“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Mr. 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.”
He went on, describing policing tactics and saying, “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.” A few minutes later, Mr. Bloomberg said the goal is to remove guns from the streets, and said, “And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”
Mr. Bloomberg, in a statement Tuesday morning, argued that he “inherited the police practice of stop-and-frisk,” and acknowledged that it was overused. “By the time I left office, I cut it back by 95%, but I should’ve done it faster and sooner. I regret that and I have apologized — and I have taken responsibility for taking too long to understand the impact it had on Black and Latino communities,” he said.
While stop-and-frisk policing began under Mr. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, it expanded dramatically under Mr. Bloomberg’s administration. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the policy represented “indirect racial profiling” and violated civil rights.
President Trump, who has supported the stop-and-frisk policing tactic and who has been criticized for statements widely criticized as racist, on Tuesday tweeted the audio recording of Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks. In a Twitter post that he pinned to the top of his feed, Mr. Trump wrote, “Wow, Bloomberg is a total racist!” He deleted the post a short time later, but his campaign manager and his son, Donald Trump Jr., aggressively pushed the recording on social media.
