Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign said that he regrets the New York Police Department’s controversial use of stop-and-frisk while he was Mayor of New York City and that he has realized the impact the technique had on communities of color.
“Mike has apologized for not fully understanding the full impact the NYPD’s practice of stop-and-frisk had on black and brown communities and I really think that the mark of a leader is admitting the mistakes you made, and so he did that,” Bloomberg’s senior national spokesperson Sabrina Singh told Boston Public Radio on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, criticism of Bloomberg's embrace of the technique renewed after a 2015 audio recording of him defending stop-and-frisk re-surfaced. In the recording, Bloomberg can be heard saying that a majority of murderers are young males of color, and that to decrease crime it is necessary to deploy the police in predominantly minority neighborhoods.
“95 percent of your murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 16 to 25,” Bloomberg can be heard saying. “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. So, you want to spend the money on a lot of cops on the street. Put those cops where the crime is, which means minority neighborhoods.”
Prior to officially entering the 2020 race, Bloomberg apologized for the use of stop-and-frisk during a speech in Brooklyn in November. Upon the release of the video, a majority of Bloomberg’s opponents in the Democratic race did not comment on it, however, fellow billionaire and businessman Tom Steyer said Bloomberg should disavow the comments.
