As long as he is sure that the seeds he is planting are corn, there is no way that farmer Jones will reap anything but corn.
I am a firm believer in the ability of the universe to balance things out. Despite human grandstanding, the universe balanced itself out on Tuesday night.
The universe ensured that Michael Bloomberg reaped a harvest of bitter fruits, compensation for the bitter seeds of police abuse he not only sowed but nurtured, as Mayor of New York City for twelve years, and even thereafter.
Voters in state after state, except in American Samoa sent Michael Bloomberg a strong message, “you are not our choice”.
Mister Bloomberg, as Mayor was well within his rights as chief executive of the city of New York, to implement policies he believes would keep the citizens safe.
No one should fault the former Mayor for the implementation of stop and frisk. In fact, the then-Mayor Bloomberg did not start the program, it was started under his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani.
But it wasn’t just that Michael Bloomberg supported and enhanced the policy, he vociferously supported it. Additionally, Bloomberg strategically used NYPD cops to target black and brown residents of the city, based upon his fundamental belief that they were the only ones committing crimes.
A friend recently reminded me that as police officers in Jamaica we randomly had access to stop and frisk as a matter of course.
I agreed with my friend, but the thing missing from our use of the strategy was racial animus.
Despite the outrage, and many calls from minority groups in New York City, Michael Bloomberg was unperturbed, even after the Supreme Court ruled that the policy was unconstitutional and the NYPD had scaled back the practice, and even after Bloomberg had demitted office, he still defiantly defended the policy.
There were undeniable strategic benefits from the stop and frisk policy from a policing standpoint. The problem with the policy is that given such broad latitude to stop and search whoever they deemed suspicious, police inculcated into the policy their own ignorant racial biases.
Two days ago, Emily Badger wrote for the New York Times: Crime in the city continued to decline, suggesting that the aggressive use of police stops wasn’t so essential to New York’s safety after all.
Evidence has emerged of the harms created by the strategy. We now know that students heavily exposed to stop-and-frisk were more likely to struggle in school, that young men were more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression, that this exposure fostered cynicism in policing and government writ large, and that it made residents more likely to retreat from civic life.
The damage that was done to young African- American and Latino men runs far deeper than the killings that occurred at the hands of NYPD cops. The many and varied instances of abuse of the rights of citizens and the tens of millions of taxpayers dollars that have been spent to compensate some victims are only the tip of the iceberg.
Research in New York found that black male students who were more exposed to stop-and-frisk had lower test scores. And other research using surveys about experiences with the police has found that students around the country who were arrested or stopped, or who witnessed these encounters or knew of others involved, had worse grades.
Last November, when he first apologized for the practice before announcing his campaign for president, Michael Bloomberg suggested that he had come to understand some of these deeper consequences, including the ways that the policy had damaged faith in law enforcement and government.
“The erosion of trust bothered me — deeply,” he said at the time. “And it still bothers me. And I want to earn it back.”
But it wasn’t just that Bloomberg had been a part of bad public policy, it was the way in which he defended it in personal ways which made it seem at the time, that he did not care about the people of color in the city because they were basically all criminals.
For that reason it did not matter to me that Bloomberg said he was sorry He may very well had seen the light and come to his senses, the damage was done and the consequences were too severe for a simple “I’m sorry”.
Michael Bloomberg by his record had no right to come to the African-America community asking for support.
There are many things he can do to make up for some of the harm he has done.
That includes setting up a charity to help repair some of the damage his policies caused.
As I said when he went to A R Bernard’s Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn and Bernard asked the congregation to show him some love and respect, many church leaders are the worst elements within the Africa-American community.
They should be exposed as the enemies that that they are.
Kudos to the members of the Brown chaple AME church in Selma Alabama who turned their backs on Mike Bloomberg, kudos to the African-American voters on Super Tuesday who sent him packing.