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News Clash

YIKES! Bloomberg’s Defense Of ‘Stop-And-Frisk’ Isn’t Going To Win Over Minority Voters

This approach isn’t going to win friends and influence people in the Democratic Party of 2020.

Michael Bloomberg can pay as many “micro-influencers” as he wants to improve his image, but it won’t matter much if the Media(D) picks up this audio and runs with it.

In 2015, Michael Bloomberg spoke at the Aspen Institute and defended his “stop-and-Frisk” policy which resulted in visible minorities being arrested at a disproportionately higher rate for low-level crimes like marijuana possession.

Bloomberg was unapologetic, however, insisting that his Stop-and-Frisk program was successful implying that the reason was that it targeted visible minorities.

In the roughly minute-long excerpt, Bloomberg begins his argument defending stop-and-frisk by saying: “95% of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops.”

Back in 2013, during the last year of Bloomberg’s administration, a federal judge ruled that New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy amounted to racial harassment and was unconstitutional. The NYPD had already begun to curtail the use of stop-and-frisk in the two previous years, but effectively abandoned the policy after the decision, while violent crime and murder rates have continued to fall in the years since then.

In the lead-up to announcing his 2020 run, Bloomberg made a public appearance at an African-American megachurch in Brooklyn, where he apologized for his role in championing stop-and-frisk. But his mea culpa rang hollow for many in the black community and, despite that statement, he continues to reflexively defend the policy.

Source: Mediaite

In the audio, Bloomberg said, “Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Why did we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”

The audio was released by podcaster, Benjamin Dixon. Bloomberg had successfully squashed video of his appearance at the Aspen Institute back in 2015 but hadn’t managed to stop the audio from being leaked.

And it’s no wonder he tried to keep it under wraps.

Appearing before nearly 400 people in Aspen on Feb. 5, the billionaire founder of Bloomberg L.P. argued that in order to save lives, police should seize guns from male minorities between ages 15 and 25.

“These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg said during the speech. “So they just don’t have any longterm focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”

National media outlets latched onto that portion of the discussion, in which Bloomberg said one method to deal with the issue is to “throw them up against the wall and frisk them,” referring to the controversial stop-and-frisk tactics New York City implemented during Bloomberg’s tenure.

Source: Aspen Times

Listen:

Yikes! In that audio clip, it seems that the former Mayor of New York is quick to rely on stereotypes and wants to use a heavy-handed approach to crime instead of the “progressive” view of finding the “root causes” of crime in particular communities.

Well, Dear Readers, what do you think of this development?

Will leftists overlook this, or will it be a real blow to Bloomberg’s campaign?

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K. Walker

ClashDaily's Associate Editor since August 2016. Self-described political junkie, anti-Third Wave Feminist, and a nightmare to the 'intersectional' crowd. Mrs. Walker has taken a stand against 'white privilege' education in public schools. She's also an amateur Playwright, former Drama teacher, and staunch defender of the Oxford comma. Follow her humble musings on Twitter: @TheMrsKnowItAll and on Gettr @KarenWalker