Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg strongly defended his “throw them up against the walls” stop-and-frisk policy in just-leaked audio of a 2015 Aspen Institute appearance, telling the audience that cops targeted minority neighborhoods “because that’s where all the crime is.”

The apparent audio of the five-year-old event, which Bloomberg blocked from public release at the time, was released by podcaster Benjamin Dixon.

Audio of @MikeBloomberg’s 2015 @AspenInstitute speech where he explains that “you can just Xerox (copy)” the description of male, minorities 16-25 and hand to cops. Bloomberg had video of speech blocked. Perhaps because of the problematic explanation he gives for #StopAndFrisk pic.twitter.com/Fm0YCi4ZRy — Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 10, 2020

In the roughly minute-long excerpt, Bloomberg begins his argument defending stop-and-frisk by saying: “95% of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops.”

Back in 2013, during the last year of Bloomberg’s administration, a federal judge ruled that New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy amounted to racial harassment and was unconstitutional. The NYPD had already begun to curtail the use of stop-and-frisk in the two previous years, but effectively abandoned the policy after the decision, while violent crime and murder rates have continued to fall in the years since then.

In the lead-up to announcing his 2020 run, Bloomberg made a public appearance at an African-American megachurch in Brooklyn, where he apologized for his role in championing stop-and-frisk. But his mea culpa rang hollow for many in the black community and, despite that statement, he continues to reflexively defend the policy.

This latest leak shows that Bloomberg, despite the judge’s damning indictment of stop-and-frisk as racial profiling, was still a strong advocate of it after he left office. At the 2015 event, he used a broad brush to paint violent crime perpetrators as overwhelmingly male, minority, and 16 to 25 years old.

“That’s true in New York, that true in virtually every city,” he claimed. “You want to spent the money to put a lot of cops on the street. Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”

To complaints that police in New York disproportionately arrested minorities for low-level offenses like marijuana possession because of stop-and-fristk, Bloomberg struck an noticeably defiant, unapologetic tone.

“Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Why did we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is.”

“The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands,” Bloomberg added, “is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”

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