Gearing up for a rumored run to join the race for the presidency, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing away from his support of the extremely controversial stop-and-frisk policing strategy.
According to the New York Times, in Brooklyn, Bloomberg apologized to a mostly black crowd for the program which disproportionally targeted Latinx and black communities. 87% of the stop-and-frisk searches in 2011 were performed on black or Latinx New Yorkers.
"Over time, I’ve come to understand something that I long struggled to admit to myself: I got something important wrong," Bloomberg said. "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. I was totally focused on saving lives, but as we know: Good intentions aren’t good enough."
"New York City had 650 murders a year when I came into office, and the toll fell heaviest on black and Hispanic young men," Bloomberg explained to Politico last year. "We were determined to do everything possible to stop gun violence, both by taking guns off the street and by taking on the NRA—when few other elected officials were willing to do that."
If Bloomberg runs, The New York Daily News is reporting that he plans to spend upwards of $100 million on anti-Trump advertising.