Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) unloaded on billionaire Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg on Thursday over recently released audio recordings, deemed by many as controversial.
Ocasio-Cortez made the attacks in response to Bloomberg News, owned by Michael Bloomberg, publishing a report on how Bloomberg “seeks to move past ‘stop and frisk’ controversy.”
“Will people get their records expunged? Will young people sucked into the spiderweb of incarceration get their lives back?” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Unless there is restorative justice, there is no ‘moving on’ from Stop & Frisk. It’s just a billionaire trying to cover up authoritarian & racist policy.”
“New York City is about 60% people of color,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “Stop and Frisk was an unconstitutional, devastating practice for the entire city that intentionally exempted White people from harm. It was one of the most racist policies I’ve ever lived through that deeply impacted the entire city.”
New York City is about 60% people of color.
Stop and Frisk was an unconstitutional, devastating practice for the entire city that intentionally exempted White people from harm.
It was one of the most racist policies I’ve ever lived through that deeply impacted the entire city.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 13, 2020
The controversy ignited earlier this week when an audio clip surfaced of Bloomberg talking about crime control in 2015, after his term as mayor of New York City, and saying that “minority neighborhoods” are “where all the crime is.”
Bloomberg said, “95% 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, 16-25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city and that’s where the real crime is.”
“You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed,” Bloomberg continued. “You want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets. Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”
“So, one of the unintended consequences is people say, ‘oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods,” Bloomberg continued. “Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them. And then they start say[ing], ‘Oh I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”
Share this far and wide. Unless the mainstream media picks it up, it will be isolated to twitter. pic.twitter.com/Fm0YCi4ZRy
— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) February 11, 2020
Ocasio-Cortez promoted an attack on Bloomberg from far-left New York Times Magazine reporter N. Hannah Jones, (known on Twitter as “Ida Bae Wells”) over separate remarks that Bloomberg made about “redlining” — a lending practice that discriminated against minorities.
“It probably all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg said in a lecture at Georgetown University in September 2008. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’”
“And then Congress got involved — local elected officials, as well — and said, ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit,’” Bloomberg continued. “And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”
Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a tweet from Jones to her millions of Twitter followers, accusing Bloomberg of defending “redlining” in his remarks: “Redlining was an explicitly racist policy that ensured that until 1968 98 % of federally insured loans went to white Americans. It created one of largest white affirmative action programs we’ve seen and is a direct cause of the devastating black/white wealth gap.”
Redlining was an explicitly racist policy that ensured that until 1968 98 % of federally insured loans went to white Americans. It created one of largest white affirmative action programs we’ve seen and is a direct cause of the devastating black/white wealth gap. https://t.co/P8WjFKyzZ2
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) February 13, 2020