Billionaire and then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed in 2011 that the city had “virtually no discrimination” and “virtually no racial problems.” That year, police stops of Black and Latinx people reached their peak under the stop-and-frisk policy he supported. But you see virtually no discrimination based on ethnicity,” Bloomberg said in November 2011 at the annual conference of Club de Madrid, a nonprofit group of former heads of state. “You have virtually no racial problems or tensions here,” Bloomberg, who is now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, added in a video of the speech posted on YouTube in 2012. In 2011, stops by New York City police hit their highest number, with nearly 700,000 people stopped ― and 87% of those stopped were either Black (53%) or Latinx (34%), per data from the New York Civil Liberties Union. After years of defending stop-and-frisk, Bloomberg apologized late last year for the policy.

Source: Huffington Post February 21, 2020 00:55 UTC