Sandy MaloneNew York, NY – Recently declared Presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is facing harsh criticism after video surfaced of him defending the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) controversial former “stop-and-frisk” policy under his mayoral administration (video below).
The remarks – which then-Mayor Bloomberg largely echoed when he appealed a judge’s ruling that “stop-and-frisk” violated civil rights – were made to a mostly-white audience at The Aspen Institute in 2015, FOX News reported.
The Aspen Times reported at the time that Bloomberg’s people asked The Aspen Institute not to publicly release video of his speech, but newly released audio has quickly gone viral.
“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg explained. “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America.”
“And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people getting killed,” he added. “The first thing you need to do to help that group is keep them both alive.”
In his speech, Bloomberg said minority young men figured they were going to die anyway so didn’t take trying to stay alive seriously.
“It is a joke to have a gun, it’s a joke to pull the trigger,” he claimed. “And in New York, before Giuliani got elected we had 2,300 murders. When he left office that was down to 660 murders, when I left office it was down to 333 murders a year, and it was all the same group.”
The then-mayor very clearly blamed the victims for their own murders in his speech.
“No one in New York gets murdered. If you get murdered, the first thing we want to do is ‘What were you selling?’ or ‘Who were your family members?’ There is no other kind of murder, whatsoever,” Bloomberg added.
He said a lot of people didn’t understand or like that minorities were targeted by NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” but said it was important and other cities failed by not targeting young minorities to get the guns off the streets.
“You have to spend money on your police department,” Bloomberg told The Aspen Institute. “A lot of people don’t like the fact that is what you do, that that is what stop and frisk is all about.”
He also had a very clear explanation for racial profiling in 2015.
“People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana, they’re all minorities,” he said. “Yes, that’s true, why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true, and why we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the first thing we can do for people is stop them from getting killed.”
“We did a calculation on how many people would have been dead if we hadn’t brought down the murder rate and gotten guns off the street. And the way you got the guns out of the kids’ hands was to throw them against the wall and frisk them,” Bloomberg said. “They say, ‘Oh I don’t want to get caught,’ so they don’t bring the gun. They may still have the gun but they leave it at home.”
Bloomberg delivered substantially the same message two years earlier when he challenged a court’s ruling that “stop-and-frisk” was unconstitutional and unfairly targeted minorities in 2013, CBS News reported at the time.
“And there is just no question that stop-question-frisk has saved countless lives. And we know that most of those lives saved, based on the statistics, have been black and Hispanic young men,” he said at the time.
“They just keep saying ‘oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be,” Bloomberg continued. “But it’s not a disproportionate of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the mur – in that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little.”
The newest candidate to enter the Democratic Presidential primary field has apologized for his previous support for “stop-and-frisk” but said that he did it with the best intentions at the time, FOX News reported.
“Over time I’ve come to understand something that I’ve long struggled to admit to myself,” Bloomberg said at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. “I got something important wrong. I got something important really wrong.”
“Today, I want you to know that I realize that back then I was wrong,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
Listen to Bloomberg’s remarks to The Aspen Institute here below: