June 28, 2013

Bloomberg: "We disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little"

I often advise readers to learn lessons from the success of 21st Century New York City: do as they do, not as they say. But crime-fighting billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg is getting old and close to retirement, so today he just flat out said what he does. From the New York Post:
Bloomberg: 'We disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little' in stop-frisk checks 
By YOAV GONEN and JENSEN WERLEY 
Mayor Bloomberg claimed that people of color should be stopped and frisked more -- not less -- while whites are stopped too frequently. 
"I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they say," Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show, in response to the City Council passing two bills aimed at reining in the controversial policing tactic. 
"I don't know where they went to school but they certainly didn't take a math course. Or a logic course.” 
... The mayor was referring to statistics showing that a majority of serious crimes in the city are carried out by young men of color. 
Eighty seven percent of all stops last year were for blacks or latinos, who constituted 90 percent of murder suspects, according to city stats. Only nine percent of stops were for white people, who made up 7 percent of all murder suspects. 
“People say, well you know, cops shouldn't be stopping so many of any one group,” he said. “The cops' job is to stop so many of groups fitting the description. It's society's job to make sure that no one group is disproportionately represented as potential perpetrators. 
"That's not the test. The test is are you stopping a disproportionate percentage of people who fit the description that witnesses or victims have come up with of crimes that have been committed.

Keep in mind that Bloomberg has been wildly popular with the media during his 12 years as mayor, in large part because of his success at keeping crime down and driving NAMs out of increasing amounts of New York. For example, there was a term limit, of the kind that has caused inconvenience to rulers like Erdogan and Putin, but was swept away by media acclamation to allow Bloomberg a third term. It also helps that Bloomberg employs a lot of journalists, whom he let spy on his clients through his $2,000 per month Bloomberg terminals.

47 comments:

Dave Pinsen said...

This brings to mind a post you wrote sometime back, about how since most successful, ambitious Republicans find highly remunerative work in the private sector, this weakens the GOP's bench for elective office (hence, weak RINOs such as McCain get challenged by even weaker candidates such as JD Hayworth, and the current best hope to primary Rubio is that former Army colonel with the quick trigger finger).

Since the Dems have a deeper bench, how do you explain the parade of mediocrities competing to replace Bloomberg?

carol said...

LOL that's the end of Bloomie..

countenance said...

Blacks whine about the death penalty being racist. The reality is that whites who are convicted of Murder-1 are more likely, perhaps twice as likely, actually to be executed than blacks who are convicted of Murder-1.

Anonymous said...

"That's not the test. The test is are you stopping a disproportionate percentage of people who fit the description that witnesses or victims have come up with of crimes that have been committed."

And the difference between this "test" and the horrors of profiling is...

Anonymous said...

How much did zombies get frisked?

Anonymous said...

The likes of Bloomberg could do as they do cuz they control what 'we' can say.

Anonymous said...

One thing for sure, white collar Wall Street criminals don't get frisked at all. If anything, they receive big cash and prizes for their crimes.

peterike said...

Despite Bloomie's petty nanny-state meddling, he has managed to continue what Giuliani started and kept the lid pretty tight on New York crime.

However, the Liberal psychos in the City Council are working overtime to reverse stop-and-frisk and no doubt everything else that's been effective.

I really worry that with the next Mayor New York is going to head back into a downhill slide of rampant, suicidal Liberalism. Thing is, so many people who live in New York now don't know what it was like in the 70s and 80s. For them, it's always been one of the safest cities in America. It could all fall apart very quickly.

DPG said...

New term: Kinsley Senility. When someone is so old they no longer care about committing "gaffes."

Anonymous said...

I really worry that with the next Mayor New York is going to head back into a downhill slide of rampant, suicidal Liberalism. Thing is, so many people who live in New York now don't know what it was like in the 70s and 80s. For them, it's always been one of the safest cities in America. It could all fall apart very quickly.

I see many opportunities for schadenfreude in the near future.

Anonymous said...

This is seriously awesome.

Anonymous said...

Anon said: If whites were being needless stopped for statistical massaging purposes are you telling me that a hyper litigious white New Yorker would not be suing the City and the ACLU or the ADL would not have his back?
.................................................................................

To be honest, I doubt the thought of such a lawsuit would even occur to hyper-litigious, melanin deficient New Yorkers. Do they sue when airport security searches their luggage in order to maintain the fiction that airborne terrorism is non-denominational?

-The Judean People's Front

Steve Sailer said...

Yes, there are more than a few whites to frisk, although they are declining in numbers as New York gets ever more expensive:

I'm waiting for my man
Got 26 dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington 125
feelin' sick and dirty
for a day and a life
Huh, I'm waiting for my man

Hey white boy, what you doin' uptown
Hey white boy, you chasin' my women around
Pardon me sir, it's furthest from my mind
I'm just waitin' for a dear-dear friend of mine
I'm waiting for my man, come on

Here he comes, he's all dressed in black
PR shoes and a big straw hat
He's never early, he's always late
first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait
I'm waiting for my man

Anonymous said...

Lou Reed--- thanks for the trip down memory lane. What would $26 circa 1976 be worth today and you Sailer-reading NYC junkies -- what's a fix run these day?

Anonymous said...

I wonder how much of not yet ethnically cleansed and gentrified Manhattan is owned by Bloomberg?

Anonymous said...

"LOL that's the end of Bloomie.."

Maybe. The New York media have happily covered up the real point of zero tolerance i.e. the ethnic cleansing of black people, especially from Manhattan, for years so they won't want to make a fuss unless the media's ethnic double standard vis a vis Jewish politicans looks too blatant.

Anonymous said...

Obviously what Bloomberg says is true but it's been true everywhere for 50 years and the New York media lying about it is the primary reason nothing was done to reduce the problem.

So there have been *millions* of victims of violent crime who might not have been victims if the New York media hadn't lied.

So not only are the New York media responsible for millions of violent crimes in other cities that could otherwise have been prevented if they hadn't policed the PC Big Lie, they want to be able to be immune to the problem themselves.

**** them.

Geeky said...

Hey folks, the math here is much more complicated than what everyone is assuming, and Bloomberg's analysis is wrong.

With speeders, if blacks are 25% of speeders, they should be 25% of people pulled over. Why? Because you should be pulling cars over based on observed speed (since that is available to you), so the prop of blacks pulled over should track the prop of blacks among those who speed.

However, this frisking thing is a different matter entirely. If you only get to frisk a fixed number of people, proportion of black offenders and proportion of black friskees are not yoked. It could be best (in terms of catching as many criminals as possible) for _all_ of the people frisked to be black, even if blacks are much less than 100% of the perps.

But (and here it gets fun!) it is also conceivable that you should frisk blacks _less_ often than whites, if you have non-racial features that are stronger predictors than race. E.g., suppose blacks are 60% of all thugs, but if the white thugs all wear red jackets, and white non-thugs rarely wear red jackets, and you can only frisk a limited number of people, then you would do better to frisk only whites in red jackets and no blacks at all!

Anonymous said...

"... weak RINOs such as McCain get challenged by even weaker candidates such as JD Hayworth..."

JD Hayworth was a local sports guy on TV. I couldn't imagine a weaker candidate.

Anonymous said...

Christine Quinn, the likely future mayor, says that stop and frisk should be "reformed". Hers is a mend-it-don't-end-it position. The leading GOP candidate and the guy I'll be voting for, Joe Lhota, supports stop and frisk fully and as is.

"LOL that's the end of Bloomie.."

Nope. Politics is all about hypocrisy. He can say things that a governor of Georgia, for example, cannot.

Anonymous said...

Steve, when you lived in a Chicago's Uptown neighborhood lakefront high rise, did you ever notice one of the needle exchange mobile units. For decades there has been one twice a week in front of Truman Community College right next to the Wilson Ave El Stop. This was about a 1/2 block from my old apartment on Malden.

You would think that all the people lined up around the block would look like the bedraggled homeless and the underclass.

I was always surprised at the number of hipsters and downward trajectory white junkies who obviously grew up in the suburbs.

My bet is that NYC has plenty of white junkie hipsters who would prefer to live in the city, SQF helps to force them to move back to the suburbs where they grew up. That way when they OD its not on NYC's dime to take care of them. Nor are they exposing themselves as potential crime victims.

The other option white junkies have is to purchase their drugs using a courier service. "My Man" now delivers to their door.

Occasionally I had to work evening food delivery jobs catering to Chicago's elite Northside in order to make ends meet between IT contracts. Saw lots of obvious to your door drug transaction going down outside fancy addresses.

I bet the cops would rather force white junkies to go to the additional expense of using couriers then cruise bad neighborhoods to score.

You can argue whether stopping likely would be drug buyers is the best priority use of police resources but I contend the stops are not attempts at filling a quota.

Steve Sailer said...

Geeky says:

"But (and here it gets fun!) it is also conceivable that you should frisk blacks _less_ often than whites, if you have non-racial features that are stronger predictors than race."

A big problem is that these days not that many white people dress like drug addicts, but a lot of black people dress like drug dealers.

Anonymous said...

JD Hayworth was a local sports guy on TV. I couldn't imagine a weaker candidate.

If a six-term member of Congress is a weak candidate, I think it's gonna be hard to find any strong candidates.

Anonymous said...

Bloomberg employs a lot of journalists and pays them well. Any media personality who speaks out against him is betting that he will never be employed at a media organization that might be acquired by Bloomberg.

Anonymous said...


Anonymous said...
JD Hayworth was a local sports guy on TV. I couldn't imagine a weaker candidate.

If a six-term member of Congress is a weak candidate, I think it's gonna be hard to find any strong candidates.


Back in 2010 I remember Hugh Hewitt, RedState, The Free Republic, pulling out all stops to defend McCain from Hayworth. They trashed Hayworth as a "Ron Burgandy" boob. They actually believed McCain's "Build the darn fence" BS. I saw Hayworth on Lou Dobbs and thought he was both polished and informed, totally superior to the not very bright McCain.


Now once again Hewitt is in free fall for being "duped" by Rubio. That's pretty sad given how unimpressive Rubio is. Anyone who is not a reflexive Republican partisan hack should be able to see how worthless Rubio is. The folks at RedState and FreeRepublic seem to be catching on, perhaps they are reading Vdare, that the nation is doomed if CIR passes.

Anonymous said...

I saw Hayworth on Lou Dobbs and thought he was both polished and informed, totally superior to the not very bright McCain.

McCain has been getting a free ride off his war hero status forever. He's no Eisenhower. McCain is a dim bulb who got elected because of his good looks and stay at the Hanoi Hilton. He is basically a borderline moron who wasn't kicked out of Annapolis because of his flag rank ancestors.

Svigor said...

McCain has been getting a free ride off his war hero status forever. He's no Eisenhower. McCain is a dim bulb who got elected because of his good looks and stay at the Hanoi Hilton. He is basically a borderline moron who wasn't kicked out of Annapolis because of his flag rank ancestors.

Too bad smell-o-vision never took off. If it had, McCain couldn't be elected dog catcher. Worst case of halitosis I've ever smelled. Like, "OMG, is he dying from something, the poor man?" bad. He's also about 5'6", but TV's always been good for covering that sort of thing up.

alexis said...

Another New York difference:

Bernie Goetz- folk hero
George Zimmerman- satan

Anonymous said...

Why on Earth does anyone pay attention to Hugh Hewitt? The guy has been profoundly wrong about just about everything, from his ideological defense of the Iraq war to his insistence that Wall Street is full of Sarah Palin fans.

Anonymous said...

If Bloomberg's successor does intentionally undo all of his anti-crime work and the fallout for NYC is as bad as Mr. Sailer anticipates, would this not be somewhat of a good thing? Given the expense of the city, there would hardly be any "Collateral damage" [i.e. innocent bystanders] if the Manhattan Oasis fell to the ideology of the majority of its inhabitants.


ben tillman said...

Hey white boy, what you doin' uptown
Hey white boy, you chasin' my women around


It's "our women", but at least you're closer than Bowie was in his cover: "You chasin' all the women around".

For the record, when I lived in the east 90's, I did commute from Lexington & 125th to Connecticut for a week or two. I saw very interesting things.

Dennis Dale said...

Perhaps now that Bloomberg is almost done and gone the Good Thinkers of NY are rediscovering their sanctimony,
as if waking from a slumber. Time to get on record as opposing those "racist" policies before it's too late.

So they're getting their fix of self-righteousness now, but if they get what they pretend to want, their satisfaction will be as fleeting and costly as Lou Reed's high:

"I'm feeling good, feeling so fine,
until tomorrow but that's just another time..."

Anonymous said...

Not surprised that's what Bloomberg thinks, but I am surprised he admitted it publicly. It makes me wonder if all his public hand wringing over global warming is really just more smokescreen to keep the media on his side. Pretty embarrassing for the Democrats when in a city where well over 80 percent of registered voters are Dems they have lost 5 straight mayoral elections. Maybe the Dems will field a Daley Jr. like candidate who will continue to gentrify the city and drive out NAM's next election.

James Walker said...

Six Men Shot In Uptown Drive-By Shooting

CHICAGO (CBS) – Six people were shot and wounded in a drive-by shooting Friday night in front of a strip mall in the Uptown neighborhood described by the alderman and community residents as a “hot spot.”

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/06/28/five-men-shot-in-uptown/

North of Montrose/south of Lawrence is seeing some vibrant gang action these days.

LemmusLemmus said...

"One thing for sure, white collar Wall Street criminals don't get frisked at all. If anything, they receive big cash and prizes for their crimes."

Presumably, the aim of stop & frisk is to reduce crime. I doubt you can do much against white-collar crime by stopping & frisking traders on Wall Street.

Anonymous said...

"I don't know where they went to school but they certainly didn't take a math course. Or a logic course.”
++++++++++++++++

Simply priceless. Now if we could only get a billionaire to speak like this consistently.

Melendwyr said...

I really worry that with the next Mayor New York is going to head back into a downhill slide of rampant, suicidal Liberalism. Thing is, so many people who live in New York now don't know what it was like in the 70s and 80s. For them, it's always been one of the safest cities in America. It could all fall apart very quickly.

Wouldn't that be a pretty fantastic way to get greater society to 'wake up' about iSteve-ish concerns, peterike? The burned hand teaches best.

Perhaps we shouldn't be working so hard to keep our societies from playing with fire.

alexis said...

Not surprised that's what Bloomberg thinks, but I am surprised he admitted it publicly. It makes me wonder if all his public hand wringing over global warming is really just more smokescreen to keep the media on his side.

I suspect it is. When I bring up Bloomberg, I've had progs say, "Well, he's contributed a lot to environmental causes".

Mr. Anon said...

"I don't know where they went to school but they certainly didn't take a math course. Or a logic course.”

Perhaps they formed their opinions on crime in NYC by watching episodes of "Law and Order".

Mr. Anon said...

"peterike said...

I really worry that with the next Mayor New York is going to head back into a downhill slide of rampant, suicidal Liberalism. Thing is, so many people who live in New York now don't know what it was like in the 70s and 80s. For them, it's always been one of the safest cities in America. It could all fall apart very quickly."

I no more care about what happens to New York than I do about what happens to Afghanistan. New Yorkers view the rest of the nation with unveiled contempt. To hell with them. New York is a foreign country as far as I'm concerned.

ATBOTL said...

"Back in 2010 I remember Hugh Hewitt, RedState, The Free Republic, pulling out all stops to defend McCain from Hayworth. They trashed Hayworth as a "Ron Burgandy" boob. They actually believed McCain's "Build the darn fence" BS. I saw Hayworth on Lou Dobbs and thought he was both polished and informed, totally superior to the not very bright McCain.


Now once again Hewitt is in free fall for being "duped" by Rubio. That's pretty sad given how unimpressive Rubio is. Anyone who is not a reflexive Republican partisan hack should be able to see how worthless Rubio is. The folks at RedState and FreeRepublic seem to be catching on, perhaps they are reading Vdare, that the nation is doomed if CIR passes."

Yeah, JD Hayworth, at worst, is comparable to the typical Senator. The idea that he had some kind of deep flaw that made him unsuitable to replace the vile McCain is absurd. It's an example of the kind of misleading meme that seems to spread so easily among gullible conservatives.

The atmosphere at FR is barely distinguishable from a white nationalist site at this point. It's rather amazing how much it's changed. I remember in 2000, when there was a race riot in Seattle where a white man was beat to death by a mob of blacks when he tried to stop them from beating a white woman, FR's posters had little to say but PC platitudes. If that happened today, there would calls for revenge, denunciations of blacks in general etc.

Grassroots conservatives are moving towards nationalism. Success of nationalists in Europe is helping give nationalism legitimacy.

Anonymous said...

"Now once again Hewitt is in free fall for being "duped" by Rubio."

This is hilarious. Jews dupe Rubio and then act like they are duped by him.

I notice a lot of devious way to pull stuff.
Take the fat guy in LOST. He is clearly a fat joke. But he's done straight, and so the show could pretend it was being 'inclusive' and non-judgmental of a fat person. But there is no going around the fact that the main reason for casting him is he's a mega-fatbody.

So, it is a fat joke posing as non-joke. And if you notice that it's a fat joke, YOU are being prejudiced.
So, a fat joke is nominally not a fat joke if done straight, and if you notice it's a fat joke(which it really is), you are prejudiced for noticing such things.

Anonymous said...

"Now once again Hewitt is in free fall for being "duped" by Rubio."

This is hilarious. Jews dupe Rubio and then act like they are duped by him.


Hewitt's not Jewish. Besides, the country's elites are served by massive immigration. It's probably a self-correcting phenomenon. When combined state and Federal tax rates for the wealthy go to 80%, the elites will back down and start agitating for Operation Wetback 2, paving the way for massive deportations of not only illegal immigrants, but those who might have become legal through fake documents. Ditto for middle and working class Americans of all ethnicities whose jobs are displaced by the influx of foreigners that follows amnesty. Rich and poor alike, people always look out for Number 1.

Anonymous said...

Bloomberg is obliquely referring to a RAND study that shows that the NYPD stops whites at a rate that is disproportionate to their appearance in the crime suspect profiles. The study has not been refuted.

Anonymous said...

The atmosphere at FR is barely distinguishable from a white nationalist site at this point. It's rather amazing how much it's changed.

Wow. I remember when FR was basically neocon in nature. How things have changed. That's pretty cool, and quite amazing to me.

NOTA said...

The game is this: you have N searches you can do per day. (Each cop can only do so many in a day, and you only have so many cops.) Blacks and whites have different fractions of would-be muggers in your local population. Police have some notion of who is likely to be a mugger, and that notion may have different accuracy for blacks and whites.

I think, given this, you could choose parameters for your model that justified anything from always searching blacks to always searching whites, and you could make the optimal number of searches of blacks vs whites come out quite different from their fractions of the population, or their fractions of the muggers, or whatever.

As an extreme case: suppose 90% of the muggers are white, 10% are black, but that every black person on the street is a mugger, and only half the whites on the street are, and the police have no indication of which other than race.. Then the police rationally should search every black person they see (for maximum hit rate) until they hit their N per day, and only then start randomly searching white guys. The statistics would look pretty damning in this case--10% of the muggings are done by blacks, but they're 100% of the searches. And yet, that's the policy a Martian or a robot would choose, with no interest at all in race.

To make up another extreme example, suppose the police can always distinguish white muggers from the innocent population, but can't distinguish black muggers from the innocent population. Suppose the population is 50/50 black and white, and that 90% of the muggers are black, but that there are also more than N white muggers showing up per day. In this case, the police should search the N white muggers they can correctly identify per day, and never search any blacks--this takes N muggers off the street, whereas randomly searching blacks will take fewer muggers off the street.

And so on. If you incorporate the possibility that muggers will respond to your search tactics (when you search every black guy you see, black muggers go elsewhere, and you eventually end up never catching a mugger till you shift your strategy), things can get even more complicated.

NOTA said...

elvisd:

It also helps that it costs Bloomberg nothing to worry in public about AGW. If worrying about AGW in public meant he had to enact some very unpopular policy (like bringing about a doubling in gas prices), he would probably discover that the whole issue was pretty complicated and needed further study. All sorts of issues are easy to talk about when you will not be required to make any painful or unpopular tradeoffs based on them--it's kind-of like the Berkeley city council declaring the city a nuclear weapons free zone, all sweets and no broccolli at all.