Why are people calling Michael Bloomberg a “racist”?

“The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg: His racist stop-and-frisk policy as New York mayor can’t be forgotten.” (NYT):

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg said. “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 city.”

That could be considered a sexist (“male”) or ageist (“16-25”) statement just as easily as “racist” (“minorities”; but actually a “minority” race in NYC was white at the time).

CommonDreams:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that Democratic presidential candidate and businessman Michael Bloomberg is “just a billionaire trying to cover up authoritarian and racist policy” if he does not commit to providing relief to those ensnared by the racist stop and frisk policy he supported as mayor of New York City.

Why isn’t Mr. Bloomberg’s (“Mini Mike’s”?) identification of a gender ID and age category objectionable to anyone?

[Loosely related: My own definition of “racist”: someone who disagrees with me.]

24 thoughts on “Why are people calling Michael Bloomberg a “racist”?

  1. It seems there’s a hierarchy of filters. The first filter is always race, and it has differing priorities (you can get away with saying things about Asians that you can’t say about Hispanics or Blacks). If you make it past the race filter then you have to deal with the others, but their order isn’t always consistent.

  2. By the crime stats what he said isn’t untrue, it just happens to not be current times ‘nice.’ Telling lies is OK, violating clownworld tropes is an unforgivable sin. MiniMike has no chance in a national race but it sure is fun to watch the left eat a lefty for hatetruth speech.

  3. Perhaps you weren’t aware of this:

    Judge Rejects New York’s Stop-and-Frisk Policy

    By Joseph Goldstein
    Aug. 12, 2013

    A federal judge ruled on Monday that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in the city, repudiating a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy.

    The use of police stops has been widely cited by city officials as a linchpin of New York’s success story in seeing murders and major crimes fall to historic lows. The police say the practice has saved the lives of thousands of young black and Hispanic men by removing thousands of guns from the streets.

    But the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department resorted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” as it increased the number of stops in minority communities. That has led to officers’ routinely stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-practice-violated-rights-judge-rules.html

    • What does it prove to you, “Vince” that one Shira Scheindlin found something? Because someone anointed her a federal judge she has some special ability to read the Constitution? Does your copy of the US Constitution prohibit stop and frisk? Like where? A disproportionate number of crimes in NYC are committed by black males in black neighborhoods. That is a fact. Should the police disregard this inconvenient fact and equally stop and frisk white business women in office towers in midtown? That is what the Constitution mandates? I don’t think so.

      As an aside, there is no “Vince.” He is Phil’s alter ego, his straight man, his Bud Abbott to Phil’s Lou Costello, who makes witless comments in order to keep the banter going and maintain interest among the dear readers.

    • I don’t think I expressed any skepticism that there would be people who agreed that Bloomberg was “racist”. In fact, quite the opposite! My question was why people weren’t also piling on regarding him being a “sexist” and an “ageist”.

    • “A disproportionate number of crimes in NYC are committed by black males in black neighborhoods. That is a fact.”

      Is it actually a fact though? If police spent any effort in policing white collar crime then your “fact” might not look so good.

    • In addition to the fourth amendment rights argument, second amendment really makes the NYC regulations against guns illegal.

  4. My own definition of “racist”: someone who disagrees with me.

    This is an odd statement. Why have you decided to come up with your own personal definition of a word? Do you do that with other words?

    • I’ve just realized that Phil is a Russian spy!
      He disclosed he did not vote for the right candidate! And why?
      In his own words, it’s because his vote does not matter wherever he lives. He lives in Soviet Russia!

  5. Bloomberg’s administration was by far the most competent in the country during his tenure.

    The secret: he brought in senior managers from Bloomberg LP, gave them the list of appointments to fill, and had them run a meritocratic hiring process to find high performing candidates from around the country.

    To my knowledge this was the only time in American history that experiment was conducted. Too bad we are unlikely to ever see it repeated on a national level.

    • >Bloomberg’s administration was by far the most competent in the country during his tenure.

      That’s on par with Hillary being the most qualified person to run for President. Bloomberg’s mayorality was more beneficial to Bloomberg’s ego and pocketbook than it was to us plebes he had to stoop to govern.

      Bloomberg rode on Giuliani’s coat-tails of reduced crime and anti-social behaviour. He appeased the labor unions by giving them rich contracts. He took control of the schools and they did not get better. He bungled oversight on the CityTime payroll project.

      Implementing the 311 phone system for contacting city departments was a job well done. Beyond that, I would consider him on par with our current Mayor, Bill DeBlasio.

      Bloomberg is a smart man of great accomplishment in business. He is no statesman. I volunteered for him when he ran the first time. I held my nose in voting for him the second time. When he ran a third time, I voted for his opponent and regretted my previous two votes.

    • John: Bloomberg was mayor from 2002 through 2013. Wasn’t that part of the period in which financial services grew tremendously as a percentage of the U.S. economy? (see https://www.cfr.org/event/finance-industry-and-its-impact-us-economy-after-great-recession ) If so, wouldn’t that have given Bloomberg a huge tailwind? How effective would he have been at running Baltimore, Buffalo, or Newark?

      Education is an important function of city government, right? New York State schools don’t perform as well as Florida and Texas once adjusted for demographics (see https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/upshot/surprise-florida-and-texas-excel-in-math-and-reading-scores.html ). The school system spends roughly twice as much pupil as the U.S. average (see https://nypost.com/2019/05/21/nyc-spends-double-the-national-average-on-education-has-little-to-show-for-it/ ).

      But even if we can agree that he was an effective steward of taxpayer funds, circling back to the original post, why don’t people attack him as a “sexist” or “ageist”?

    • @PhilG:
      Bloomberg did not get much credit for breaking our economic dependency on financial services. In the wake of the financial crisis, he managed to convince the big tech (Facebook, Twitter, etc) to open offices in NYC and he poured tons of money into tech incubators and advertising and schmoozing with VC. That worked. As a result, thousands upon thousands of laid off engineers, quants, and other tech workers were absorbed by large Internet companies–and at good salaries too. The Silicon Alley grew to play in the same tech league as Boston. That’s also a partial reason behind NYC chosen as the location of the Amazon HQ2.

      Bloomberg had plenty of accomplishments as our mayor. He was an efficient technocrat and a great administrator. His major weakness, which was obvious even then, is that he is a horrible politician. He cannot work well with political interests (remember, Bloomberg LLC is a private company–unlike, say, Uber). He switched affiliations twice and got zero political traction. His strategy has been to pour big bucks in support of his party of choice (does this sound familiar?) and the functionaries would take the money and jettison him.
      Compare him to Trump who had to play nice with NY politicians his whole life. That’s why he developed the traits that remind me of Mafia don. Also consider Rudy Giuliani, Bloomberg’s popular predecessor, who was often called Duce Giuliani back in the day.

  6. Because a tough-on-crime policy that catches disproportionate numbers of minorities is automatically deemed racist, even though they mostly prey on their own communities.

    I’d be interested in learning what pastors at African-American churches think, as they are the ones who see first-hand the ravages of crime and drugs on their communities.

    • He claims they weren’t, and aren’t, and are not going to be, all that upset about it. Bloomberg’s network runs pretty deep and he’s been building it for years. So far, I don’t think it’s damaged him. From 2015:

      https://www.aspentimes.com/news/michael-bloomberg-blocks-footage-of-aspen-institute-appearance/

      “When addressing his stop-and-frisk policies, Bloomberg relayed a story about a Baptist minister in Harlem who invited him to speak.

      “While I’m sitting there waiting for him to introduce me, he said to his congregation, ‘You know, if every one of you stopped and frisked your kid before they went out at night, the mayor wouldn’t have to do it,’” Bloomberg said. “And so I knew I was going to be OK with that audience.”

      At least one of his campaign offices has been vandalized recently, though.

      https://nypost.com/2020/02/13/mike-bloomberg-ohio-campaign-office-vandalized/

      “Photos show the signs also read read “broken windows, broken homes” and “a billion dollars for a billion collars” or arrests.”

  7. Don’t worry, eventually it will be. Right now, the most important thing for his adversaries is to wage war on his connection with mayors and African Americans to put the brakes on his “Velvet Guerilla” campaign. Warren was supposed to be the point person on the gender front of that war, but she is fading. Therefore it’s more important than ever to try to make sure Bloomberg doesn’t keep gaining momentum in the crucial upcoming primaries, and they’re scrambling a little, but fear not – the longer he goes on, the nastier and more intense the attacks will become.

    My guess is that they’re trying the best attacks first, the most poll-tested, and working hard to frame him before he can define himself.

    In one very important sense, Bloomberg sealed his fate with his own words when he decided to reverse his decision not to run, which he publicly stated on March 21, 2019:

    “UNLESS – I was willing to change all my views and go on what CNN called an Apology Tour.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1vF6M34-ns

    He asked for it, and he’s gonna get it.

  8. “Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg said. “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 city.”

    This statement is incorrect. The correct number is 97%.

  9. Oh Boy Here It Comes Department:

    Drudge is reporting in an “EXCLUSIVE” that “Sources close to the Bloomberg campaign” are saying that Bloomberg is considering Hillary Clinton for VP. I believe this is a selective leak, to see how it moves the needles.

    http://www.drudgereport.com

    • Can a billionaire be that stupid? Selecting her as VP isn’t political suicide, it is real suicide. He really is too short for this ride.

  10. Bloomberg has other “interesting” opinions too. A complaint filed against Bloomberg alleges that in the presence of a large group of employees, he shouted this at a female employee who was having difficulty finding a nanny: “It’s a f*ing baby! All it does it eat and sh*t! It doesn’t know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn’t even have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building”

  11. Warren was on this fight at the beginning. Now, right on cue…just arrived in the inbox from the Washington Post:

    Mike Bloomberg for years has battled women’s allegations of profane, sexist comments

    The billionaire candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has denied accusations about his workplace conduct. But he won’t release women who sued him from confidentiality agreements.

  12. It must be nice to be able to drop $500 Million on empty advertising in order to attract these vicious responses. Who are the ads intended for, people who are literally asleep?

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