JACK DUNPHY: 2020 Democrats Are Pure Comedy Gold, None More So Than Bloomberg.
Characteristically of the left, Bloomberg is being branded as a racist for actions he took as mayor that helped black residents of New York, specifically, his continuation of the tough-on-crime policies that began under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton. Those policies included proactive measures intended to deter street crime of the type that had turned much of the city into a dystopian war zone. One of those measures, the most controversial of them, came to be known as stop-and-frisk.
The very term has been branded as racist based on the fact that the number of blacks and Hispanics stopped and frisked by police in New York was disproportionate to their share of the population. Gentle readers, when you see stop and arrest rates for this or that ethnic group compared with that group’s share of the overall population, you know you are being hoodwinked. It is the criminal offender pool that must be compared to the stop and arrest rates, and in New York City — as is the case in any other city you can name — it is blacks and Hispanics who commit the vast majority of violent crime.
In 2018, blacks were 72.6 percent of the shooting suspects in New York City, and Hispanics were 24.1 percent (see page 12 of this NYPD report). Blacks and Hispanics were also 73.3 and 22.4 percent of the city’s shooting victims, respectively, so it should be beyond saying (but sadly isn’t) that curtailing shooting incidents will be a balm to those communities. Arrests for firearm possession closely mirrored these statistics (see page 13 of the same report), so it’s clear that, by the benchmark that matters, there is no racial disproportion among the arrestees.
Bloomberg, fearful of the racist label sticking despite its lack of a factual basis, has apologized for stop-and-frisk, in essence saying he regrets the tactic that brought about crime reductions few thought were possible. The NYPD investigated 2,262 murders in 1990; in 2019 the number was 319. This decrease would not have been possible without the proactive measures, stop-and-frisk chief among them, initiated by leaders unafraid of political backlash.
Related: Warren, AOC: Let’s not forget that Bloomberg’s a racist.