In 2011, when current presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, there were 158,406 black teenagers and men between the ages of 14 and 24 in the city. That same year, New York Police Department (NYPD) officers stopped and searched black males in that age range 168,000 times.

The discriminatory practice led to physical and verbal harassment of young men of color. In 2011, one teenager secretly recorded officers who searched him in Harlem and threatened to break his arm and punch him in the face. He told The Nation, "He just kept pushing me, pushing me, it looked like he was going to hit me. I felt like they was trying to make me resist or fight back." An officer threatened to send him to jail, and when asked why, the officer replied, "For being a fucking mutt." NYPD officers who spoke to The Nation said that they were under tremendous pressure to hit numerical goals.

The NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk was so flagrantly racist and invasive that in 2013 a U.S. District Court judge found the practice unconstitutional. Bloomberg has since apologized for stop-and-frisk, saying that he "regrets" the policy that he relentlessly championed and defended during his time as mayor. It just took his announcement of his bid for the White House for him to finally get around to that apology.

In fact, Bloomberg was defending stop-and-frisk as recently as 2015, well after it was ruled unconstitutional. He reportedly advocated for the discriminatory practice at the Aspen Institute that year, but afterward he pressured the group not to release any recordings of him speaking. On Monday, audio of that appearance leaked. In it, he says, "Ninety-five percent of murders, murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25."

He continues: "Put the cops where the crime is, which is in minority neighborhoods. So 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 minority neighborhoods. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is."

Like many defenders of racial profiling, Bloomberg has this backward. The more heavily police patrol an area, the more likely they are to arrest people there regardless of how the actual crime rate compares to another area. In 2018, for example, black people in Manhattan were arrested at 15 times the rate of white people for marijuana possession, and black neighborhoods produced the bulk of arrests despite the fact that the rate of complaints about marijuana use are the same in white neighborhoods. A 2002 study in San Diego found the same phenomenon, that "white residents were underrepresented when compared to their percentage of the population and studies showing patterns of drug use and drug distribution activities."