Opinion | The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg

Bloomberg is blanketing the airwaves with slick ads and glamouring liberals into amnesia and acquiescence. These liberals are then openly gaming out scenarios in which Bloomberg is the last, best option.

They don’t recognize that Bloomberg is the master of this sort of emotional manipulation. During his 2001 campaign for mayor, he ran ads that The New York Times noted focused on old crime fears.

“The scenes, set to dramatic synthesizer music punctuated by sharp blasts of percussion, come from what could well be called ‘N.Y.P.D. Bloomberg,’” The Times reported. “They seem calibrated to throw fear into the hearts of the citizenry at the thought of crime mushrooming again in a post-Giuliani New York City.”

During a campaign debate that year, Bloomberg, a Republican at the time, was asked how prevalent he believed racial profiling was in the New York Police Department. His answer is fascinating to examine in retrospect. He said: “In terms of the actuality, it is probably a very small number of police officers. Most police officers in this city work very hard. They are not racist thugs.”

But then he turned them into just that, making them part of a citywide system of racial profiling. Even the police objected. When Bloomberg was finally forced last fall to apologize for stop-and-frisk so he could run for president, Patrick Lynch, president of the city’s Police Benevolent Association, issued a blistering statement:

“Mayor Bloomberg could have saved himself this apology if he had just listened to the police officers on the street. We said in the early 2000s that the quota-driven emphasis on street stops was polluting the relationship between cops and our communities. His administration’s misguided policy inspired an anti-police movement that has made cops the target of hatred and violence, and stripped away many of the tools we had used to keep New Yorkers safe.”

In 2012, after million of stops, Bloomberg stood up in a church in Brownsville, Brooklyn, among the neighborhoods hardest hit by the policy, and declared that racial profiling was banned in the Police Department. “We will not tolerate it,” he said.

That was a Donald Trump-level lie.

The next year a federal judge ruled that the way the city used stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional because it amounted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”