Bloomberg on Stop-and-Frisk: 'I Think We Stop Minorities Too Little'
Echoing New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's recent statement on the subject, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a radio interview today that, as far as he sees it, blacks and Latinos are actually not being stopped enough under the city's racist stop-and-frisk program.
The New York City Council recently passed two bills expressly designed to mitigate some of stop-and-frisk's problems. The first would create an inspector general position within the NYPD, while the other, the so-called "racial profiling bill," would allow New Yorkers to sue the NYPD in state court for discriminatory targeting, according to Capital.
Despite the fact that most New Yorkers disapprove of stop-and-frisk, Bloomberg said he plans on vetoing both bills. Why? Because "nobody racially profiles."
There is this business, there's one newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, 'Oh it's a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.' That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.
A New York Civil Liberties Union study from last year found that though they accounted for less than 5 percent of New York's population in 2011, black and Latino males aged 14 to 24 made up nearly 42 percent of those stopped and frisked. But nobody racially profiles in New York, of course.
