Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "stop and frisk" police policy could hinder his potential run as a Democratic presidential candidate because of how it affected black and Latino men.
"The evidence is clear that stop-and-frisk was not what drove the decline in crime," New York City Councilman Brad Lander, who clashed with Bloomberg about the policy, told Politico. "I don't know why anyone would continue to support it, especially someone running in a Democratic primary in 2020."
While Bloomberg was mayor from 2002 to 2013, police conducted "Terry stops," during which they could stop a person and question them and even search them.
The policy has come under fire through the police abuse debate, but that's not all that could hinder Bloomberg, said Neal Kwatra, a Democratic operative who has worked on the campaigns of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and current Mayor Bill de Blasio.
"When you couple [stop-and-frisk] with him being out of step with where the party increasingly is on things like taxes, universal healthcare and financial regulation, along with a more progressive base of the party having a louder voice, it creates challenges and obstacles he frankly didn’t have to navigate in his mayoralty," Kwatra said.
However, President Donald Trump has recently praised stop and frisk, which could hinder Bloomberg's presidential plans, and the former mayor himself recently said he thinks people want "low crime" and "don't want kids to kill each other."
"New York City had 650 murders a year when I came into office, and the toll fell heaviest on black and Hispanic young men," Bloomberg said. "We were determined to do everything possible to stop gun violence."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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