Never mind. Democrats don’t need Michael Bloomberg, after all.
When news broke two weeks ago that the former New York mayor was looking to enter the presidential race, I said Democrats needed him the same way Republicans needed Donald Trump.
Bloomberg would say what needs to be said, I thought. While every other Democratic candidate was talking about abortions for trans women and free health insurance for illegal immigrants, Bloomberg could have been the one to say: Okay, that’s enough, children. Let’s talk about reducing crime and fixing public schools.
But, no. Bloomberg has decided he doesn’t want to be that person. He instead wants to be like every other Democrat kneeling before the social justice mob that now governs the party.
Speaking Sunday at a black church in New York, Bloomberg apologized for the perfectly fine “stop and frisk” policy he instituted while running the city.
“I got something important really wrong,” he said. “I didn’t understand that back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities. I was totally focused on saving lives, but as we know, good intentions aren’t good enough.”
Bloomberg is probably not actually remorseful over a policy he championed for years. But he knows there is no securing the Democratic nomination without first bowing to social justice ideology.
Stop and frisk allowed police officers to target crime-heavy areas in New York by stopping and questioning individuals who authorities might suspect of wrongdoing. The theory was that crime would fall in areas where people know at any moment they might be apprehended.
In 2013, a federal judge ruled against the policy, which liberals said unfairly targeted minorities. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio formally ended it when he was elected.
That’s too bad for a lot of dead people because there’s plenty of evidence that the policy worked. Stops increased from 2002 to 2011, and throughout that time, the murder rate fell.
Liberals like to point out that after stops peaked in 2011 and then began to decline, the murder rate also continued its decline. But that was only true until 2013 when it stopped falling and even saw an uptick in 2015. Besides, it’s not the whole city we’re concerned about. It’s the specific areas where crime is high. Numbers tell a different story there.
Even the liberal New York Daily News reported in 2014 that after East New York and Brownsville, “two of the city’s toughest precincts,” saw stops in those areas plummet, the number of shootings spiked.
Bloomberg had every reason to promote the success of the policy. But he, like every other Democrat, is pledging allegiance to the social justice movement instead.
