I wrote my first column involving stop-and-frisk in 2009, and it didn’t even mention Bloomberg. I too assumed that this was a police policy gone awry. I continued to write about it, but it wasn’t until 2011 that I mentioned him, and even then I didn’t directly blame him for the policy.

That is because it wasn’t until the last few years of his mayoralty that Bloomberg himself began to give public, full-throated defenses of stop-and-frisk, like the speech he gave in 2012 at a Brooklyn church as a court case against the city loomed.

Then it was abundantly clear: This wasn’t a practice being perpetrated by rogue cops; it was a dictate coming from the top, from Bloomberg himself. Simply put, Bloomberg escaped much of the blame for stop-and-frisk during his mayoralty, because he never stepped forth to accept it. He hid behind the police department and let it take all the arrows.

This is why the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president, Patrick Lynch, blasted Bloomberg in November when he cynically apologized so that he could run for president. As Lynch put it:

“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. The apology is too little, too late.”

That is the problem with having a leader so slavishly devoted to data: The underlings will seek numbers rather than justice to satisfy him.

At the stop-and-frisk trial, a Puerto Rican police officer named Pedro Serrano with nine years of experience was asked on direct examination: “What is your basis for your knowledge that the N.Y.P.D., in your judgment, imposes quotas for enforcement activity on you and your fellow officers? What’s your basis for your knowledge of that?”

He answered: “The basis is they tell you to your face. They tell you at roll call. They pull you to the side and tell you. Also you get retaliated against. I’ve gotten retaliated against because I didn’t meet the quota. Again, I might have enough arrests, but I might not have enough C summonses for them. So they go after that. But again it’s — they do retaliate. And they tell you that I need the specific number.”