Bloomberg Misleads on Stop-And-Frisk
Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg misleadingly stated that he “cut” the police practice of stop-and-frisk — a policy that he “inherited” — by “95%” by the time he left office as mayor of New York. There were nearly twice as many stops in his last year as mayor compared with the year before he took office.
It’s true that the number of recorded stops declined steadily over the last two years of Bloomberg’s 12 years in office. But Bloomberg’s statistic ignores the dramatic rise in such stops in earlier years under his watch. He also fails to mention that the decline in later years came amid public backlash about the policy and mounting pressure from a class-action lawsuit.
In Bloomberg’s first 10 years in office, the number of stop-and-frisk actions increased nearly 600% from what he “inherited,” reaching a peak of nearly 686,000 stops in 2011. There were about 192,000 documented stops in 2013.
Bloomberg gets to his figure of a 95% cut by cherry-picking the quarterly high point of 203,500 stops in the first quarter of 2012 and comparing that with the 12,485 stops in the last quarter of 2013 — a decline that would not have been possible without the numbers ballooning earlier in Bloomberg’s tenure.
Bloomberg continued to defend the stop-and-frisk practice throughout his term as mayor — and after — maintaining that the policy led to a decrease in
