WATCH: Colbert Catches Bloomberg Defending Stop-and-Frisk Even After Apologizing, Calling It a ‘Mistake’
Democratic presidential candidate and billionaire Michael Bloomberg got politely called out by Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night for appearing to double back on his apology for New York City’s previous stop-and-frisk policy and instead suggesting that the policing tactic was effective in lowering the murder rate while he was mayor.
Just ahead of announcing his presidential run this past fall, Bloomberg attempted a public reckoning over the highly controversial policy that haunted his time as the city’s chief executive, apologizing for an aggressive stop-and-frisk policing strategy that resulted in the harassment of hundreds of thousands of minority men each year. “I was wrong…and I am sorry,” Bloomberg said in a speech at a prominent African-American megachurch in Brooklyn.
When Bloomberg came into office in 2002, recorded policy stops totaled less than 100,000 a year. But by 2011, at their peak, NYC police made more than 685,000 recorded stops in that year, nearly 90% of which involved stopping innocent people as well as Black and Latino men, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. On the CBS late night show, Bloomberg revisited his reasoning for the apology and why he chose to curtail the stop-and-frisk policy in the final two years of his tenure as mayor.
“I started out with 650 murders a year in the city, mostly young minority males. Had to do something about it. Your responsibility is to stop the carnage. Did the best I could,” Bloomberg explained. “Near the end, I realized we were getting out of control and doing it too much. Actually talked to the woman who’s my assistant who sits next to me, has a young son, and we talked about what would happen if her son was getting stopped. And I took a look and said let’s try something: Stop doing the stop-and-frisk and see what happens. We thought murders would go up, and it didn’t, so I said let’s phase it out. And before I left office, we cut 95% of them out.”
Notably, the murder rate, which dropped significantly during Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor, continued to drop in 2012 and 2013 even as his administration substantially curtailed stop-and-frisk. Even more tellingly, the city’s murder rate steadily dropped even further — reaching record lows in both 2017 and 2018 — after he left office and newly-elected Mayor Bill de Blasio abandoned the stop-and-frisk policy completely.
“If you can’t apologize, I don’t know how you live with yourself. Sometimes you just— not everything goes right— not everything goes the right way. Sometimes you do something wrong. Apologize and get on with it,” Bloomberg told Colbert.
“Well, while you were mayor there was a lot of criticism of it as well,” Colbert said, pushing back on Bloomberg not-so-subtle self-congratulation. “Why not assess it while it’s going on? As a leader, don’t we want to know that while you’re in power you change your mind, not after it doesn’t matter,” he added, to a smattering of applause.
“No, we did,” Bloomberg said. “But the murder rate went from 650 down to 300. We reduced dramatically.”
“But you’re saying afterwards it wasn’t because of stop-and-frisk because when you stopped it, it didn’t change anything,” Colbert pointed out, alluding to the fact that the murder and violent crime rates continued to fall in the city without the policy.
“Well…we did the best thing we can. I think it had something to do with it,” Bloomberg said in response, implying that stop-and-frisk had been effective but simply overused, striking a very different tone than the one in November when he publicly apologized for stop-and-frisk and called it a “mistake.”
“At some point in time, you do too much of one thing then you should stop doing it,” Bloomberg added. “We reduced the incarceration rate. We reduced the recidivism rate. We started a whole bunch of programs for young kids, one of which President [Barack] Obama copied for the nation. You have to do all the different things and try and see what happens.”
