Bloomberg: 'All Crime' is in Minority Areas; 'Throw Them Against Wall & Frisk Them'
Leaked audio from 2015 speech resurfaces
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Presidential candidate and former Mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg, is facing backlash for an audiotape of him defending an aggressive strategy of policing minority neighborhoods during a 2015 speech to the Aspen Institute.
In the speech, Bloomberg pushed the idea of cities taking action on instituting and enforcing gun bans.
“Cities need to get guns out of [the]… hands” of individuals who are “male, minority, and between the ages of 15 and 25.," The Aspen Times quoted Bloomberg.
But the audio speech in its entirety revealed Bloomberg’s comments were also racially charged.
Speaking about minorities, Bloomberg said, “throw them against the wall and frisk them,” admitting “we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods…. [b]ecause that’s where all the crime is.”
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President Donald Trump's campaign and associates posted clips from the speech, which has since gone viral.
Trump also shared the clip on his twitter, saying:
"WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST!”
The post has been deleted.
“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one [unintelligible],” Bloomberg says to the mostly white crowd.
“You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York; it’s true in virtually every city in America.”
He said, “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people getting killed. The first thing you need to do to help that group is keep them both alive.”
He suggested these young men don't have any “long-term focus” due to the belief they will be killed.
So, “it is a joke to have a gun, it’s a joke to pull the trigger. And in New York, before Giuliani got elected, we had 2,300 murders. When he left the office that was down to 660 murders, when I left office, it was down to 333 murders a year, and it was all the same group. No one in New York gets murdered. If you get murdered, the first thing we want to do is, ‘What were selling?’ or ‘Who were your family members?’. There is no other kind of murder, whatsoever.”
Omg! Leaked audio of Mike Bloomberg talking about the high crime rates among urban minorities.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 11, 2020
“And the way to get the guns out of the kids hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them” #BloombergIsARacist pic.twitter.com/MkONUhQQpX
All the money in the world can’t undo this
— Brad Parscale - Text TRUMP to 88022 (@parscale) February 11, 2020
“The way you get guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall.” pic.twitter.com/t4k0jRVJRR
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Bloomberg also implied that people fail to understand that knowing the population which commits crime was foundational to stop and frisk.
He went on to suggest that “other cities” fail by not getting guns out of the hands of the young minorities.
He added, “you have to spend money on your police department, A lot of people don’t like the fact that is what you do, that that is what stop and frisk is all about.”
Bloomberg added: “People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana, they’re all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true, and why we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the first thing we can do for people is stop them from getting killed.”
“We did a calculation on how many people would have been dead if we hadn’t brought down the murder rate and gotten guns off the street. And the way you got the guns out of the kids’ hands was to throw them against the wall and frisk them."
"They say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get caught,’ so they don’t bring the gun. They may still have the gun, but they leave it at home.”
