Did Mayor de Blasio “misspeak” the other day about the NYPD’s stop-question-frisk tactics, as his aides contend — or was he out to hide the real story?
Speaking at a National Action Network conference, the mayor claimed that stop-and-frisk has been totally reformed.
Under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, he declared, “There were 700,000 stop-and-frisks of people in this city, the vast majority of whom were young men of color, the vast majority of whom were innocent in every way, shape and form.”
But now, he boasted, it’s just “40,000, and the people who are stopped are people who have done something wrong.”
He was right that the number of stops has plummeted. Not so on the other contrasts.
In the top stop-and-frisk year under Bloomberg, only 12 percent of stops resulted in arrest. In de Blasio’s first year, the number was 18 percent.
That’s an increase — but nowhere near the mayor’s suggestion that everyone stopped nowadays has been caught in crime.
As for race, 84 percent of those stopped last year were people of color — about what the numbers have been for over a decade.
Which leaves the precipitous drop in the number of stops — a drop that began years before de Blasio moved into Gracie Mansion.
More important are the figures the mayor chose not to mention: a 20 percent rise in homicides and 17 percent jump in shootings this year over 2014.
De Blasio has pooh-poohed any notion of a link between those numbers, insisting the problem is localized to a few police precincts. Maybe so, but the trend is troubling.
Last summer, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton warned that “there are too many young men in this city carrying guns” who are being lured into violent gangs.
A proven way to prevent that is the wise use of stop-and frisk, without politically imposed constraints.
