Bloomberg Apologizes for Stop-and-Frisk at Just the Right Time

At a black church in New York on Sunday, Michael Bloomberg stood before the congregation and repented.

He said the police stops of millions of black and Latino men when he was mayor, a practice known as stop-and-frisk, were a mistake.

“Over time, I’ve come to understand something that I long struggled to admit to myself,” he said in the soaring sanctuary of the Christian Cultural Center, in East New York, Brooklyn. The former mayor choked up, seemingly holding back tears. “I got something important wrong. I got something important really wrong. I didn’t understand back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities.”

The apology was a decade late for those who were humiliated, harassed and intimidated by the government that is supposed to serve them. It came just ahead of Mr. Bloomberg’s anticipated announcement that he will seek the Democratic nomination for president.

“We could and should have acted sooner, and acted faster, to cut the stops. I wish we had, and I’m sorry that we didn’t,” he continued.

“I can’t change history,” he said. “I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong, and I am sorry.”

Inside the church, the apology was met with warm applause. “Once you leave office, you get a chance to reflect on what you did. Amen?” the church’s pastor, the Rev. A.R. Bernard, asked his churchgoers. “Amen,” they replied.

But many may find the apology hard to accept under the circumstances. Mr. Bloomberg is on the precipice of joining the herd of Democrats running for president. The nomination may already be a long shot for Mr. Bloomberg this late in the game. Without the support of black voters, it could be an impossibility.

The mea culpa may show how seriously he’s considering becoming a candidate. He defiantly defended the policy even last year as he took more tentative steps toward a bid.

But those close to him insist that his conversion on stop-and-frisk is sincere. They say he has come to a conclusion that can be hard to reach for a stubborn 77-year-old billionaire: He was wrong.

As mayor, he showed little devotion to public opinion, pushing unpopular ideas like banning smoking in bars and restaurants and trying to limit the sale of large sodas. He faced scathing tabloid headlines after he jetted off to his house in Bermuda as a snowstorm bore down on the city, only to hurry back when it turned into a blizzard. Rather than retreat in the face of the outrage he sometimes caused, he seemed to relish it.

But now, stop-and-frisk is different.

In September 2009, 62 percent of black voters approved of Mr. Bloomberg’s job performance, while 30 percent disapproved. Over the next three years, the number of stops swelled to a peak of more than 685,000 in 2011, then subsided. By September 2013, as the mayor continued to stand by the policy despite growing evidence that it discriminated against minority New Yorkers, just 25 percent of the black voters approved of his job performance, while 63 percent disapproved, according to Quinnipiac University polls.

Sunday, he said that while he remained proud that gun violence had declined under his watch, stop-and-frisk had harmed innocent people and alienated minority communities.

“That erosion of trust bothered me — deeply,” he said. “It still bothers me. And I want to earn it back.”

Some close to the former mayor have pushed him to reverse course on the issue for years, agonizing not only over damage to his legacy, but to New York.

But until now, Mr. Bloomberg stubbornly defended the policy anyway, saying it saved black and Latino lives. As he approached the end of his third term in office in 2013, he said halting the practice would mean that “people will needlessly die and we’ll all be responsible.” He said something similar only last year.

The data Mr. Bloomberg is so fond of ultimately showed otherwise. In 88 percent of the stops, there was no arrest. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the administration’s use of the tactic was unconstitutional. Stops declined sharply in his final years in office, then plummeted under Mayor Bill de Blasio. But crime continued to fall.

Still, Mr. Bloomberg did not apologize.

By the time he left office, New Yorkers had been stopped by the police more than five million times. An entire generation of black and Latino children had grown up accustomed to getting “tossed” by the police on their way home from school.

“You could see the simmering frustration and anger about what these young people felt,” said Geoffrey Canada, president of the Harlem Children’s Zone and a longtime supporter of Mr. Bloomberg.

“I thought this issue really undermined him particularly in the black community,” Mr. Canada said. “Why not just say, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done it.’ We agreed on so much.”

When the two men met for breakfast this past summer, Mr. Canada said he brought up the issue, as usual, and Mr. Bloomberg surprised him. “He said, ‘You know, I’m going to really have to potentially rethink this,’” Mr. Canada recalled.

The lure of the White House can make Americans do extraordinary things.

When Mr. Bloomberg became mayor in January of 2002, New York was a city of open wounds. Toxic ash from the World Trade Center attacks still lingered in the winter sky. The economy was in crisis, and New Yorkers were losing their jobs. The city’s deep tribalism was aflame, zealously lit up by his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani.

Mr. Bloomberg wanted to heal those wounds. But on policing, as other New York mayors have, he lost his way. This Sunday, he finally asked black New Yorkers for their forgiveness. And their vote.

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