Mike Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York City running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is under fire for a resurfaced audio tape where the progressive politician defended his strategy of aggressively policing minority neighborhoods in a 2015 speech to the Aspen Institute.
Breitbart News reported the speech at the time, in which Bloomberg pushed the idea of cities taking the initiative on instituting and enforcing the gun bans.
The Aspen Times quoted Bloomberg as saying: “Cities need to get guns out of [the]… hands” of individuals who are “male, minority, and between the ages of 15 and 25.”
The full audio of the speech further revealed the racially-charged tone of Bloomberg’s comments, wherein he bluntly said of young minorities, “throw them against the wall and frisk them,” and admitted “we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods…. [b]ecause that’s where all the crime is.”
Clips from the speech went viral Tuesday morning thanks to social media posts from President Donald Trump’s campaign and associates, such as the president’s son Donald Trump Jr.
Omg! Leaked audio of Mike Bloomberg talking about the high crime rates among urban minorities.
“And the way to get the guns out of the kids hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them” #BloombergIsARacist pic.twitter.com/MkONUhQQpX
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 11, 2020
All the money in the world can’t undo this
“The way you get guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall.” pic.twitter.com/t4k0jRVJRR
— Brad Parscale – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@parscale) February 11, 2020
Trump himself shared the clip from his official Twitter account, writing, “WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST!” However, at the time of this writing, that post has been deleted.
“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one [unintelligible],” Bloomberg says to the mostly white crowd. “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America.”
He said, “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people getting killed. The first thing you need to do to help that group is keep them both alive.”
He suggested these young men do not have any “long-term focus” because they believe they are doing to get killed anyway. So, “it is a joke to have a gun, it’s a joke to pull the trigger. And in New York, before Giuliani got elected we had 2,300 murders. When he left office that was down to 660 murders, when I left office it was down to 333 murders a year, and it was all the same group. No one in New York gets murdered. If you get murdered, the first thing we want to do is, ‘What were selling?’ or ‘Who were your family members?’. There is no other kind of murder, whatsoever.”
Bloomberg suggested a lot of people do not understand that knowing the population which commits crime was foundational to stop and frisk.
He suggested “other cities” fail by not getting guns out of the hands of the young minorities. He said, “You have to spend money on your police department, A lot of people don’t like the fact that is what you do, that that is what stop and frisk is all about.”
He said, “People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana, they’re all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true, why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true, and why we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the first thing we can do for people is stop them from getting killed.”
Bloomberg added, “We did a calculation on how many people would have been dead if we hadn’t brought down the murder rate and gotten guns off the street. And the way you got the guns out of the kids’ hands was to throw them against the wall and frisk them. They say, ‘Oh I don’t want to get caught,’ so they don’t bring the gun. They may still have the gun but they leave it at home.”
The Aspen Institute is the think tank behind the Aspen Ideas Festival, a utopian conference for western elites that has earned mockery for its lofty and convoluted response to first-world problems.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.