Pushing back against critics of stop-and-frisk policing, Mayor Bloomberg Friday said it could be argued that the Police Department stops white people too many times and non-whites too little.
The comments made one day after the City Council passed two bills to rein in the controversial police tactic touched off a firestorm of criticism.
Speaking on his weekly radio show, Bloomberg sought to rebut critics who cite the high percentage of blacks and Hispanics stopped by the police as proof that stop-and-frisk has unfairly singled out minorities.
One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, Oh, its a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group. That may be. But its not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murders, Bloomberg said.
In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little, the mayor said. Its exactly the reverse of what theyre saying. I dont know where they went to school, but they certainly didnt take a math course, or a logic course.
Complaints in the black community about the aggressive use of stop-and-frisk policing have led to a federal lawsuit challenging the practice and fueled a passionate debate in the mayoral race.
Several mayoral hopefuls sharply criticized Bloomberg for his remarks Friday.
His comments weren't worthy of any elected official, much less the mayor of the city of New York, said Democrat Bill Thompson, the only black candidate in the race.
Another Democrat, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, urged followers on Twitter to retweet if they agreed that "Bloomberg's statement today that minorities are stopped and frisked too little is outrageous and out of touch.
Complaints in the black community about the aggressive use of stop-and-frisk policing have led to a federal lawsuit challenging the practice and fueled a passionate debate in the mayoral race.
To buttress the mayors remarks, his office released a set of statistics. The numbers showed that 87% of the people stopped under stop-and-frisk in 2012 were black or Latino, and that 9% were white. That same year, more than 90% of those identified as murder suspects were blacks or Latino; just 7% were white.
Critics of stop-and-frisk charge that such numbers are irrelevant. They charge that cops indiscriminately go after young black and Hispanic men on bogus grounds, and that nearly nine out of ten people who are stopped are innocent.
Thompson called a mid-afternoon news conference just to denounce Bloombergs comments. He claimed the mayor seemed to be suggesting that blacks and Latinos were automatically murder suspects.
I just found it to be an incredibly insulting moment, Thompson said.
De Blasio said the mayors comments ignored the fact that most of those who are stopped and frisked committed no crime.
Stop-and-frisk is being used with an incredibly broad brush, he said. And the best evidence in the world is the vast majority of those stopped are innocent.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said that she strongly disagreed with Bloombergs comments.
We have too many stops that overwhelmingly focus on young men of color, yielding very few weapons, she said.
Stop, question and frisk needs to be reformed significantly, precisely because young men of color are disproportionately stopped in New York.
