Bloomberg Wrong On Stop-And-Frisk Race Comments

Last week the Mayor of Money said the NYPD stops too many white people and not enough people of color.

Those comments were controversial, to say the least, but the mayor doubled down on them, saying any City Council member who doesn't vote with him on the stop-and-frisk issue may have to deal with the Bloomberg PAC using its money against them.

Today the NY Daily News looks at the Bloomberg comments on stop-and-frisk and finds them wanting:

The mayor made headlines last week with his assertion that white New Yorkers were stopped too often by officers patrolling the five boroughs, and minority-group members weren’t stopped often enough.

But it’s right there in black and white: The mayoral math on stop-and-frisk doesn’t add up.

A Daily News analysis of NYPD data contradicts Bloomberg’s claim, by looking at all crime suspects versus just violent crime suspects — particularly in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics are in the population minority, but make up the majority of stops.

 ...
 
City Hall released statistics to support Bloomberg’s controversial claim about stop-and-frisk and race.
The NYPD numbers showed 6.9% of the violent crime suspects were white — although whites made up 9.7% of the total number of people stopped.

But The News’ review of NYPD data found police listed a “violent” offense as the suspected crime on little more than one-quarter of the 532,911 stops made last year — mostly for “robbery.” The rest listed “nonviolent” offenses like weapons possession, larceny, pot possession and criminal trespass.

When the lesser offenses are included, whites comprise 13.8% all crime suspects in the city — meaning they were stopped too infrequently.

The 109th Precinct in Queens — where whites and Asians constitute more than 80% of the population — produced the biggest discrepancy: 48% of local crime suspects were black, while 65% of those stopped were black or Hispanic.

The 17-percentage point difference was the largest of any precinct, followed by the 6th Precinct (Greenwich and West Village, 15.6); Midtown North (Hell’s Kitchen, 15), Central Park (14) and the 104th Precinct (Ridgewood, Queens, 13).

Only four of the 22 precincts with a difference of more than 5 percentage points were home to a majority of black or Hispanic residents.

Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna defended the mayor’s numbers, sticking to the “violent” suspect standard.

Selective use of data to push their ill-begotten policies is a hallmark of this administration.

They're doing it with the stop-and-frisk and crime data.

Later today I'll take a look at how they're doing it with the 911 system too.

In the case of the stop-and-frisk policy, funking with the data to sell it is going to come back to haunt them in court:

The future of stop-and-frisk could hinge on Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling on a class-action lawsuit — a decision that could come as early as this week.

Legal experts predict Scheindlin will likely appoint an independent monitor to oversee the nation’s largest police force if she finds the police procedure is unconstitutional.

Scheindlin is widely expected to rule against the NYPD after taking the cops to task for the “high error rate.”

“You reasonably suspect something and you’re wrong 90% of the time,” the judge said. “That’s a lot of misjudgment of suspicion.”

Legal experts predicted she’s likely to order reforms, including a federal monitor who would report to her on problems solely related to stop-and-frisk. She could then compel the NYPD to make changes.

I highlighted part of the judge's statement because it is so emblematic of what is wrong with Bloomberg and Kelly.

 

They pursue an unjust, racist and unconstitutional policy that, at its core, is not about stopping crime but about intimidation and control.

 

Kelly is on record as saying they want every brown and black man in this city worried that they could be stopped at any moment by police and searched, that the city wanted to "instill" fear into them.

 

Kelly and Bloomberg don't care that 90% of the time, stop-and-frisk searches find nothing.

 

The point is to simply stop men of color and intimidate them.

 

At that, the policy is quite successful.

 

I still do not understand, given the racist polices this mayor has pursued, why he does not enjoy the same reputation of being a racist that his predecessor Rudy Giuliani enjoys.