In 2010, I was working in my office on 116th Street in East Harlem when a man came in from the street to tell me that eight police officers had a teen up against the wall outside.

I followed him out to the street, and immediately saw the officers and the teen. I could not hear what was being said, but body language told an undeniable story: the police officers were completely surrounding the young man. The young man stood still, his back against the wall, as he glanced off into the distance. The expression on his face was almost absent, but something about it was so recognizable: defeat.

It broke my heart.

This was in the middle of Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year stint as the Mayor of New York, and seeing a young man of color be stopped and frisked was, devastatingly, normal.

To watch it happen put a pit in my stomach; it made my skin crawl; it made me enraged.

As a member of my community, and a city councilwoman who people trusted to stand up for them, I did not want to be a bystander to a human rights violation outside of my door. As an elected official who had taken an oath, I did not want to watch the constitutional rights of a young man be violated; a young man who deserved to have his rights be recognized and respected just as much as the officer who was ready to violate his privacy, and just as much as the mayor who had actively worked to expand stop and frisk.

I knew I did not run for office to condone these sorts of behaviors, and I’d spoken out often against stop and frisk in the City Council chambers as well.

I realized that in this moment, I had power, and I had to use it. I walked up to the cops, and asked them what was happening that could possibly require eight officers to surround a kid. I told them who I was: a city councilwoman, a member of this community, and a Latina who was not about to just sit there and watch another Black or Brown young man be treated like a second class citizen.

The cops backed down, and they walked off. The young man remained. He looked humiliated and ashamed.

That moment showed the impact of stop and frisk on our entire community: Black and Brown people were taught that they had to comply with the cops violating their rights to just walk around like anyone else; they had to let their bodies be touched by hostile strangers.

Even if they were not roughed up, or taken to jail, the feeling of subjugation and oppression lasted.

For the past few weeks, as Mayor Bloomberg has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the race, and rapidly risen in the polls, people who were impacted by stop and frisk have spoken out. Simultaneously, Bloomberg and his allies have tried to downplay the degree to which he championed stop and frisk while in office, and the impact it had on a generation of Black and Brown New Yorkers.

Mayor Bloomberg can spend his money hiring fancy consultants who write lines for him to say in debates and scripts for him to recite that try to diminish the role he played, and the damage he caused, but I call BS. I was there: I not only served as a New York City councilwoman during Bloomberg’s time as mayor, but then was the speaker of the City Council — and the first Latina and the first Puerto Rican to hold citywide office in New York City — and spent much of my time in that role working to undo the damage that had been done under Bloomberg.