The New York City Police Department stops minorities too little, and whites way too much, according to Mayor Bloomberg. The comment came on a radio show where the host was asking the mayor some tough questions about the city’s controversial “stop and frisk” program, which is designed to bring down the city’s crime rate by targeting suspicious individuals for pat-downs. According to ThinkProgress, Bloomberg specifically said,

“One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying ‘oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the [crime]. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course. Or a logic course.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that the program didn’t actually do much to keep illegal firearms off the street, and that in 70 out of the city’s 76 precincts in 2011, blacks and Latinos made up more than half of the stops, and in 10 precincts where blacks and Latinos make up less than 14% of the overall population, they accounted for 70% of the stops.

Also, 90% of the black and Latinos stopped and frisked were innocent. In addition to that, white New Yorkers who were stopped were twice as likely to be illegally packing heat or carrying some type of contraband items than black New Yorkers, despite the disproportionate number of stops of blacks.

A police department’s right to stop and pat down someone who’s acting “reasonably suspicious” has been approved the Supreme Court, despite the fact that it allows police departments wide latitude to determine what “reasonably suspicious” is and leads to a presumption of guilty until proven innocent. In New York, only 6% of all the stops actually lead to an arrest.

Back in May, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly told ABC that about 70% to 75% of the crimes committed are described, by witnesses and victims, as being committed by someone who is black, and that the reality of the situation is that only 53% of the people being stopped are black, so the department was actually understopping black people, not targeting them disproportionately. To them, the sad fact of the matter is that most crime is committed by minorities, therefore they need to focus more on minorities. This is both racial profiling and the presumption of guilty until proven innocent in practice.

It also doesn’t explain why whites are twice as likely as blacks to be carrying something contraband.

The city council recently passed two bills aimed at curbing this type of profiling by creating legal recourse for those who have been wrongly stopped and searched, and also creating an independent inspector’s office to oversee the police department’s activities. The mayor and the police commissioner were not happy about that, and a council member said that it would make New York more dangerous.

The measures were veto-proof, however Bloomberg is working to get some to change their minds so that he can veto the bills.

Bloomberg’s assertion that whites are stopped too much is at odds with his assertion that nobody engages in racial profiling. The definition of racial profiling, according to the ACLU, is “the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.” But the apparent rationale behind the way the stop and frisk program is used is that violent crime in New York is committed by minorities at a far higher rate than whites, therefore crime is associated with being a minority and they need to better target minorities and target fewer whites.

Bloomberg and NYPD are merely trying to rationalize their way out of being guilty of racial profiling and discriminatory actions.