De Blasio Touts Reductions in Stop-and-Frisk That Occurred Under Bloomberg

 

By Azi Paybarah and Brendan Cheney

Mayor Bill de Blasio recently sent out a fund-raising email in which he seemed to claim that he reduced stop-and-frisk by 97 percent — a drop that actually occurred almost entirely before he took office.

In the email, de Blasio recounted meeting with President-elect Donald Trump and telling him that over-using the tactic “creates a wedge” between police and local residents. He said that “not many people know precisely how much we have reduced the use of stop-and-frisk in New York City" and posed a question: 

“How much have we reduced the use of stop-and-frisk in New York City since its high point in 2011?” The answer, he said, is 97 percent. “I promised to fix it and we have,” he wrote in the email, which includes a link to make a donation.

But police stops decreased by 94 percent, from 203,500 in the first three months of 2012 to 12,497 during the last three months of 2013, while Michael Bloomberg was mayor. In fact, stop-and-frisk had been reduced so much during Bloomberg’s tenure that de Blasio’s first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, declared the problem “more or less solved” two weeks after de Blasio took office in January, 2014. 

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Source: Politico (via The Empire Report)