Jeezus help us!
Friday morning, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the police department’s controversial ‘stop and frisk’ program during a radio interview and complained that the NYPD was stopping too many white people and not enough minorities.
WOR-NY host John Gambling, questioned the mayor about some of the troubling statistics of the city’s stop and frisk program and the city’s falling murder rate and the mayor responded:
One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying ‘oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the [crime]. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course. Or a logic course.
Really mayor? ThinkProgress reports:
An independent study of the city’s stop-and-frisk program found that 87 percent of the 685,724 stops in 2011 — a record high — were of blacks and latinos. Young black men between the ages of 14 and 24 were stopped 106% of the time — as in, there were more stops of young black men than the entire population of young black men.
And contrary to Bloomberg’s belief, a study by the city’s own Public Advocate found that stops of white people were twice as likely to yield a weapon, and a third more likely to yield some form of contraband as compared to stops of black people.
Since hearing Bloomberg’s comments, Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the NYCLU, issued a statement to ThinkProgress on Friday afternoon saying:
“Mayor Bloomberg needs a math lesson. The NYPD’s own data shows that only 11 percent of stops last year were based on suspicion that the individual has committed of a violent crime. More than half of the stops were based on ‘furtive movement’ a catch-all category that encompasses all sorts of innocent behavior. But perhaps the most compelling fact is that since Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, nearly 9-10 of more than 5 million police stops were of completely innocent people. That is some truly troubling math.
It’s time for the Mayor to turn down the rhetoric and consider meaningful solutions to a problem that is apparent to everyone in the city except him.”
Agreed! C’mon Mayor! Get it together! Check out the audio of his statement for yourself below:
SOURCE: TP
