NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he thinks white people are stopped and frisked too much by the NYPD and minorities aren't stopped enough. And he claims the stats back him up.
"I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little," Bloomberg said, grousing during his weekly radio address about the passage of two bills geared at curtailing the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk crime fighting policy.
The mayor complained that critics who emphasize number of blacks and Latino who have been stopped by the cops don't know the full story.
"That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murders," he said. He added, "Most serious crimes in this city are committed by male minorities [age] 15 to 25."
As proof, the mayor's press office offered statistics for the last two years that show that 90 percent or more of the homicide suspects in the city are black or Latino. Whites, according to the mayor's stats, constituted 9 percent of the people stopped in 2011, but only 5 percent of the suspects in murder cases.
This week, the City Council passed two bills, one that would establish an inspector general to oversee the police department and another that would curb alleged racial profiling by police.
“The racial profiling bill is just so unworkable,” the mayor said on the radio Friday. “Nobody racially profiles.”
Former top brass at the NYPD told DNAinfo New York's "On The Inside" that Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly were partly to blame for the City Council's actions, since Bloomberg and Kelly have both been slow to reveal details about stop-and-frisk publicly and have not been sensitive to criticism, sources said.
Bloomberg has promised to veto the bills, but the council has enough votes to push the legislation through.
"When it comes to policing, the police have to be able to go out and look for those that fit the description of a witness or a victim after a crime," he said. "If you can’t do that you then you just turn over the streets to the criminals, literally overnight."
