Is Michael Bloomberg Sorry?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2020
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since he launched his bid for the Democratic nomination, Michael Bloomberg has been trying to distance himself from the legacy of ‘stop and frisk.’ He says stops went down 95 percent by the end of his time as mayor. Darius Charney, one of the lawyers that helped bring down the policy, doesn’t buy it. As he tells it, there’s little evidence that Mayor Bloomberg means it when he says “I’m sorry.”
Guest: Darius Charney, Senior Staff Attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | About a week before declaring himself a presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, showed up for Sunday services at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. |
| 0:16.3 | Thank you, everyone, and good morning. |
| 0:19.3 | This is a 96,000 square foot megachurch. |
| 0:23.2 | The audience is mostly black. |
| 0:25.8 | Bloomberg came here, offering an apology. |
| 0:28.8 | We did make mistakes. |
| 0:30.6 | I made mistakes. |
| 0:32.3 | I've never met anybody who hasn't made a mistake. |
| 0:35.7 | The critical issue is whether you can admit it. |
| 0:39.4 | This mistake happened when Bloomberg was mayor. |
| 0:42.6 | That's when he supported a policy that allowed police to question and search New Yorkers, |
| 0:47.5 | even when they were doing nothing wrong. |
| 0:49.8 | The policy was called stop and frisk. |
| 0:52.1 | Our focus was on saving lives. |
| 0:55.8 | The fact is, far too many innocent people were being stopped while we tried to do that. |
| 1:01.8 | And the overwhelming majority of them were black and Latino. |
| 1:06.2 | That may have included, I'm sorry to say, some of you here today. |
| 1:10.3 | Well, I mean, it was interesting to watch, because it was this kind of like sorry, not sorry. |
| 1:14.0 | Yes. |
| 1:14.4 | Apology? |
| 1:15.2 | Yes. |
| 1:15.9 | Darius Charney was part of a team of lawyers that spent five years suing the city of New York |
... |
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