Interview by Meagan Day

Multibillionaire media magnate and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is pouring unprecedented amounts of money into a late-bloomer presidential campaign. As his unprecedented self-funded ad buys start to show results, he’s coming under serious scrutiny for his record, particularly his stop-and-frisk policy that targeted a generation of young black and Latino men in New York City for arrest and incarceration.

On Monday, journalist and progressive activist Benjamin Dixon posted audio of a speech Bloomberg gave at the Aspen Institute in 2015. In it, Bloomberg explains his rationale for stop-and-frisk. Since “95 percent” of “murders and murderers and murder victims” are black and Latino men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, he said incorrectly, it was necessary to:

Spend a lot of money, put a lot of cops in the street, put those cops where the crime is, which is in the minority neighborhoods. So this is — one of the unintended consequences is, people say, “Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.” Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the first thing you can do for people is to stop them getting killed.

Bloomberg added, “The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw ’em against the wall and frisk ’em.” The jarring audio went viral on social media, and soon made headlines in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

But not everyone welcomed the revelation. CNN’s Cristina Alesci alleged that the recording couldn’t be trusted on account of Dixon’s own political views. “The podcaster and the writer that released this sound is clearly a Bernie supporter,” she said. She also raised questions about the provenance of the audio, which had been publicly available on YouTube for years. Alesci is a former finance reporter for Bloomberg News.

When a reporter asked Bloomberg about the remarks, he said, “I don’t think those words reflect what, how I led the most diverse city in the nation. And I apologized for the practice and the pain that it caused.” He added, “It was five years ago. And, you know, it’s just not the way that I think and it … doesn’t reflect what I do every day. I led the most populous, largest city in the United States and got reelected three times, the public seemed to like what I do.”

Many seem poised to accept Bloomberg’s apology, but not Benjamin Dixon. Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day spoke with Dixon about the meaning of Bloomberg’s comments on stop-and-frisk, the perils of his money-soaked campaign, and why so many in the media and politics are hesitant to criticize him.