Bloomberg used the fear factor to keep white New Yorkers in his corner. He insisted that stop-and-frisk was keeping them safe and that without it crime would soar.

And his ruse worked. In eight separate surveys from 2012 to 2013, pollsters at Quinnipiac University asked New Yorkers if they approved of stop-and-frisk. Every single time, a majority of white New Yorkers said they approved.

But Bloomberg’s crime argument was dubious. The Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey Fagan produced a report that became part of a class-action lawsuit against the city in 2010. It found that: “[s]eizures of weapons or contraband are extremely rare. Overall, guns are seized in less than 1 percent of all stops: 0.15 percent … Contraband, which may include weapons but also includes drugs or stolen property, is seized in 1.75 percent of all stops.”

As Fagan wrote, “The N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk tactics produce rates of seizures of guns or other contraband that are no greater than would be produced simply by chance.”

And, as the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote this year:

“Since Mayor de Blasio came into office in January 2014, the N.Y.P.D. now reports about 10,000 stops per year. As stops have receded, crime in New York City has dropped significantly. In 2018, New York City recorded the lowest number of homicides in nearly 70 years.”

So Bloomberg’s fear mongering was all a lie.

A federal judge ruled in 2013 that New York’s stop-and-frisk tactics violated the constitutional rights of racial minorities, calling it a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”

Yet, a little over a month before that ruling, Bloomberg said on a radio show, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” As USA Today pointed out at the time: “About 5 million stops have been made during the past decade. Eighty-seven percent of those stopped in the last two years were black or Hispanic.”