The Aspen Times quoted Bloomberg as saying: “Cities need to get guns out of [the]… hands” of individuals who are “male, minority, and between the ages of 15 and 25.”
The full audio of the speech further revealed the racially-charged tone of Bloomberg’s comments, wherein he bluntly said of young minorities, “throw them against the wall and frisk them,” and admitted “we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods…. [b]ecause that’s where all the crime is.”
“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 do not have any “long-term focus” because they believe they are doing to get killed anyway. 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 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.”
Bloomberg suggested a lot of people do not understand that knowing the population which commits crime was foundational to stop and frisk.
He suggested “other cities” fail by not getting guns out of the hands of the young minorities. He said, “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.”
He said, “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.”
Bloomberg added, “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.”
The Aspen Institute is the think tank behind the Aspen Ideas Festival, a utopian conference for western elites that has earned mockery for its lofty and convoluted response to first-world problems.
tokenny says
LOL, pot calling the kettle black? A few thoughts:
You write this up like it occurred recently, it didn’t. Does the year 2015 ring a bell? Are you looking for the title of “Purveyor of misinformation”?
Racial rants didn’t stop you from voting for Trump (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/trump-racism-comments/588067/) Why should a few words from a democrat concern you now?
“Are Democrats the Real Racist”, you seem to be implying the Republicans are racist and after some investigative journalism you found a democrat who is possibly a racist.
Pat yourselves on the back, you lower the candidate bar by electing Trump!