To the Editor:

Re “Bloomberg Says He Now Regrets ‘Stop and Frisk’” (front page, Nov. 18):

Understandable as a political strategy, but not credible as a heartfelt apology.

It’s too late and too facile, especially coming at a time when it serves Michael R. Bloomberg’s electoral interests. Especially when he defended the tactic for years in the face of undeniable evidence that it was racist and illegal. He even said, “I th i nk we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”

As other New York City mayors have done, Mr. Bloomberg is paying the price for not restraining the Police Department’s worst practices.

Robert Gangi

New York

The writer is director of the Police Reform Organizing Project.

To the Editor:

Even if Michael R. Bloomberg’s apology is genuine and most sincere, it would have been much more credible if he had offered it to a carefully selected group of black and Latino victims of his stop-and-frisk policy instead of to a gathering at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch, in Brooklyn.

His response is difficult to accept, even for African-Americans like me who would like to believe him. It suggests an apparent insensitivity to how stop-and-frisk was reminiscent of the South African passbook laws during apartheid. Under those laws, it was compulsory for all black people over 16 to carry a passbook when in a white neighborhood.