Jason Riley has this column in the WSJ with the headline/subhead "Bloomberg Grovels Over Stop and Frisk: If black lives matter, New York's former mayor has nothing to apologize for."
He traces the history of the horrific rise and subsequent fall of crime rates from the 1960s through recent years.
Minority communities bore the brunt of the crime wave and vocally criticized what they considered inadequate law enforcement. In 1967, the Harlem-based Amsterdam News editorialized that the city "can't get rid of crime by ignoring or compromising with it" and called for "restoring the legitimate, unbiased use of firearms by our police." The local chapter of the NAACP said, "It is not police brutality that makes people afraid to walk the streets at night" and demanded an end to "the reign of criminal terror in Harlem." In a 1968 report, [Vincent] Cannato writes, the civil-rights organization asked for "greater police protection in Harlem, harsher criminal penalties for murderers and drug dealers, and 'vigorous' enforcement of the city's anti-vagrancy laws."
After many years of liberal mayors and rising crime rates, the people voted in Rudy Giuliani, who got tough. Not coincidentally, crime rates eventually came down.
Mr. Giuliani was succeeded by Michael Bloomberg, who continued to employ his predecessor's polices. The city sustained steep reductions in violent crime. But these days Mr. Bloomberg is weighing a run for president and apparently believes he can't win the Democratic nomination without pandering to black voters. Last weekend, he spoke at a black church in Brooklyn and apologized for stop and frisk. "I can't change history," he said. "However, today, I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong, and I'm sorry."
But why should Mr. Bloomberg apologize? If anyone should be remorseful, it's all those city leaders in the 1970s and '80s who allowed crime to reach levels that made "Death Wish" look like a documentary. If anything close to the crime rates of the early 1990s had persisted for another quarter-century, tens of thousands more black men might be dead or incarcerated. Does Mr. Bloomberg really want to return to a time when criminals were treated like victims, police were treated like criminals, and the quality of life for law-abiding blacks in poor neighborhoods was an afterthought?
Of course, crime is complex, with many factors and interrelations between factors, so the mere sequence of policies and rates is not conclusive. Even so, getting tough on crime was a major factor in bringing the rates down, and for that in general Mr. Riley is correct that Mr. Bloomberg should be proud of his record, not apologetic for it. There are arguably particular aspects of his policies that should have been carried out differently, and going overboard with stop and frisk may well be one of them. But that is no reason to repudiate the whole package.
Based on comments by Mr. Bloomberg and the declared Democratic candidates, it appears that they do indeed "want to return to a time when criminals were treated like victims, police were treated like criminals, and the quality of life for law-abiding blacks in poor neighborhoods was an afterthought." The quality of life for all law-abiding people will suffer greatly if this mentality gains control. Just look at San Francisco.
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