There is one important thing you have to remember about Michael Bloomberg: He is an asshole. It is easy to forget this if you don’t live in New York, or if you live in New York and you are a well-off white person who is never harassed by his NYPD, but it is a fact. Thus far, the billionaire mayor has been using his fortune for nice things that everyone likes like funding ads in support of gay marriage and gun control. But he has enough money to also spend some on capricious meddling in areas Good Liberals are less likely to approve of. According to the New York Post (and admittedly they are often wrong about all sorts of things but you can generally trust their City Hall reporting), Mayor Bloomberg is now planning to spend some money to defeat City Council opponents of stop-and-frisk. Or, if not defeat them, at least scare them into changing their minds.
Stop-and-frisk is an NYPD policy in which cops stop and question and frisk residents of, primarily, very poor neighborhoods, looking for drugs and guns. The people stopped and frisked are nearly always racial or ethnic minorities. No probable cause is required for stopping and frisking. (Cops are supposed to have a reason for the frisking but, as the invaluable stop and frisk Twitter account has shown us, those reasons are so elastic as to be meaningless. One reason is “other.”) Cops stop hundreds of thousands of people each year and arrest only a small fraction of those questioned. The arrests are questionable too: New York led the nation in pointless marijuana arrests throughout Bloomberg’s time in office.
The city is currently defending itself in a class-action lawsuit charging that stop-and-frisk is unconstitutional. Each Democrat currently running to replace Bloomberg, whose third and final term ends this year, has promised to reform or eliminate the program. The City Council got tired of waiting, and passed two bills last week aimed as restraining the cops. One created an inspector general to oversee the NYPD, the other allowed citizens to file racial profiling claims against the NYPD. Both bills passed with veto-proof majorities. Without the ability to veto, the mayor is looking for other avenues to getting his way, as he usually does.
With every seat in the council up for grabs this year, Bloomberg’s PAC will “cast a wide net” and try to persuade council members to flip their votes, said Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson.
“I’ve got the time to talk to all members. Basically, we’re going to recanvass as many members as we can and see what we come up with,” Wolfson said.
When loathsome flack Wolfson says “recanvass,” he means threaten to unload a small fortune on small-time city council races until one council member is scared enough to flip his or her vote, because one vote is all the mayor needs to get his veto to stick.
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Bloomberg, as he often does, is trying his very hardest to get his many liberal admirers to notice how illiberal he is. His money can be used to browbeat gun-loving redstate hicks, sure, but he is also more than happy to use it to get his way in a fight over whether or not the police are supposed to be a full-time minority-harassment squad.
I've said this before, I'll say it again:
If anybody thinks Bloomberg is going away on December 31, 2013, they are sorely mistaken.
He has put together a PAC, he has fed that PAC millions of his dollars, and he plans to use that PAC to promote issues dear to his heart.
As Pareene notes, many liberals were happy when the Bloomberg PAC money was used against red state Dems who voted against gun control or gay rights.
But he's using that cash to promote awful policies like stop-and-frisk too.
And as a teacher, I am certain he's going to use that PAC cash against teachers in coming years, whether it's on evaluation issues, mayoral control, contracts or test scores/grad rates.
This loathsome little man - this "asshole" as Pareene calls him - is going to be with us for a long time because he has a lot of money and he plans to use it as a bludgeon to bolster his reputation, his "legacy" as mayor and the policies he wants to see perpetrated in perpetuity.
