Margot Cleveland explains in a Federalist column that a recent controversy involving former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg could have an impact on one of his Democratic presidential opponents, too.
On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg took a hit when audio surfaced of him celebrating his police department’s targeting of minority neighborhoods. The media pounced, quickly forcing the former New York City mayor to apologize for his dated comments. Yet, for all the outrage, the press ignored the nearly identical sentiments South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg voiced mere days earlier, during the New Hampshire Democrat debate.
“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,” Bloomberg said during a 2015 appearance at an Aspen Institute event. …
… While Bloomberg’s comments came nearly five years ago, and he has since apologized for the stop-and-frisk policy he ineptly described while speaking before the nonprofit Aspen Institute, the same cannot be said of Buttigieg’s Friday night comments, which came during the most recent Democratic debate. …
… Then Buttigieg channeled Bloomberg’s comments from years earlier, stating that “one of the strategies that our community adopted was to target—when there were cases where there was gun violence and gang violence, which was slaughtering so many in our community, burying teenagers, disproportionately black teenagers, we adopted a strategy that said that drug enforcement would be targeted in cases where there was a connection to the most violent group or gang connected to a murder. There things are all connected.”
