By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
Billionaire Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is taking heat over remarks he made in 2015 during a speech in which he defended stop-and-frisk policies and concentrating police in minority neighborhoods during his three terms as New York City mayor.
In the recently-surfaced audio, Bloomberg can be heard to justify putting police in to certain minority sections of the city because “that’s where the real crime is,” during a speech at the Aspen Institute nearly five years ago.
The Washington Times reported that the audio of Bloomberg defending the “racially controversial police tactic of ‘stop and frisk’ went viral” just as the polls opened in New Hampshire’s primary. While he was not actively campaigning in that state, he did get some support, although Sen. Bernie Sanders came out on top and is now running neck-and-neck with former Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Bloomberg apologized for supporting “stop and frisk” as he opened his presidential campaign last fall. But that was before the audio surfaced, and his remarks streaked across social media and were widely reported by conservative news outlets. The audio was released by podcaster Benjamin Dixon.
“Ninety-five percent of murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg asserted in his remarks five years ago. “You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16-25. 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 people that are getting killed.”
The Aspen Times reported the Institute had been asked by Bloomberg’s representatives to not release the recording.
Adding to Bloomberg’s troubles over the audio, John Lott—founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center—said Bloomberg’s assertion about crime and the “stop and frisk” effort was “riddled with inaccuracies,” in an opinion he wrote for Fox News.
“It is one thing to say that minorities commit crime at relatively high rates compared to whites, but it is something quite different to falsely claim that minorities commit virtually all murders,” Lott stated.
Bloomberg avoided early debates in 2019 and skipped early primaries to concentrate on the upcoming “Super Tuesday” elections March 3, followed by other state primary elections March 10.
