Posted on by Brendan Birth

Twelve Years of Bloomberg as Mayor: A New Yorker’s Perspective (Part Two)

As I announced last Monday, I will be doing a couple of posts on what it was like to have current presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg as mayor (and particularly justice-related topics from his time as mayor). This is the first of two such posts, as honestly, I have too much material to fit into one post.

This first post will focus on his treatment of other people while he was mayor, particularly his treatment of people of color, Muslims, women, and the poor. Buckle up, because this is going to be rough…

While he has apologized repeatedly for the existence of stop-and-frisk under his police force while he was mayor, I think it’s difficult to talk about his time as mayor without talking about that practice. The practice, which allowed police to stop someone temporarily to search, question, and detain someone, disproportionately targeted people of color. Consider the fact that, in the 2010 United States Census, African Americans made up under 23 percent of the total New York City population[1] but consistently accounted for over half of stops.[2] My family’s experiences match up with these statistics—while my brother, and I, and our white friends, never got stopped-and-frisked, my younger brother heard horror stories of friends of color in middle school (kids who were 11 or 12 years old) getting stopped-and-frisked by the New York Police Department, even though they (like nearly 90% of those stopped at that time) were doing nothing wrong! Mayor Bloomberg may’ve apologized for the practice,[3] but the apology does not undo the damage done to my brother’s friends who were stopped, among many others. The apology does not take away the fact that his police force basically treated black and brown kids like accused criminals.

Nor does the apology undo other racist practices under the Bloomberg administration. It does not undo the fact that Bloomberg’s education policies deepened segregation in New York City schools[4]—something he has not apologized for to my knowledge. He also has not apologized for the fact that his Department of Education created policies that denied educational opportunities to people who were thought to be black, including my brother![5] He has not apologized for the disinvestment in public housing in New York City[6]—relevant because the population of public housing in New York is overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic.[7] And he has not apologized for saying that the end of redlining, “a practice used by banks to discriminate against minority borrowers,” led to the 2008 economic crisis.[8]

People of color weren’t the only people the Bloomberg administration discriminated against. He had and still seems to have an Islamophobic streak, for Bloomberg’s New York Police Department also had extreme levels of surveillance of Muslims.[9] When he repeatedly says that his one regret is stop-and-frisk, it also means that he does not regret the discrimination of Muslims through this surveillance. That’s very telling.

For those of my readers interested in women’s issues and women’s rights, Bloomberg repeatedly struggled with sexism while he was mayor. Here’s an excerpt from an article at The Atlantic, a lot of which includes remarks he made while he was mayor:

There’s more: Bloomberg reportedly saying to a journalist and the journalist’s friend, as he gazed at a woman at a holiday party, “Look at the ass on her.” (He denied having made that comment.) Bloomberg, according to a top aide, seeing attractive women and reflexively remarking, “Nice tits.” Bloomberg, mocking Christine Quinn, the then-speaker of New York’s City Council, for going too long between hair colorings. (“The couple of days a week before I need to get my hair colored,” Quinn once said, “he’ll say, ‘Do you pay a lot to make your hair be two colors? Because now it’s three with the gray.’”) Bloomberg mocking Quinn again, she said, for failing to wear heels at public events. (“I was at a parade with him once and he said, ‘What are those?’ and I said, ‘They’re comfortable,’ and he said, ‘I never want to hear those words out of your mouth again.’”)[10]

The same article I just cited also went into the culture of sexism at his company, and it is no secret that Bloomberg faces numerous allegations of fostering a hostile work environment for women at his company[11] (something Senator Elizabeth Warren exposed in the recent debate). While my piece focuses on what it was like to have him as mayor, I don’t want people to forget about the workplace hostility against many women at Bloomberg, the company.

As for the poor, Mayor Bloomberg advocated for policies that hurt the poor. He argued for a tax on sugary soft drinks, which would have disproportionately affected the poor. He defended the proposed tax, even though he acknowledged that the tax would disproportionately hurt the poor![12] That, along with a lack of investment in public housing (which I previously mentioned) and the increasing unaffordability of the city while he was mayor,[13] show that he was not a friend of the poor.

There is probably even more that I’m missing here, but you probably get the point by now: unless you are white, somewhat wealthy, male, and not Muslim, Mayor Bloomberg was not an advocate for you.

And yet, I have even more injustices to say about Bloomberg as mayor even beyond his treatment of others. To be continued…

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/nyc-population/census2010/t_pl_p3_nyc.pdf

[2] https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data. Also, for those who deny the existence of white privilege, consider the fact that whites make up a third of New York’s population but only about 10% of stops.

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/17/politics/michael-bloomberg-stop-and-frisk-apology/index.html

[4] https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/11/25/michael-bloomberg-is-running-for-president-what-you-should-know-about-the-billionaires-education-record-in-new-york-city/

[5] My brother is white, like me, but the education system in New York thought my brother was black. It’s a long story. Read this old post of mine to view the story: https://blindinjusticeblog.com/2018/04/24/institutional-racism-series-how-it-affected-where-i-went-to-school/

[6] https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/a-marshall-plan-for-nycha

[7] Even though this statistic was from 2017, a few years after Bloomberg left office, from my understanding, these statistics are also a reflection of what the demographics were like when Bloomberg was mayor: https://furmancenter.org/files/NYCHA_Diversity_Brief_Final-04-30-2019.pdf

[8] https://apnews.com/8cbb1fafbb4faf01e8d9571363979501

[9] https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/21/us/new-york-muslim-surveillance/index.html

[10] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/mike-bloomberg-comments-women-metoo/570448/

[11] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/mike-bloomberg-comments-women-metoo/570448/

[12]https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/12/05/michael_bloomberg_tax_the_poor_for_their_own_good_141890.html

[13] https://www.wnyc.org/story/304422-new-york-remade-city-more-desirable-ever-also-too-expensive-many/

25 Replies to “Twelve Years of Bloomberg as Mayor: A New Yorker’s Perspective (Part Two)”

    1. That’s correct. In terms of the treatment of people, there are actually some significant similarities between the two–both have a history of racism, sexism, Islamophobia and anti-poor policy.

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  2. Reblogged this on Filosofa's Word and commented:
    Now that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has thrown his hat into the 2020 presidential circle, it is important to look back at his performance as Mayor. Blogger-friend Brendan Birth has lived his entire life in New York City and well remembers Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor. I mentioned to Brendan last week that I might like him to do a guest post for me, and he went one better, and is doing a mini-series! The series began with an intro on Monday that I re-blogged on Tuesday, and today he gives us Part II of a look at Mike Bloomberg as mayor. He will finish with a conclusion next Monday, just in time for Super Tuesday! Thanks Brendan, for sharing your birds-eye views!

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      1. My pleasure, Brendan! The more informed people are, the more likely they are to make wise choices, and we surely do need some wise choices to be made this year! In my book, Bloomberg is not one of them. Though, that said, if he is the nominee, I will vote for him, since I believe the current occupant of the Oval Office is the personification of evil.

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    1. You’re welcome. Yeah, I have a lot of direct information, and honestly, even many of the things we get fed from his campaign ads aren’t even true. I will be talking about his record on the environment in my post on Monday, by the way.

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  4. I agree that these incidents certainly do not paint a positive picture of Mayor Bloomberg. I’ll be curious to see if there is any mention of any of the good things he did as mayor in the final installment of this series. (there must have been some for him to serve for 12 years)

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    1. Hi Jim. You will find out more on Monday, but my posts will focus more on the unsavory side of things. I decided that for a few reasons:
      1. Bloomberg has already focused on many of the positives in his ads…and has not been truthful about certain things he said we’re positive (like on health care, for example).
      2. However, I have noticed that relatively little is covered about a number of the negatives that happened while he was in office.
      3. Honestly, my experiences of him as mayor were overwhelmingly negative.

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  7. The way he treated the Muslim community was so monstrous. How is it the NYPD was given authority to spy on people outside of NY City and even New Jersey? They had to have collaborators from other departments as well?

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    1. That’s a good question, Caleb. Honestly, I’m not sure how he got that authority. My educated guess would be help from the feds? (After all, for much of his time in office, the Bush Administration was also in office.)

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    1. Thanks for sharing the article. This article’s assessment is by-in-large true. The issue in my case was that I was not wealthy (and my family was not wealthy), so my perspective is tilted towards how his time in office affected those who were not wealthy.

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  11. disproportionately targeted people of color

    This phrase disproportionately TARGETED people of color exposes a very biased and dishonest perspective on race relations in Bloomberg’s term as Mayor of New York.

    The NYPD developed a rigorous, data based metric for targeting their “Broken Windows,” enforcement policy.

    The Broken Windows enforcement policy was a proven police method that enforced lower level laws to establish a strong police presence and restore a sense of safety and reassure the public that the police were protecting them.

    These assertive police tactics were targeted by crime statistics and NOT by race.

    For political reasons, the Republican Mayors or overwhelmingly democratic New York, Giuliani and Bloomberg, inadvisedly continued Broken Windows, by then dubbed Stop and Frisk after the crime levels in NYC dropped,.

    As court decisions have shown this continuation of Stop and Frisk after the data no longer supported it was a massive fourth amendment violation of the rights of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of New Yorkers and was greatly reduced.

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    1. I disagree. I (and my brother) are no more suspicious than our friends of color, yet we were never stopped, searched, or frisked. Our friends were. I heard similar things from friends of friends…that the white people in the grouped were never stopped, searched, or frisk, while their friends were. Things may’ve happened under the guise of “targeting by crime statistics,” but the reality was that the tactics disproportionately targeted people of color.

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