“When we discovered, I discovered, that we were doing many, many, too many stop and frisks, we cut 95% of it out.”
Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters. ___ STOP AND FRISK DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MIKE BLOOMBERG, on the stop-and-frisk policing policy when he was New York mayor: "What happened, however, was it got out of control and when we discovered — I discovered — that we were doing many, many, too many stop and frisks, we cut 95% of them out." — Democratic debate Wednesday. THE FACTS: He’s misrepresenting how stop and frisk declined. That happened because of a court order, not because Bloomberg learned that it was being overused. In Bloomberg’s first 10 years in office, the number of stop-and-frisk actions increased nearly 600% from when he took office in 2002, reaching a peak of nearly 686,000 stops in 2011. That declined to about 192,000 documented stops in 2013, his final year as mayor. Bloomberg achieved his claim of a 95% cut by cherry-picking the quarterly high point of 203,500 stops in the first quarter of 2012 and comparing that with the 12,485 stops in the last quarter of 2013.