Leaked audio of Democratic presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg calling for targeted police harassment of minorities, because ‘that’s where the real crime is,’ has gone viral with a boost from Trump.
“95 percent of your murderers — murderers and murder victims — fit one MO,” Bloomberg appears to say in audio leaked from an Aspen Institute speech in 2015.
“You can just take the description, xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, sixteen to twenty-five. That’s where the real crime is.”
The three-term New York mayor goes on to advise blanketing minority neighborhoods with cops — once again, because “that’s where the crime is” — and says the way to get guns off the streets is to “throw [minority youth] against the wall and frisk them.”
At the peak of the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, just over one percent of stops of nonwhite individuals produced a weapon (the percentage was slightly higher for whites, whom Bloomberg advises — in another video circulating under the #BloombergIsRacist hashtag — “frisking” less often).
The inflammatory audio, originally posted by political podcaster Ben Dixon, got a boost from an unexpected quarter when President Donald Trump retweeted it — only to delete it shortly thereafter. By then, however, it was already trending.
Several commenters observed that Bloomberg could spend hundreds of millions of dollars more — he’s already spent three-quarters of the money poured into the 2020 Democratic primary — and the audio would still float to the surface.
Bloomberg apparently had a premonition his speech might come back to bite him someday, as he specifically ordered the Aspen Institute not to distribute footage of his 2015 appearance. He was reportedly already considering a presidential run at the time, and likely figured his views wouldn’t go over well with the general public.
