Wednesday night’s Democratic debate in Nevada laid bare what was only recently regarded as implausible, laughable, even: Michael Bloomberg as the 2020 Democratic nominee.

But as support for his candidacy has increased exponentially from a stream to a torrent — support that now includes endorsements from a governor, mayors of more than five major cities, and three members of the Congressional Black Caucus — so too has withering criticism of his past policies. Chief among these is a barrage of scrutiny for his promotion of stop-and-frisk during his tenure as Mayor of New York City, a policy decision that he was forced to justify repeatedly throughout Wednesday night’s debate.

For those who are unfamiliar, stop-and-frisk — the police strategy of arbitrarily stopping and searching people for contraband with little or no evidence of wrongdoing — was a disastrous policy that dehumanized and degraded its victims, soured relationships between communities and police departments, and overwhelmingly targeted members of minority communities (in New York, Latino and black residents were nine times as likely to be stopped by police in 2009 as white residents).

As Bloomberg attempts to hold onto his momentum in the polls after a shockingly poor debate performance, his expansion of this now-odious policy will no doubt remain the albatross around his neck.

Culpable though he is, responsibility for the harm done by stop-and-frisk is far from Mike Bloomberg’s exclusive burden to bear.

A brief historical analysis reveals that stop-and-frisk was long considered a staple of American urban policing. Michael Bloomberg was but the most prominent in a long line of adherents to a flawed policing approach that spanned decades, cities, and political parties.

To fully understand stop-and-frisk (and Bloomberg’s role and responsibility in its proliferation) it is first necessary to contextualize the policy in the broader scheme of urban policing in the past 40 years, and the many fallacies that undergirded it.

The Perfect Storm: Terry v. Ohio, Broken Windows Theory, and Violent Crime

(Photo by Tomas Castelazo, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

The right of the police to stop and question suspicious persons is about as old as the English common law itself, but stop-and-frisk as it is understood in the modern American political context can be traced back to the landmark 1968 court case Terry v. Ohio. The Supreme Court in Terry ruled that a stop-and-frisk was constitutional in such cases as when “a reasonably prudent officer is warranted in the circumstances of a given case in believing that his safety or that of others is endangered.” In such instances, said officer “may make a reasonable search for weapons of the person believed by him to be armed and dangerous.”

The flexible language of the ruling and the deference it paid to the “reasonably prudent officer” would pave the way for an application of the Terry standard in which police felt emboldened to stop and search practically anyone for practically anything.

A year after Terry, in 1969, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo pioneered one of those rare academic theories that manages to worm its way into popular parlance: broken windows theory. In general terms, the theory postulates that something that is clearly neglected (a building with broken windows, for example) is more susceptible to further abuse than something that is maintained in good condition.

Broken windows theory moved out of the university and into the streets when, in 1982, its basic premise was applied by criminologist George L. Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson not just to buildings or property, but to entire communities.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani at an NYFPC meeting in 2002. (Photo by U.S. Department of State.)

In distilled form, broken windows theory came to inform a style of community policing that placed immense importance on so-called “quality of life crimes” (think graffiti, sleeping in public, loitering, etc.). Enforcement against these relatively innocuous misdemeanors had historically been rather lackadaisical, but the emergence of broken windows theory and its application to law enforcement resulted in a zero-tolerance approach to even the pettiest of public misdeeds. This new technique was based on the assumption that even small offenses would ultimately create the conditions in which more serious crimes were likely to be committed. (Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York is generally understood to be the first major proponent of this philosophy. He eliminated New York’s infamous “squeegee men” as a part of his efforts.)

The application of broken windows theory to community policing led directly to the types of arbitrary stop-and-frisks—in which police stopped and searched mostly young, male, innocent minorities for little or no reason—with which we are so familiar today.

Armed with the legal standard set in Terry, and later emboldened by the social science of Zimbardo, police forces in cities across the country added stop-and-frisk to their arsenal of crime-fighting tools amid vertiginous increases in violent crime that began in the 1960s and culminated in the 1990s. (Handgun related homicides increased more than twofold between 1985 and 1990 alone.)

Democratic and Republican politicians alike in cities across the U.S. — from New York to Los Angeles to Philadelphia to Chicago — adopted tough-on-crime policies, which included stop-and-frisk as an indispensable component. Stop-and-frisk was hailed by politicians on the right and on the left, for, as Columbia University professor Bernard Harcourt reported to NPR in 2016:

“It seemed like a magical solution. It allowed everybody to find a way in their own mind to get rid of the panhandler, the guy sleeping on the street, the prostitute, the drugs, the litter, and it allowed liberals to do that while still feeling self-righteous and good about themselves.”

A malleable legal standard, a new social theory, and an unprecedented and unrelenting surge in crime created the perfect storm, one in which stop-and-frisk and its many victims grew exponentially across the United States.

Precipitous declines in violent crime following the implementation of stop-and-frisk nationwide seemed to testify to its efficacy. In New York City—where in 1990 there were 2,245 killings—murders dropped to under 600 in 2002 (Bloomberg’s first year in office) and steadily declined throughout his mayoralty, even as crime rates in other cities fluctuated. (It was only later, in 2015, that a study out of Columbia University found that stop-and-frisk “had little crime reduction benefit”).

Declines in violent crime in the mid-1990s coincided with the implementation of stop-and-frisk, though later studies found that stop-and-frisk had “little crime reduction benefit.” (Data by FBI and KQED News.)

Stop-and-Frisk in Practice: A Tale of Three Cities

Following in Rudy Giuliani´s footsteps, Bloomberg increased the frequency of stop-and-frisk 600 percent during his three terms as Mayor of New York City between 2002 and 2012. There were 2.4 million stops between 2009 and 2012 alone. Of these, according to data from the New York State Attorney General’s office, only 3 percent led to convictions and .1 percent led to convictions for violent crimes. In 2012, 87 percent of those stopped were black (55 percent) or Latino (32 percent), according to the New York branch of the ACLU. A year later, in 2013, a federal judge ruled that New York’s stop-and-frisk policy, as carried out under Bloomberg, unconstitutionally violated the rights of minorities.

In Philadelphia, where a discrimination lawsuit was brought against the police in 2010 over their disproportionate “stopping [of] African-American and Hispanic men without sufficient cause,” the situation was hardly any better than in New York. Even after safeguards were implemented following the 2010 lawsuit, 40 percent of stop-and-frisks in 2017 occurred without “reasonable suspicion.” African-Americans, who comprised less than half of the population of Philadelphia in 2017, nonetheless accounted for 69 percent of all stops, according to the Pennsylvania branch of the ACLU.

Bloomberg drastically increased the number of stop-and-frisks during his tenure as mayor between 2002 and 2013. (Data by NYCLU.)

The story repeats itself in Los Angeles. Even after a 2001 federal Consent Decree mandated reforms for the LAPD in order to address racial profiling, stop-and-frisks were still highly racially biased. According to a 2006 report by the Southern California branch of the ACLU that analyzed 810,000 stops, black and Hispanic Angelenos were, respectively, 127 percent and 43 percent more likely to be frisked upon being stopped than their white counterparts.

Three different cities, three different mayors (two Democrats and one Republican), united by one flawed policy in a well-intentioned but ill-fated effort to reduce crime.

Back to Bloomberg

So where does this leave Bloomberg? None of the preceding information should be viewed as an exculpation for what was ultimately a calamitous, discriminatory, and ineffective approach to law enforcement that has left lasting scars on New York’s black and Latino communities. But it should help to place Bloomberg’s policy decisions in a national context that saw politicians across the political spectrum employing stop-and-frisk in a misguided attempt to address a crisis of increasing violent crime.

Even Senator Cory Booker, renowned for his social justice bona fides, embraced stop-and-frisk as Mayor of Newark. According to Udi Ofer, the former executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey who was quoted in a March 2019 article in the New York Times, “There was an exponential spike in stop-and-frisk, racial profiling, excessive force,” after Booker, who pledged a policy of “zero tolerance” on crime, took office.

While Bloomberg must without a doubt be held responsible for his perpetuation of stop-and-frisk, to put him to the torch while ignoring the complicity of citizens, politicians, and law enforcement officials from New York to Los Angeles—both Republicans and Democrats—is more than a little hypocritical (and negligent).

In Bloomberg’s very backyard, according to a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University, 57 percent of white voters and 53 percent of Hispanic voters approved of stop-and-frisk as late as 2012 (compared to 25 percent approval among black voters). Mike Bloomberg may have implemented the policy, but he was supported through the end by a majority of his white and Hispanic constituents.

In Philadelphia the polls are even more damning. According to a Pew survey from 2011, a whopping 61 percent of Philadelphians supported stop-and-frisk.

Apologies

Bloomberg has since apologized for his defense of stop-and-frisk, first in November of 2019 and most recently during the Nevada debate. Michael Nutter, the former Mayor of Philadelphia who oversaw the stop-and-frisk regime in his city, has similarly apologized.

Sincere contrition in the face of past error is the great white whale of American politics, and whether Bloomberg or Nutter or countless other politicians deserve our forgiveness is, of course, a uniquely personal decision. Rare as political sincerity may be, however, an acknowledgment of our own complicity in the evils perpetuated by stop-and-frisk — complicity that is evinced by the aforementioned opinion polls in New York and Philadelphia — is an even rarer beast.