"Here's What Should Disqualify Michael Bloomberg New York's stop-and-frisk policy is just

[emmaverybo]

one example of the former mayor’s lack of respect for civil liberties “

Michael Bloomberg says he is sorry.

On Sunday, amid preparations for a presidential bid, the billionaire appeared at a black church in Brooklyn and apologized for stop-and-frisk, a method of policing that he championed as mayor of New York City, a method he defended even as evidence emerged that it intruded on and inconvenienced millions of innocent people, humiliating many.

The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino,” the New York Civil Liberties Union objected in 2012. “More than 4 million innocent New Yorkers were subjected to police stops and street interrogations from 2004 through 2011 ... Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports.” Those stats undermine stop-and-frisk defenders, who claim to this day that the NYPD only targeted “those whom they reasonably believed to be involved in crimes and armed.” How reasonable can that ostensible belief have been when it was wrong roughly 90 percent of the time?

But Bloomberg kept claiming that the noble end of reducing gun murders justified the authoritarian means of forcing millions to undergo intrusive frisks on the street, in spite of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures. He cited falling New York City murder rates to defend stop-and-frisk. As it turned out, the murder rate kept falling after Bloomberg’s successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, ended stop-and-frisk.

Should Sunday’s apology make civil libertarians more favorably disposed toward a Bloomberg candidacy? No. Stop-and-frisk is not the only reason to worry about the former mayor’s paternalistic, coercive tendencies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/bloomberg-civil-liberties/602239/

[msongs]

1. sad to say bloomie is not the only one with paternalistic coercive tendendcies nt

[Peacetrain]

2. My absolute biggest fear of Bloomberg.. is that we are making it a billionaire game

for the President.