Being an apologist for China’s genocidal Communist Party is not even former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s worst quality.
The 2020 Democratic primary candidate is also a bare-faced liar.
Bloomberg claimed in an interview this week with CBS News’ Gayle King that “nobody asked” him about the controversial stop-and-frisk program he oversaw as mayor until he ran for president. This is not even close to being true, but let’s back up for a second.
In November, as Bloomberg teased his 2020 presidential campaign, he apologized at an event in South Carolina for stop and frisk, under which police officers stopped, searched, and sometimes detained random civilians in crime-ridden New York City neighborhoods.
“I got something important wrong,” said the former mayor. “I got something important really wrong … we could and should have acted sooner and acted faster to reduce the stops. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
This week, King said to Bloomberg that some people were suspicious of the timing of his apology.
“The mark of an intelligent, competent person is when they make a mistake, they have the guts to stand up and say, ‘I made a mistake, I’m sorry,'” Bloomberg retorted.
King noted, “We don’t question your belief that you made a mistake. I think the question is the timing that you realized you made the mistake.”
“Well, nobody asked me about it before I started running for president, so come on,” Bloomberg said. “I think we were overzealous at the time to do it. Our intent was to do anything we could to stop the carnage, the murder rate.”
He added, “Should’ve, would’ve, and could’ve? I can’t help that. … I’m sorry. I apologize. Let’s go fight the NRA and find other ways to stop the murders and incarceration.”
King did not fact-check Bloomberg for his egregious “nobody asked me” lie (because what else do you expect?), so let’s do that now.
For starters, as mayor of New York City, Bloomberg’s pet law enforcement program was met with fierce and constant pushback from civil rights groups, including the New York state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, and the Bronx Defenders. They filed an actual, honest-to-goodness class-action lawsuit. There were even marches — literal marches in the streets — in New York City in 2012 over the controversial policy.
No one had to ask Bloomberg to defend stop and frisk. He did it repeatedly over the years without prompting, precisely because it was a topic of debate. In 2013, for example, the former mayor authored an op-ed for the Washington Post, titled “Stop and Frisk Keeps New York Safe,” wherein he decried a court ruling that found the program unconstitutional. That same year, he conceded in a radio interview that perhaps the policy was being enforced too zealously, as noted by Business Insider.
“I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” Bloomberg said.
Later, in January 2019, he said stop and frisk’s enforcers “focused on keeping kids from going through the correctional system … kids who walked around looking like they might have a gun, remove the gun from their pockets and stop it.”
A couple of months later, Bloomberg apologized for the entire thing. Please ignore the part where his charge of heart coincides almost perfectly with the launch of his 2020 candidacy. Now let’s go get the NRA!
