New presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York City, apologized for a controversial police tactic he once vehemently defended on Sunday.
“I got something important wrong. I got something important really wrong,” Bloomberg said at the Christian Cultural Center, a non-denominational “megachurch” in the predominantly minority neighborhood of East New York in Brooklyn.
“I didn’t understand back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities,” Bloomberg continued.
Stop-and-frisk was a policy that grew from the aggressive police work started under Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and his police chief William Bratton. At its apex in 2011, during Bloomberg’s third term, there were 685,724 stops recorded. Only nine percent of those stopped were white and 88 percent were innocent, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Stop-and-frisk allows officers to briefly detain someone on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. During Bloomberg’s mayoralty many critics felt the policy went too far and unfairly targeted people of color.
Ending stop-and-frisk was a campaign pledge from current New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has already dropped out of the Democratic primary race that Bloomberg just entered. When Bloomberg first ran for mayor in 2001 he campaigned as a Republican. He switched to an independent in 2007 and joined the Democratic Party last year.
De Blasio tweeted that the former mayor’s timing is “transparent and cynical.” However, the current mayor is currently facing criticism for recent aggressive policing of fare evasion in subways, inspiring demonstrations.