Bloomberg, New York, and Stop-and-Frisk: An Era of Hard Legacies

New York City Mayors Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg have contributed greatly to the evolution of policing, presenting a unique era of aggressive tactics in New York City. Bloomberg, in particular, is notorious for his endorsement of the “Stop, Question, and Frisk” (SQF) strategy employed under his administration. SQF gave New York Police Department officers the authority to stop and search anyone under reasonable suspicion of being involved in criminal activity. The results of tactics like SQF are patterns of discrimination against people of color and damage to low-income communities and neighborhoods.

Over the years of Bloomberg’s support for SQF, people of color were subject to frequent racial profiling, intrusive and violent searches, and often unprompted questioning. Of the millions of “random” pat-downs conducted by NYPD officers during Bloomberg’s 12-year tenure, a disproportionate 87 percent of people patted down were African-American or Latinx. Only 6 percent of those people gave officers a reasonable cause for arrest.

One notable instance of SQF is the 2011 stopping of a Black 17-year-old by the name of Alvin in Harlem. The NYPD officers present at the scene were incentivized to act because Alvin was “looking” at them suspiciously with his hood on. One officer threatened to arrest Alvin for “being a [EPLETIVE] mutt” while another threatened to break his arm and punch him in his face. In line with statistics from all over the city, the officers did not find that Alvin had broken the law in any way and eventually let him go.

Interactions with the police like this one continue to generate serious emotional, psychological, and physical trauma to both individuals and communities. The public, particularly shocked by Alvin’s young age and the height of escalation, was outraged; yet it gave Bloomberg no reason to doubt his unwavering support for SQF, justifying the tactic and, sometimes unreasonable, police action with results. At the time, Bloomberg credited SQF for driving down crime rates in New York City, stating, “Every day, [Police] Commissioner [Ray] Kelly and I wake up determined to keep New Yorkers safe and save lives. And our crime strategies and tools, including stop, question, frisk, have made New York City the safest big city in America.”

If Bloomberg did indeed use proper rationale for attributing low crime rates to SQF, crime in New York should have risen dramatically in 2013 when newly elected mayor Bill de Blasio abandoned Bloomberg’s SQF policy. Under the de Blasio administration, however, NYPD street stops declined by roughly 98 percent and crime rates plummeted to new lows not seen since the 1950s.

At the United States Naval Academy’s 2019 Leadership Conference in January, Bloomberg continued to praise SQF as being responsible for the significant drop in homicides during his tenure. In response to a question about the targeting of African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans under SQF, Bloomberg responded, "We focused on keeping kids from going through the correctional system. Kids who walked around looking like they might have a gun, remove the gun from their pockets and stop it.”

SQF, a pillar of Bloomberg’s political legacy, finally lost Bloomberg’s glowing accolades last month in the days just before the former mayor announced his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg apologized for SQF while speaking at the Christian Cultural Center, a majority Black church in Brooklyn. “I can’t change history. However, today, I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong,” he said. Yet even as he acknowledged the negative impacts which ignorant law enforcement had on such communities, it is unclear as to whether or not candidate Bloomberg actually cares about the effects of SQF policies on communities of color. In stating that “The fact is, far too many innocent people were being stopped while we tried to do that. And the overwhelming majority of them were Black and Latino,” Bloomberg overlooks the fact that police used racial profiling in their routine SQF’s by reducing statistics on the disproportonate number of people of color subjected to SQF as being a matter of coincidence and inevitability as opposed to being conflated with prejudice and intention. Regardless, Bloomberg’s apology comes six years too late: the damage, injustice, and long-term trauma to communities of color is already done.

Under Bill de Blasio’s administration, one would assume that policing practices in NYC have finally evolved to ensure a safe and equitable city. This could not be further from the truth. Since January 2014, a Black police officer and now-Sergeant in the NYPD, Edwin Raymond, has been recording his interactions with his partners and those in positions of authority. The purpose of these recordings is to journal his attempts to change the NYPD's “inherently racist” policies. These policies are ones that Raymond believes contrasted with the characteristics of a new era of policing.

Once his journey gained momentum, on behalf of other minority officers, in August 2015, Raymond and 11 other officers, all of whom are Black or Latino, joined together as the whistleblowing group NYPD 12 to file a class-action suit against the department for requiring that police officers meet quotas for arrests and court summons in whichever location they are stationed. If quotas are not met, officers often faced demotion or the threat of being dismissed. Despite the NYPD repeatedly claiming that quotas do not exist, the suit accuses the NYPD of violating minorities’ Fourteenth Amendment rights as well as a 2010 state ban on such quotas.

As risky as it was for the NYPD 12 to speak out, confirming the existence and active use of quotas was and is crucial in informing the public on law enforcement’s prioritization of the quantity of arrests and court summons over the severity of the crime(s) behind them. Even more so, the quota system is meticulously designed to concentrate arrests and court summons in minority communities. In an interview with Jennifer Gonnerman from The New Yorker, Sergeant Raymond admits that the NYPD does not enforce quotas in predominantly White areas like Park Slope. Instead, they are enforced in areas already deemed high-crime like Flatbush, Crown Heights, Harlem, and Mott Haven. Not coincidentally, these neighborhoods are predominantly populated by people of color. Drawing a parallel from the way Bloomberg painted the disproportionate effects of policing of communities of color as a coincidence in his apology, racial profiling in the status quo is certainly not up to fate. By using people of color as a means to generate revenue, arrest quotas simply extend the impact of the SQF strategy that criminalized minority communities for minor offenses.

The NYPD 12’s courage in exposing and taking action against the quota system made it clear that racial profiling is not a thing of the past. It is alive and well in New York City, and masking it through claims of fairer policing and intentional lack of transparency between communities of color and those with uniforms is equivalent to ignoring the fact that racism is systemic. Furthermore, the fact that the NYPD 12 are all people of color presents more gray areas on what compromises are necessary between minority communities and the NYPD. As it is justified for minority communities to protest the politics and morality of policing entirely due to past traumas, the NYPD 12’s choice to change the system from within complicates fairer policing to more than just a question of policy. It is a question of framework. The distrust that has built up over the beginning of the 21st century renders the fight for fairer policing something politicians like Bloomberg and de Blasio ignore: unlike the majority of what our political discourse has consisted of, issues of policing cannot be categorized into binary structures. Instead, we must have more nuanced discussions on how, amidst fear and fading optimism, our understanding of justice is not akin to law in our realities.

From Bloomberg’s SQF era and late apology to the quota system, the relationship between communities of color and the NYPD has been strained, and police legitimacy has not been easy to restore. Nonetheless, SQF has created a legacy of racial inequality, distrust, and lack of transparency and a new era of policing New Yorkers under Bill de Blasio that may not be so new after all.