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. That’s true in virtually every city.
That’s an old quote from Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, cited in “The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg: His racist stop-and-frisk policy as New York mayor can’t be forgotten.” in the New York Times.
My first thought is, instead of jumping right to calling the man a “racist” (translation: “anyone who disagrees with me”), run the numbers and tell us if the statement is true. My sense is that he might be a little off on the numbers but not a lot.
And my second thought is that the statement is both sexist and ageist but to my knowledge no one has objected to anything but the racial angle.