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Mayor Bloomberg’s impassioned speech in defense of stop-and-frisk this week wasn’t enough to persuade City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to back off from her support of a bill to create an inspector general to oversee the NYPD.
Quinn insisted yesterday that she is forging ahead with legislation that would impose an IG on the cops, and she will allow the council to take up a second bill aimed at racial profiling, even though she doesn’t support that measure.
The mayoral candidate also boasted of her efforts to slash the number of stop-and-frisks conducted by cops, which peaked at 684,000 in 2011 and dropped to 525,000 last year.
“The [nearly] 700,000 number, which was at our height, it has gone down because of the intervention of my office and the council,” Quinn said. “That’s a number that is too high and clearly shows that many of those stops could not have been happening in a constitutionally sound way.”
Quinn defended her stance on stop-and-frisk a day after Bloomberg lashed out at politicians, civil-liberties groups and even The New York Times for undermining a policing strategy that he says saves lives.
She refused to say whether stop-and-frisks would continue to decline if she were elected mayor, saying only, “When I’m mayor, stops will happen in a constitutionally sound way.”
Although she thinks stop-and-frisk is a problem, Quinn — in the face of a push-back from Bloomberg — announced last week that she does not support a separate bill to allow those who claim racial profiling to sue in state court.
Critics claim stop-and-frisk allows cops to profile suspects.
She will, however, make a rare move and allow that bill to get a council vote without her support — something she has never before permitted in her seven-year tenure as speaker.
Earlier yesterday, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — one of fellow Democrat Quinn’s mayoral rivals — attacked Bloomberg’s defense of stop-and-frisk.
“This is fear-mongering. It’s really inappropriate of the mayor to not address these issues seriously,” de Blasio said on a radio program. And he slammed Quinn as “Bloomberg lite” on policing issues.
De Blasio supports both council measures.
Meanwhile, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson yesterday tweeted about a night of mayhem in Chicago as evidence that safety in large cities can’t be taken for granted.
“As you read coverage of Bloomberg crime speech consider this Chicago news: shootings across city kill 3, injure 17,” he wrote.