Bloomberg Takes Direct Fire on Leadership Over Stop and Frisk: ‘You Need a Different Apology Here’

Mayor Michael Bloomberg took direct fire from multiple sides at the Nevada debate over his leadership while mayor of New York City, when his police department enforced a draconian stop-and-frisk policy that was deemed unconstitutional for its millions of stops of innocent black and brown men.

NBC Nighty News anchor Lester Holt began by pushing Bloomberg on comments he made in 2015, where he justified the police  throwing minorities “up against the wall” and defended heavy police presence in minority neighborhoods because “that’s where the crime is.”

“What does that kind of language say about how you view people of color or people in minority neighborhoods?” Holt asked.

“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,” Bloomberg said, delicately using language that put distance between his leadership and the policy. “When I got into office, there was 650 murders a year in New York City. And I thought that my first responsibility was to give people the right to live. That’s the basic right of everything. And we started a — we adopted a policy which had been in place, the policy that all big police departments used of stop and frisk. What happened, however, was it got out of control.”

“When we discovered, I discovered, that we were doing many, many, too many stop and frisks, we cut 95% of it out,” Bloomberg added. “The crime rate did go from 650, 50% down, to 300. And we have to keep the lid on crime, but we cannot go out and stop people indiscriminately.”

Bloomberg did not note, however, after the city abandoned the policy completely after he left office, the murder and violent crime rate continued to drop. Then, former Vice President Joe Biden attacked Bloomberg for claiming that he was the impetus behind curtailing stop and frisk.

“The reason 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,” Biden said. “Let’s get the facts straight. Let’s get the order straight. And 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. And we are the one, my — our administration sent in people to monitor it. And at the very time the mayor argued against that. This idea that he figured out it was a bad idea, figured out it was a bad idea after we sent in monitors and said it must stop. Even then he continued the policy.”

Bloomberg responded by noting that he has apologized and asked for forgiveness for the policy. “But the bottom line that is we stopped too many people,” he acknowledged. “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 would be nobody else up here.”

This answer was not nearly good enough for Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“I do think this really is about leadership and accountability. When the mayor says that he apologized, listen very closely to the apology,” Warren said. “Now this isn’t about how it turned out, this is about what it was designed to do to begin with. It targeted communities of color. It targeted black and brown men from the beginning. And if you want to issue a real apology, then the apology has to start with the intent of the plan as it was put together and the willful ignorance day by day by day of admitting what was happening, even as people protested in your own street, shutting out the sounds of people telling you how your own policy was breaking their lives. You need a different apology here, Mr. Mayor.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.