Michael Bloomberg Apologizes for Stop-and-Frisk

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The first stop on Michael Bloomberg’s slow train to presidential candidacy was an apology.

On Sunday, the former New York City mayor stood in front of the audience at the Christian Cultural Center, a predominantly black megachurch in Brooklyn, and reversed his position on stop-and-frisk policing, once a foundational element of his leadership legacy.

“I was wrong,” Bloomberg said. “And I am sorry.”

Bloomberg has up until now stubbornly defended the aggressive practice, one that allowed the police to turn Black and brown neighborhoods—like the one that is home to the Christian Cultural Center—into hunting grounds. He continued to defend it even after the practice was ruled by federal court Judge Shira Scheindlin to be a form of racial discrimination and therefore unconstitutional.

His apology was also a reversal of his own brand of political authenticity.

“It’s just not going to happen on a national level for somebody like me starting where I am unless I was willing to change all my views and go on what CNN called an apology tour,” Bloomberg said when asked about his own potential candidacy at an executive conference last March.

It looks like winning the Black vote is on everyone’s to-do list.

Regardless of his political ambition, Bloomberg’s quest is an important opportunity to understand how popular ideas have helped to destroy communities of color.

CityLab has an excellent breakdown of the damage the policy did back when it “looked like New York City police were drunk on stop-and-frisk”:

Between January 2004 and June 2012, the NYPD conducted over 4.4 million stops, over half (52%) of which were for African Americans compared to 10% for whites.
The number of stops more than doubled from 314,000 in 2004 to 686,000 in 2011, at the peak of New York City’s stop-and-frisk regime. No actual law enforcement action was taken in 88% of those cases.
People were frisked in 52% of those stops, but a weapon was found in only 1.5% of those cases.
Police used force against African Americans in 23% of those stops compared to 17% of the stops of whites.
In 2013, African Americans and Latinos were stopped-and-frisked more often than whites, 60.1% vs 46.7%, but weapons were almost twice as likely to be found on whites than Blacks or Latinos.

The stories of the 685,724 people who were stopped in 2011 have even been memorably captured by the @stopandfrisk Twitter bot. (“Other” and “furtive movements” were very popular rationales for harassment back in the day.)

Charles Blow, opinion columnist for the New York Times was unsparing in his assessment of the former mayor’s candidacy.

“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,” he says. “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.”

I do not have the heart to ask the family of Kalief Browder what they think of the mayor’s change of heart.

Four years after Judge Scheindlin’s ruling, she observed that police stops were down 96%. And yet, she said, “the enormous decrease in stops has clearly not caused an upsurge in crime despite alarmist predictions by our former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelley.” By 2018, New York City recorded the lowest number of homicides in nearly 70 years.

While police stops are down significantly, they still disproportionately affect people of color.

Between 2014 and 2017, reports the ACLU of New York, young Black and Latino boys and men between the ages of 14 and 24 comprised 38% of police stops, and yet are only 5% percent of the city’s population.

Some 80% of them hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet, they got swept into a terrifying, dangerous, and expensive system that likely destroyed their lives.

Which begs a bigger question: Who is going to apologize to them?

Ellen McGirt

@ellmcgirt

[email protected]

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Tamara El-Waylly helps write and produce raceAhead.