New York Post Editorial Board weighs in

The New York Post Editorial Board has this to say about Bloomberg and "Stop and Frisk."

The tape of Mike Bloomberg’s 2015 defense of stop, question and frisk presents his own successful policies in a way guaranteed to repulse fair-minded listeners.

Indeed, his claim that “the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them” is an insult to the police officers tasked with using stop-and-frisk to fight crime: NYPD cops strive to use the least force necessary now — and they did then, too.

Oh, and: “Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” he said — also wrong: M.O., modus operandi, refers to a criminal’s behavior. He wasn’t wrong that the vast majority of those perps are “male, minorities, 16 to 25” — but his remark that “you can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops” doesn’t begin to match how cops actually work: A description has always needed more detail than that to justify police action — with details about height, clothing and so on.

It’s as if Bloomberg thought he was addressing an audience of racists. Is that his opinion of the Aspen Institute elite?

* * *

Let’s set the record straight.

For starters, most stops have always ended at the “question” phase — proceeding to a frisk only if a civilian’s answers or behavior give an officer cause for deeper suspicion. And stop-question-and-sometimes-frisk is a basic policing tool, still in NYPD use, although at a far lower level.

Second: Even before the early ’90s policing revolution, the NYPD put far more street resources in neighborhoods that have more street crime — which means lower-income, mostly minority areas.

Bloomberg: ‘95% of murderers' fit one racial profile, 'Xerox it'
And it has done so to protect the mainly lower-income, mostly minority victims of that street crime from perps who are also lower-income and minority — and, yes, mainly males aged 16 to 25.

Last year, NYPD data show, 93 percent of suspects arrested for murder were black or Hispanic, as were 88 percent of victims; 96 percent of those nabbed in shootings were also minorities — as were 96 percent of shooting victims. The numbers have been roughly the same for decades — except that New York cops have brought total crime way, way down from its early-’90s peak.

And a key part of that crime drop came under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Murders peaked in 1991 at 2,245, then began to fall as the city hired more police — and the drop accelerated as the NYPD adopted major new tactics (CompStat and “Broken Windows” community policing) under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Commissioner Bill Bratton. Killings were down to 633 in 1998, after Rudy won reelection — but then leveled off, hitting 649 in 2001, Rudy’s final year.

That 2001 total doesn’t include those slain on 9/11 — an event that rightly led Kelly to divert roughly 1,000 officers to full-time anti-terror work.

On top of that, Bloomberg opted to let the overall force decline by about 6,000 cops, to around 34,000 total. (“Essentially, Mayor Bloomberg shifted the money for those six thousand cops into the Department of Education,” Kelly notes in his memoir, “Vigilance.”)

And that’s the context in which the NYPD increased its use of stops — a shift that brought crime down to unprecedented levels: The last Bloomberg-Kelly year, 2013, saw just 335 murders.

In other words, stop-and-frisk helped cut the city’s homicide rate in half, even as the NYPD lost some 15 percent of its manpower. Manhattan Institute policing expert Heather Mac Donald estimates it saved some 1,600 minority lives alone.

For all the criticism of stop-and-frisk, countless African American and Hispanic residents loved it. Those who talked to Mac Donald begged for more proactive policing, she’s written. “Why are they hanging out in crowds on the corners?” one man asked about youths in his neighborhood back in 2015. “Can’t you arrest them for loitering?”

“I think they should put [stop-and-frisk] back,” another told her. “The criminals feel more comfortable [without it]; it’s easier to get their hands on guns.”

NYPD recorded highest stop-and-frisk numbers last year since 2015
Did stop-and-frisk go too far? Politically, you have to say yes: NYPD critics who’d been complaining from the earliest Giuliani years, made it a cause célèbre, and Bill de Blasio rode the issue all the way to the mayoralty.

Meanwhile, Kelly responded to the public’s complaints: Stops peaked just below 700,000 in 2011, and were down by more than two-thirds before de Blasio took over, and his “new” commissioner (Bratton again) basically ordered an end to it. They fell to just 11,008 in 2018.

Yes, crime kept falling even as stops dropped: The NYPD adopted other tactics — and included greatly increased use of technology, aka “precision policing,” so it can ID the most likely offenders without doing as much “street work.”

Note that much of the money to buy that technology came from Manhattan DA Cy Vance — who’s received billions in settlement payments in the years since the 2008 fiscal crisis.

Plus, Bratton in his first year got the City Council to agree to boost the size of the force by about 2,000 officers.