This audio recording shows that Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, remained an advocate of racial profiling long after a federal judge ruled that his use of it in office amounted to unconstitutional racial harassment.
Bloomberg has attempted to prevent the leak of his 2015 speech at the Aspen Institute, somehow preventing them from releasing official video of him explaining why blacks need to be policed harder than whites. But it turns out at least one audience member had tape rolling.
Here's a transcript of Bloomberg's evidence-free rangefinding on black crime, as posted by Daily Kos:
95% of your murders — murderers and murder victims fit one MO. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male. minorities, sixteen to twenty-five. That's true in New York. That's true in virtually every city. And that's where the real crime is.
You've got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. You want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets. Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods. So, one of the unintended consequences is people say, "Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities. Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that's true. Why do we do it? Because that's where all the crime is.
And the way you get the guns out of the kid's hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them. And they start, "Oh, I don't want to get caught." So they don't bring the gun. They still have a gun. But they leave it at home.
The audio's been out there for some time, but mostly seen through a conservative lens that emphasises Bloomberg's gun control opinions. His advocacy of racial profiling, however, now becomes salient as Bloomberg muscled his way into second place in the Dem primary polls after a billion-dollar ad spend.
"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."
My horse-race bet for 2020 is that Bloomberg will buy it. He's already blown everyone except Sanders out the water with his billion-dollar ad buy, a fact that's now finally registering in national polls.
