The Lethal Consequences of Woke Justice

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, now a candidate for President, is apologizing for one of the most successful policies he supported when he was serving as Mayor.  It was proactive policing that drove violent crime down in New York between 2002 and 2013, while Bloomberg was Mayor.  In her piece in The Hill, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald notes that the most valuable tool police used during that period was “stop, question and frisk.”  Today as a candidate for President, Bloomberg is apologizing for allowing police to use that tool. “I got something important really wrong,” he said at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. “I didn’t understand that back then, the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities.”

Why would Bloomberg apologize, when it has been proven that “stop, question and frisk,” helped reduce homicides by 50% during his tenure, saving 1,600 minority lives?  And while this policy was being used, a 2013 Quinnipiac poll, gave NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly then in his twelfth year as Bloomberg’s police chief and the public face of the NYPD’s “stop” policy, a 63% approval rating. The NYPD itself received its highest approval rating since 2002 – 70 percent – among all voters, including 56 percent approval from black voters. In 2017, NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill received a 55 percent approval rating among black voters. This suggests that, at least among a majority of black New Yorkers, the policy was helping not hurting minority neighborhoods.

Anti-law enforcement progressives continue to argue that the “stop” policy disproportionately targeted blacks and Latinos.  But as MacDonald notes the minority neighborhoods in New York are where most violent crime occurs.  In 2018, 73.3 percent of shooting victims were black; 22.4 percent of shooting victims were Hispanic. Their assailants were also disproportionately minority: Blacks were 72.6 percent of all shooting suspects in 2018, according to the victims of and witnesses to those shootings. Add Hispanic to black shootings and you accounted for 96.7 percent of all shootings in New York in 2018. Whites made up 2.8 percent of shooting suspects in 2018, according to victims and witnesses, even though they are 34 percent of the city’s population.   Leaders of Black Lives Matter have called for disbanding police departments.  Which segments of the population would suffer most if that demand were met?

Candidate Bloomberg should be advocating police policies which have been proven to reduce violent crime rather than kowtowing to progressive activists who clearly don’t care about black lives.