Stop Apologizing, Mr. Bloomberg

William McGurn has this column in the WSJ.

Just before Michael Bloomberg threw his billions into the ring … he apologized for the New York City Police Department’s use of a tactic popularly known as stop-and-frisk…. If he stays on this path, he’ll find himself spending more time apologizing for his record than running on it.

That would be a loss for everyone, including the Democratic Party. At a moment when identity politics has consumed the bread-and-butter politics that used to lie at the heart of the Democrats’ appeal, on two key issues—crime and education—Mr. Bloomberg brings a record and perspective that could help restore sanity.

Start with crime. When sworn in on New Year’s Day 2002, Mayor Bloomberg inherited a city where murders and shootings had been driven to lows thought impossible only a few years before. To almost everyone’s surprise, he improved on that success. The number of murders dropped from 649 in 2001 to 335 in 2013, his final year in office, even as the city’s incarceration rate declined 39%.

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The truth is that Mr. Bloomberg’s policing saved lives, disproportionately African-American lives. In an August 2013 op-ed for the Washington Post, he calculated that if New York had the same murder rate as the District of Columbia during his time as mayor, “21,651 more people would have been killed”—“more than 90 percent” of them “black and Hispanic.” Think of it as the Bloomberg version of black lives matter.