Mike 'Apology Tour' Bloomberg Used To Argue That The NYPD Stopped White People 'Too Much'

Former mayor and likely 2020 presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg told parishioners at the Christian Cultural Center in East New York on Sunday that he "got something important really wrong” when it came to his unwavering support for the NYPD stopping and frisking millions of innocent black and Hispanic New Yorkers. "I realize back then I was wrong, and I'm sorry,” Bloomberg said. "Our main focus was saving lives. The fact is far too many people were being stopped while we tried to do that.”

But before the billionaire hits the next stop on his self-prophesied white male “apology tour,” it’s worth looking back at the ways in which he defended the practice.

The three-term mayor was not some passive actor granting tacit authority to his police department to continue the stops—he made strident, threatening, and at some times bizarre public pronouncements about why New Yorkers needed stop and frisk, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, and a federal judge’s ruling that it was unconstitutional. Even after mayor-elect Bill de Blasio pledged to end the City’s appeal of that ruling, Bloomberg spent taxpayer resources fighting it until the day he left office.

Reading the mayor’s own words raises the question: how much work is this apology supposed to accomplish?

That Time Mayor Bloomberg Said The NYPD Stopped White People “Too Much”

This was a favorite defense of the “technocratic” mayor and his Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly. By invoking statistics that show that people of color commit and are affected by crime at higher proportions than whites, of course they are stopped at higher proportions than white people, the story went, because the NYPD targets crime, not race. (Almost 90 percent of people stopped during the Bloomberg administration were black or Hispanic men. The vast majority—around 88 percent of the 4.4 million stops from 2004 through 2012—were innocent of any crime.)

“And the numbers put the lie to the racist allegations,” Bloomberg said in a speech in the spring of 2013, as the federal class action lawsuit against stop and frisk was playing out in court. “In fact, the percentage of stops of blacks is less than that of whites and Asians when adjusted for crime reports.”

But in a radio interview that summer, after the City Council passed two NYPD oversight bills, Bloomberg was more explicit.

"I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they say," Bloomberg said.

The next day, facing criticism, the mayor insisted he was correct.

"For years now critics have been trying to argue that minorities are stopped disproportionately; if you look at the crime numbers that's just not true. The numbers don't lie,” Bloomberg said.

But using statistics to justify racial profiling is still racial profiling. The federal judge in the case, Justice Shira Scheindlin, made this observation to a City lawyer defending the practice during the nine-week trial in the spring of 2013:

Commissioner Kelly went a step further than the mayor and argued that the people who were stopped and released without a summons or an arrest—who were overwhelmingly young, male, black and Hispanic—weren’t actually innocent.

“It doesn't mean that people are not doing anything wrong. If you look at the statute, it says reasonable suspicion that individuals may be about to commit, are committing or have committed a crime,” Kelly said on Meet The Press after the ruling was handed down. “So, there's a preventive aspect to this. And people say innocent. That's not the appropriate word.”

That Time Mayor Bloomberg Said Parents Should “Start A Stop And Frisk In The Home”

In the fall of 2012, Mayor Bloomberg spoke to the congregation at the East Ward Missionary Baptist Church in Harlem.

"Mr. Mayor, what I’d like to do is, if we could, I’d like to start a stop-question-and-frisk policy in the home,” the Reverend Sean Gardner said, as a means of introduction. "Every parent—mother and father—would be responsible for looking at the things their children bring into the house."

This appeared to be a somewhat clumsy way of saying: parents should know what’s going on in their children’s lives, not that they should actually be stopping and frisking their children. (Roughly half of those stopped by police were between the ages of 14 and 24.) Bloomberg saw his opening and took it.

"It is the parents' job to start a stop-and-frisk in the home, to the extent that they can,” Bloomberg replied. "We in the city are doing everything we can to work with our young kids, for those who've fallen off the right path, to get them back on track."

That Time Bloomberg Compared Stop And Frisk Opponents To The NRA

The Center for Constitutional Rights, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, led the charge against the City in the federal stop and frisk litigation.

“Let’s be clear, the NYCLU’s priority is not protecting our safety. It is protecting their ideology. And in that regard, they are no better than the NRA,” Bloomberg told another church congregation in the summer of 2012. “One group views the Second Amendment in absolutist terms; the other group views the Fourth Amendment in absolutist terms. Both groups, I think, are dangerously wrong on the Constitution.”

Bloomberg added, “The right to bear arms and the right to privacy do not trump the right of citizens to walk down their own street, or walk down their own hallway, without getting blown away. You’d think that would be common sense!”

“You Won’t Be Safe Anymore”: Bloomberg’s Fearmongering Machine

In countless appearances, Mayor Bloomberg and members of his administration made the consequences of curtailed stops and NYPD oversight known.

“The last thing we need is some politician or judge getting involved with setting policy, because you won’t be safe anymore. But today, you are,” Bloomberg told reporters in 2012, when asked about City Council legislation introduced in response to an uproar over police stops and the department’s Muslim surveillance unit. “Think about that when you write your story."

As support for the two bills gained momentum—one to create an NYPD Inspector General, the other to restrict racial profiling by the police—Bloomberg mimicked his predecessor.

“My message is simple: Stop playing politics with public safety. Look at what’s happened in Boston," Bloomberg said at one press conference in April of 2013. "Remember what happened here on 9/11."

A few weeks later, Bloomberg ratcheted up his threats. "This is not a game, this is a life-threatening thing…This is life and death, this isn't playing some game,” he said. “It's very nice to have a lawyer and everybody after say you should have done this and you should have done that, but when the other guy maybe has a gun in his pocket, that's a different story."

At that press conference, Bloomberg predicted an orgy of lawsuits against the NYPD if reforms were instituted.

"Every tort lawyer is gonna buy a new house and a new car right away," the mayor said.

Commissioner Kelly quipped, "City Council might as well have named the legislation, the 'Full Employment for Plaintiffs Attorneys Act'…Take heart Al Qaeda wannabes." (The City paid out $185 million to settle lawsuits against the NYPD in 2011. Those figures have climbed significantly, and not because of the Community Safety Act.)

A staunch proponent of stricter gun laws, Bloomberg argued that stop and frisk took illegal firearms off the street, and thus prevented fatal shootings.

"Nobody should ask Ray Kelly to apologize—he's not going to and neither am I—for saving 5,600 lives,” Mayor Bloomberg said, trotting out a stat created by comparing the previous decade to the mayor’s first decade in office. “I think it's fair to say that stop-question-and-frisk has been an essential part of the NYPD's work."

But stop and frisk was never good at finding guns: only 0.1 percent of stops produced a firearm.

“This is a fight to defend your life and your kids’ lives. You can rest assured I will not give up for one minute,” Bloomberg said after the City Council’s bills passed, vowing to veto them.

“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying,” Bloomberg replied, when asked if the police department would stop fewer New Yorkers after the judge’s ruling.

Bloomberg’s Response To The Stop And Frisk Ruling: Smear The Reputation Of "Some Woman" (A Highly Respected, Female Federal Judge)

Judge Shira Scheindlin’s decision was thoughtful and nuanced. “To be very clear, I am not ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk," Scheindlin wrote. “I respect that police officers have chosen a profession of public service involving dangers and challenges with few parallels in civilian life."

Scheindlin concluded that the evidence showed that the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy “encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints. This is a form of racial profiling.”

Even if stop and frisk was somehow responsible for decreasing crime, the judge wrote, “Many police practices may be useful for fighting crime—preventive detention or coerced confessions, for example—but because they are unconstitutional they cannot be used, no matter how effective.”

Hours after Judge Scheindlin rendered her verdict, Bloomberg and Kelly held a press conference in which they accused her of being unfair.

“Throughout the trial that just concluded, the judge made it clear she was not at all interested in the crime reductions here or how we achieved them,” Bloomberg said, claiming Scheindlin “ignored the real-world realities of crime.”

On his radio show a few days later, Bloomberg was even nastier.

“Your safety and the safety of your kids is now in the hands of some woman who does not have the expertise to do it,” the mayor said.

The City’s attorneys had never argued in court that Scheindlin had treated them unfairly, but a few months later, a panel of three male federal judges suddenly removed her from the case because she allegedly “ran afoul of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges” for giving innocuous quotes to the AP and The New Yorker. Attorneys and law professors rallied to her defense, and the panel of judges were later forced to walk back their accusations.

The Bloomberg administration fought the stop and frisk ruling tooth and nail, until newly-inaugurated Mayor de Blasio dropped the appeal.

“They seemed out of touch with the issues that the communities cared about,” Judge Scheindlin told the Times a few years later, before she retired from the bench. “They didn’t seem to understand the impact of these policies on real people and real neighborhoods and real communities and the detrimental impact it was having, even on policing.”