Tim O’Brien, a top adviser for Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign, said in an interview on CNN that the Democratic candidate will “always have to apologize” for the stop-and-frisk policy he imposed during his time as the mayor of New York City.
CNN anchor Jim Sciutto pressed O’Brien about his response when people criticize Bloomberg for only apologizing for the policy now.
The former mayor has defended the policy in the past.
The anchor brought up audio from 2015 that surfaced this week of Bloomberg defending the practice that has drawn scrutiny from both Democrats and Republicans in recent days.
In the audio, Bloomberg said, “Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city.”
O’Brien responded to Sciutto, saying that this week is not the first time the former mayor has apologized for his policy and language he used to defend it.
“Last night wasn’t the first time he has apologized for this,” O’Brien said.
He continued, “Mike will always have to apologize for this; it was a mistake. He held onto it for too long [and] he defended it for too long, and it was deeply damaging and painful to people of color in New York.”
The campaign adviser said that he thinks Bloomberg will have to spend the rest of his public career proving to people that stop-and-frisk is not representative of his entire political career and persona.
“Stop-and-frisk hardly represents the totality of his time as mayor,” O’Brien said. “He lowered the incarceration rate in New York; he diversified the NYPD; he started a model program integrating young people of color into job networks that Barack Obama modeled ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ on.”
O’Brien also noted that Bloomberg is more “complex and compassionate” than his former policy suggests.
Stop-and-frisk was a policy used by New York City law enforcement that targeted a disproportionate amount of people of color, and was later discontinued in 2013 at the end of Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor.