Democratic Primaries
Related: About this forum"Here's What Should Disqualify Michael Bloomberg New York's stop-and-frisk policy is just
one example of the former mayors lack of respect for civil liberties
Michael Bloomberg says he is sorry.
On Sunday, amid preparations for a presidential bid, the billionaire appeared at a black church in Brooklyn and apologized for stop-and-frisk, a method of policing that he championed as mayor of New York City, a method he defended even as evidence emerged that it intruded on and inconvenienced millions of innocent people, humiliating many.
The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino, the New York Civil Liberties Union objected in 2012. More than 4 million innocent New Yorkers were subjected to police stops and street interrogations from 2004 through 2011 ... Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPDs own reports. Those stats undermine stop-and-frisk defenders, who claim to this day that the NYPD only targeted those whom they reasonably believed to be involved in crimes and armed. How reasonable can that ostensible belief have been when it was wrong roughly 90 percent of the time?
But Bloomberg kept claiming that the noble end of reducing gun murders justified the authoritarian means of forcing millions to undergo intrusive frisks on the street, in spite of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures. He cited falling New York City murder rates to defend stop-and-frisk. As it turned out, the murder rate kept falling after Bloombergs successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, ended stop-and-frisk.
Should Sundays apology make civil libertarians more favorably disposed toward a Bloomberg candidacy? No. Stop-and-frisk is not the only reason to worry about the former mayors paternalistic, coercive tendencies.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/bloomberg-civil-liberties/602239/
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
msongs
(67,478 posts)primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden
Peacetrain
(22,881 posts)for the President.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden