News, the Wall St Journal & Sinclair Media.That would be a real contribution to the country.
Campbell Brown is the news editor of Facebook. Campbell Brown also runs The 74. The 74 is opposed to certain Democratic candidates.
Bloomberg’s family foundation also gave The 74 half a million dollars:
Click to access 205602483_201712_990PF.pdf
I hope no one is relying on Facebook to curate their news on the Democratic primary. I would just suggest finding another source.
“… in the primary.” Ah, yes, but voting for a racist president in the general is perfectly fine.
And don’t tell me that there’s no choice because Trump is worse. Over 40% of the country identifies as independent. We shouldn’t be stuck with either of the minority parties.
Any one of the Democrats running for the nomination is preferable to Trump.
Overall, yes, even most Republicans are preferable to Trump. Still sorta glad Jeb isn’t president, though. Still in many ways glad to, for example, have DeVos instead of Duncan. I’m not ready to start girding up to vote for an arch enemy like Bloomberg or Booker. It’s difficult for a cognizant teacher to vote for someone who has ruined public education and destroyed the lives of teachers. I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it. Go Bernie! Go Elizabeth!
Dienne disagrees with Trudeau who said you don’t compare a candidate to God almighty, you compare him/her to the opposing candidate.
Bill de Blasio ended stop and frisk, despite lots of white people insisting that he could not because crime would go up.
de Blasio also started universal pre-k, which has helped almost 70,000 four year olds each year. And he tried to limit giveaways to charters, despite being ordered to give them what they want by the state. (Eva Moskowitz is still making her parents protest at City Hall about that every few months).
But, according to the type of thinking that dienne77 is saying, there is no difference between Bloomberg winning another term and de Blasio because they are both corporate tools and if she lived in NYC I assume she would have been actively campaigning against de Blasio.
There is something very racist about those who pretend they care about racism while they insist that it doesn’t matter if Trump wins because the Democrat is just as racist. They seem to be professing a concern about racism that they don’t really believe as they are more than willing to have a racist Republican President win as long as it prevents a Democrat from winning.
Despite all the criticisms of de Blasio, NYC is MUCH better off with him than Bloomberg. And only those who think the end of stop and frisk is unimportant would say otherwise.
A federal judge ended stop-and-frisk
NYC public school parent
NYC may be better off without stop and frisk. But that does not mean that the policies of any of the last 3 mayors are responsible for the dramatic decline in crime we have seen.
Diane,
de Blasio made stop and frisk a campaign issue and one of the first thing he did (his very first month in office) was to drop the Bloomberg Administrations legal appeal of that judge’s decision. Maybe Bloomberg would have won that appeal and it would have been easy for a candidate to say he was just waiting until the appeals process completed. By saying “we are dropping the appeal”, de Blasio made it clear that the buck stopped with him.
I went back to read the news stories from January 2014 – de Blasio’s first month in office when under his orders the city dropped Bloomberg’s appeal — and all the stories included “Now, some New Yorkers are worried about a possible rise in crime..”
If there had been any rise in crime, de Blasio would have been blamed and he knew it but was willing to do it anyway because he believed it was the right thing to do.
Joel,
You are right that there are many factors leading to the rise or decline in crime. But that has nothing to do with the political courage it took for de Blasio to put himself on the line when any rise in crime would have absolutely been blamed on him for ending stop and frisk.
It was just like when de Blasio and his wife spent the day visiting the restaurant and bowling alley where the doctor with ebola had spent the previous day. It went a long way to reassuring the public that the panic over Ebola that Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie were trying to stoke was wrong. And it was a political risk (as proven by the completely opposite response of those two political hacks).
My point that even if there are legitimate reasons to be disappointed or angry at some of de Blasio’s policy choices, anyone who believes that there was no difference between having 4 more years of Bloomberg or de Blasio is wrong.
It’s just amusing to me that anyone who is NOT a devotee of Donald Trump cannot run as a Republican, so end up in the Democratic column.
Donald Trump is one person. How in the heck did this happen, that he swallowed an entire US political party? It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.
Bloomberg is clearly a Republican. Yet. He is not Donald Trump or an acolyte of Donald Trump so he therefore defaults to the Democrats?
I believe Bloomberg was a Democrat his whole life before he first ran for NYC Mayor in 2001. He switched to Republican for that election, presumably because it gave him a straight path to the general election, avoiding a crowded primary fight (and the Dem primary is usually effectively the election that really counts in NYC). After that, he switched to Independent, and I guess he’s switched back to Democrat more recently.
Bloomberg has not mentioned what party he belongs to. A few years ago, he promoted something called “No Labels, meaning running without a party.
He re-registered as a Democrat last year.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/former-nyc-mayor-mike-bloomberg-re-registers-democrat-n918441
Party means nothing to Mike. He will do what best serves his interests.
Mayor Bloomberg made his politics clear when he embraced the Republican National Convention when it came to NYC in 2004. Bloomberg spoke at the convention and what’s worse, Bloomberg oversaw the rounding up of peaceful protestors (and innocent bystanders) just to please the Republicans.
Not to mention, Bloomberg’s past history of blatant sexism is appalling. The way we can tell that Bloomberg is really a Republican is that the media has given him a free pass for doing things that no Democrat would get away with. Bloomberg is closest to Trump in the fact he has made some of the most blatant sexist and offensive remarks about women — and his company has been sued by multiple women — but it has always been minimized as not a big deal. No Democrat would get away with even 1/10th of the things Bloomberg has done, so if he is a “real” Democrat, he would be forced to step down should he decide to run.
Bloomberg picks a party that serves his personal interests & his class.
No Labels is a Trojan Horse organization pretending to be a grassroots political party. They are comprised of a slick group of insiders who claimed bipartisanship is the only way to get things done for the country.
Members came from Congress, the Senate, Chamber of Commerce/Wall St friendly Democrats and Republicans. What they wanted done was gutting social security, ending public pensions, wiping the deficit, and other republican policies.
No Labels is a perfect fit for him.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-slick-no-labels-effor_b_1678389
Back in early 2016, Trump seemed like a joke. It could be Putin who scares Trump’s challengers.
The problem with this piece is only focusing on stop and frisk instead of including all the other crap Bloomberg did. Like is policies in destroying public ed with attack on kids of color by closing their schools and replacing them with even more segregated charters. But Blow may support that for all we know.
Norm, different people have different reasons not to like Bloomberg. Charles Blow stated his. Why don’t you write about Bloomberg’s role in education in NYC, about which he boasts now?