First in a series
When author Michelle Alexander stepped to the podium of the Urban Affairs Forum at 8:25 this morning in the crowded African American Museum on the USC campus, she had no way of knowing that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg clangingly made her point yesterday afternoon in Queens.
If only the Ohio State professor and former East Bay lawyer for the ACLU had heard Mr. Bloomberg’s controversial pitch – to aggressively maintain the city’s “effective and necessary” policy of stopping and frisking mostly black and brown men – they could have staged a cross-country donnybrook of historic proportions.
At the very moment the learned, and infuriated, Ms. Alexander, author of the recently published “The New Jim Crow,” was railing to a huge crowd about the asserted massive, “bigoted” harassing of black and brown males by cops everywhere in America, Mr. Bloomberg was making a diametrically opposite point.
“Stop & Frisk or Risk More Crime: Mike,” was the way one New York newspaper this morning summarized His Honor’s demand.
Last year, the NYPD controversially made 685,724 stop-and-frisks – overwhelmingly against non-white males.
Mr. Bloomberg, you should know, sharply has elevated the rate of stop-and-frisks. When he took office 10 years ago, cops did it 97,296 times. By ’07, it was up to 472,096, and five years later, it is up 50 percent.
But here are the so-called justification numbers to pay attention to, he says:
Over the past decade, said Mr. Bloomberg, stop-and-frisks resulted in 5,600 fewer murders. “That is 5,600 men, women and children who are slice today who would not be” if it weren’t for accelerated stop-and-frisks.
Here came the mayor’s knockout punch:
“We know from the data that 90 percent of the murder victims in this city are black and Hispanic. So 90 percent percent of those 5,600 probably would have been minorities.”
On Monday: Ms. Alexander’s counterpoint.
