Mike Bloomberg was forced to face implemented racist stop and frisk policies as fellow candidates on stage at the debate Wednesday night took aim at the former mayor of New York City.
‘Well, if I go back and look at my time in office, the one thing that I’m really worried about – embarrassed about – was how it turned out with stop and frisk,’ he admitted.
Even though the billionaire expressed regret, he claimed that the policy was effective in reducing crime in American’s most populated city and tried to write it off as a mistake he had already apologized for.
‘When I got into office, there were 650 murders a year in New York City, and I thought that my first responsibility was to give people the right to live,’ Bloomberg explained in defending implementing the practice. ‘That’s the basic right of everything.’
In the most fiery debate yet of the 2020 primary season, Bloomberg, who was making his first debate appearance, faced an onslaught of attacks from his Democratic challengers.
Mike Bloomberg found himself having to explain his mayoral record in implementing stop and frisk policies at Wednesday night’s debate
‘Well, if I go back and look at my time in office, the one thing that I’m really worried about – embarrassed about – was how it turned out with stop and frisk,’ he said as he faced an onslaught of attacks from the five other Democrats on stage
Bloomberg did admit that he implemented the practice because he wanted to reduce the high level of crime, and said in that matter, it was effective
Former Vice President Joe Biden said an apology wasn’t enough, and said the only reason Bloomberg stopped the ‘abhorrent’ practice was because the Obama administration came in to monitor the situation
Former Vice President Joe Biden called the stop and frisks ‘abhorrent’ and the former mayor admitted that it ‘got out of control.’
‘When we discovered – I discovered – that we were doing many, many – too many – stop and frisks, we cut 95 per cent of it out,’ Bloomberg asserted.
The former mayor said he is and was trying to ‘learn’ how to change policies to help continuing reduce crime in New York City.
‘I’ve sat down with a bunch of African-American clergy and business people to talk about this to try to learn. I’ve talked to a number of kids who have been stopped. And I’m trying – was trying to understand how we change our policy so we can keep the city safe because the crime rate did go from 650, 50 per cent down to 300. And We have to keep a lid on crime, but we cannot go out and stop people discriminately,’ he said.
Biden hit back at Bloomberg, claiming he couldn’t apologize it away and said it violated every right people posses.
‘Let’s get something straight. The reason that stop and frisk changed is because Barack Obama sent moderators to see what was going on. When we sent them there to say ‘this practice has to stop,’ the mayor thought it was a terrible idea we send them there – a terrible idea,’ Biden said, invoking the name of one of the most famous Democrats.
‘It’s not whether he apologized or not, it’s the policy. The policy was abhorrent, and it was, in fact, a violation of every right people have,’ he said, claiming Bloomberg pushed back against stopping the policies.
‘He figured out it was a bad idea after we sent in monitors and said it must stop. Even then he continued the policy,’ Biden said on stage at the ninth Democratic primary debate.
Bloomberg, a newcomer who launched his campaign in mid-November, qualified for the debate stage Tuesday and became the common enemy of the rest of the Democrats on stage.
But the 78-year-old billionaire, who is self-funding his campaign, asserted the best he could do is apologize for his past and promise to do better in the future.
‘I’ve sat, I’ve apologized, I’ve asked for forgiveness, but the bottom line is we stopped too many people, and we’ve got to make sure that we do something about criminal justice in this country,’ Bloomberg explained.
‘There is no great answer to a lot of these problems. If we took off everybody that was wrong off this panel, everybody that was wrong on criminal justice at some time in their careers, there’d be nobody else up here,’ he said of the five other candidates on stage.
It was clear that Bloomberg would face questions over stop and frisk, a policy that has been widely denounced as racist.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday that Bloomberg would need to answer for the way he has treated different groups and people.
‘I think he has to answer for his treatment of others, for his language and above all for an attitude that seems to have dismissed the humanity of a lot of people,’ Buttigieg said in an interview with NBC Nightly News.