Let’s be clear about the mayor: We would not have defended stop-and-frisk the way he did yesterday.
Let’s also be clear about the critics now piling on: Pretending that Bloomberg was calling for racial profiling is a disservice to this city, especially to our citizens who depend most on stop-and-frisk because they live in vulnerable neighborhoods and buildings that do not have the luxury of doormen to keep hoodlums out.
Here’s what Bloomberg actually said. On WOR Radio, the mayor was talking about bills passed by the City Council to limit stop-and-frisk. In particular, he complained about those who focus on one point, that those stopped are disproportionately black or Latino.
“That may be,” said Bloomberg, “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.”
His critics have seized upon that last line. These include Councilman Brad Lander, who complained that after “powerful testimony from so many African-American and Latino City Council members about the realities and indignities of discriminatory policing, it is the height of arrogance for the mayor to keep arguing that the real problem is that the NYPD is over-stopping white people.”
Bloomberg’s critics know full well the mayor meant that if the police stops for blacks (87 percent) strictly followed the racial breakdown for murder suspects (90 percent black), you would have even more blacks and fewer whites stopped.
The flip side — which these same critics know but ignore — is that the victims of murder in this city are also disproportionately black and Latino. So when you bring murder rates down, as the city has been doing for past two decades with smarter and more aggressive policing, you find that upwards of 90 percent of the lives saved since the 1990s are minorities.
Bloomberg misspoke. But his critics distort. And if the latter have their way, law-abiding black and Latino citizens living in our most vulnerable neighborhoods will pay a high price.