World leaders gather for united nations climate summit
Photo Credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Photo Credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
UPDATE: Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has now officially announced his 2020 Democratic campaign.
On Sunday, Michael Bloomberg announced his presidential bid. In an announcement on his campaign website he shared he will focus on "defeating Donald Trump" and "rebuilding America." The announcement included the following:
"I'm running for president to defeat Donald Trump and rebuild America. We cannot afford four more years of President Trump's reckless and unethical actions. He represents an existential threat to our country and our values. If he wins another term in office, we may never recover from the damage. The stakes could not be higher. We must win this election. And we must begin rebuilding America."
"I now see that we should have acted sooner, and acted faster," Bloomberg said of the policing strategy during a recent appearance at Brooklyn's Christian Cultural Center.
Michael Bloomberg has apologized for supporting stop-and-frisk during his time as New York City mayor.
"I was wrong," Bloomberg said, according to the New York Times. "And I am sorry."
READ: Trump Calls On Chicago Cops To Use Stop And Frisk To Curb Gun Violence
Bloomberg spoke on his regret of pushing the policing strategy during an appearance at Brooklyn's Christian Culture Center on Sunday. The controversial stop-and-frisk policy primarily targeted black and brown young men, and was ruled as racially discriminatory and unconstitutional in the case Floyd, et al. v. New York, in 2013.
"Of 575,000 stops conducted in 2009, black and Latino people were nine times as likely as white people to be targeted by the police," the Times stated. "In 2011, police officers made about 685,000 stops; 87 percent of those stopped were black or Latino."
Two months prior to the ruling, Bloomberg had defended stop-and-frisk and argued against the racial disparities in stops.
"In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little," he said at the time. "It's exactly the reverse of what they're saying. I don't know where they went to school, but they certainly didn't take a math course, or a logic course."
Bloomberg showed a more apologetic look on the policy at the Christian Culture Center.
"Over time, I've come to understand something that I long struggled to admit to myself: I got something important wrong," he 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."
Bloomberg's apology hasn't been well-received on social media, with some users calling for the billionaire to offer reparations to the people affected by stop-and-frisk.
Source: New York Times
