'Throw Them Against The Wall And Frisk Them': Bloomberg's 2015 Race Talk Stirs Debate

Bobby Allyn

February 11, 2020 / 8:03 am

caption: Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg generated new criticism on social media after a 2015 audio clip resurfaced in which Bloomberg defends aggressive police tactics targeting minority communities.

Audio from a 2015 speech in which former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defends aggressive police tactics in minority neighborhoods is recirculating online and generating fresh blowback.

Bloomberg made the remarks at the Aspen Institute on Feb. 5, 2015. In the audio, he can be heard saying: "95 percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25."

He continues: "That's true in New York. That's true in virtually every city in America. And that's where the real crime is. You've got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed."

Bloomberg's idea of a solution? Flooding minority neighborhoods with law enforcement.

"People say, 'Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana who are all minorities.' Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes that's true. Why'd we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids' hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them," Bloomberg says.

Both supporters of President Trump as well as progressive activists shared the speech on social media. Its resurfacing has brought new scrutiny about Bloomberg's views on criminal justice and minority communities as he spends more than $100 million on his 2020 presidential bid. Indeed, a new Quinnipiac University poll released Monday showed Bloomberg in third place nationally among Democrats, trailing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden. Much of Bloomberg's gains in the poll come at Biden's expense.

At the time the talk in 2015, the Aspen Times reported that Bloomberg's representatives sought to have video of the speech suppressed, asking the Aspen Institute to not distribute the footage. The institute agreed, but audio from the event in front of about 400 people was published by the conservative website The Daily Caller.

Responding to the comments, Stu Loeser, the former mayor's spokesman, told Newsday in 2015 that Bloomberg made the same kind of remarks while in office, defending the provocative statements as "indisputable, unfortunate facts."

"As he said hundreds of times, we need common-sense gun laws in Washington and policing focused on high-crime areas to stop them from getting killed," Loeser said in a statement at the time.

The Bloomberg campaign has not yet formally responded to a request for comment from NPR.

Before officially launching his run for the White House, Bloomberg delivered a surprising about-face and apologized for his support of stop-and-frisk, a centerpiece of his time as New York's mayor.

"I can't change history. History, today, I want you to know that I realize back then, I was wrong," Bloomberg said in November.

The police tactic was upheld in a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court as long as officers have "reasonable suspicion" that a crime may be afoot. But the practice has been assailed by critics who say officers abuse their discretion and overwhelmingly target minorities on false pretenses.

Bloomberg's previous advocacy of stop-and-frisk has been characterized as a vulnerability in his efforts to court the black and Hispanic vote in 2020. On Tuesday, President Trump tweeted — and then deleted — a post calling Bloomberg "racist."

A federal court in New York, in 2013, found that stop-and-frisk systemically violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of mostly black and Hispanic men in New York. The judge called the practice "indirect racial profiling" of young men of color.