Mayor Bloomberg Uses Dead Teen to Bash Stop and Frisk Critics
But stop and frisk hasn't even gone anywhere yet
Michael Bloomberg's at it again, using dead bodies as proxies for policy discussion. The shooting of a Bronx teenager last week gave him an opportunity to continue bashing critics of stop and frisk. Via the Daily News:
"(The candidates) never had responsibility for public safety and strategy and are putting ideology and election-year politics above public safety," he [Bloomberg] said, without naming names.
The candidates and other critics of stop-and-frisk are quick to trash the police, he said, but all were silent last week when 17-year-old Alphonza Bryant was shot to death in the Bronx.
"After his murder, there was no outrage from the Center for Constitutional Rights or the NYCLU," a disgusted Bloomberg said, referring to two groups that vehemently oppose the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy.
In Mike Bloomberg's head, the made up and emotion-laden "right not to be shot" trumps the actual constitutional and civil right not to be molested by a government agent. His concern over dead children only goes so far; the killing of Ramarley Graham by a police officer over a dime bag of marijuana last year yielded no change of heart from Bloomberg on the senseless drug war his department wages on a daily basis, destroying families and taking lives.
As for his insinuation that stop and frisk could've saved the life of Alphonza Bryant; stop and frisk, while it is on trial, has not been suspended, so the argument is spectacularly cynical. (The department has defended the program in trial by saying their cops were too lazy to be productive without it) The millions of stop and frisks that have been conducted, meanwhile, only yielded a gun fewer than .5 percent of the time. Some champion of civil liberties.
h/t Restoras
