Trump slammed Bloomberg as 'racist' over stop-and-frisk, but the president has repeatedly championed the practice
- Trump and his campaign manager on Tuesday went after Bloomberg over stop-and-frisk, even though the president has repeatedly championed the policing practice in the past.
- This happened as a clip of Bloomberg forcefully defending stop-and-frisk, a practice widely viewed as racist and ineffective, resurfaced.
- Stop-and-frisk policing accelerated when Bloomberg was mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013.
- A federal judge deemed stop-and-frisk unconstitutional in 2013.
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President Donald Trump has repeatedly championed stop-and-frisk policing, but on Tuesday the president and his 2020 campaign manager condemned Michael Bloomberg as "racist" over the practice as a video of the former New York City mayor touting it resurfaced on social media.
Benjamin Dixon, a podcaster, on Monday tweeted a clip of Bloomberg defending the stop-and-frisk program in 2015. In the clip, which quickly went viral, Bloomberg could be heard condoning blatant racial profiling by police.
"Ninety-five percent of your murders - murderers and murder victims - fit one M.O.," Bloomberg said in the recording. "You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That's true in New York, that's true in virtually every every city."
"We put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes. That's true. Why do we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them," Bloomberg added.
The remarks are seemingly from an Aspen Institute event Bloomber spoke at in February 2015. Bloomberg's representatives asked the Aspen Institute not to air the footage of his comments, the Aspen Times reported later that month.
The Trump campaign went after Bloomberg on stop-and-frisk, even though the president has been a vocal supporter of the practice
As the clip went viral on Tuesday alongside the hashtag #BloombergIsARacist, Trump and his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, joined in.
In a tweet that was quickly deleted, Trump on Tuesday morning said, "WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST."
Meanwhile, Parscale in a tweet decried the video as "horrible" and Bloomberg as a "racist," questioning whether Bloomberg Politics would write that "their boss is a complete racist." The Trump campaign has barred Bloomberg News from events due to its policy of not investigating the former New York City mayor and billionaire, who owns the publication.
But, in the past, Trump was a vocal proponent of stop-and-frisk.
"I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically," Trump said in September 2016. "You understand, you have to have, in my opinion, I see what's going on here, I see what's going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk. In New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked. Now, we had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you could do."
Trump has also tweeted in support of stop-and-frisk.
Bloomberg slammed Trump in a statement on Tuesday: "Make no mistake Mr. President: I am not afraid of you and I will not let you bully me or anyone else in America. Between now and November, I will do everything I can to defeat you whether I am on the ballot or not."
The Trump campaign's increase in attacks on Bloomberg came as a new Quinnipiac poll from Monday showed him in third among 2020 Democrats, despite his decision to skip the early voting states - including the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
Bloomberg has apologized for stop-and-frisk, which was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge
The former New York City mayor, who is now running for the 2020 Democratic nomination, apologized for stop-and-frisk shortly before he hopped in the presidential race in November.
"I was wrong," Bloomberg said in mid-November. "And I am sorry."
Stop-and-frisk has been widely decried as racist and ineffective. In 2013, a federal judge deemed the practice as unconstitutional and a "policy of indirect racial profiling."
In New York City, the stop-and-frisk program empowered police to detain and question people on the street and elsewhere if they were suspected of a crime. Black and Latino people were disproportionately targeted under this policy, which did not begin under Bloomberg but accelerated during his tenure - police recorded over five million stops while he was in office.
Defenders of stop-and-frisk contended it prevented crime, but evidence suggests otherwise.
The policy was essentially abandoned under Mayor Bill de Blasio, with stops decreasing 76% in his first term. Though there was an increase in murders in 2019 from 2018, the city has still seen historically low crime levels since moving away from stop-and-frisk. Despite the rise last year, murders were still 85.9% below 1990 levels, Reuters reported last month, and the overall major crime rate continued to fall (it's gone down nearly 82% since 1990).