Yesterday, a DNAInfo report suggested that the increased number of stop-and-frisks throughout the city has had no evident impact on the number of shootings that have occurred. Although he's loathe to badmouth a policy he has championed time after time, Bloomberg did admit that stop-and-frisk hasn't been perfect: “It’s worrisome,” the mayor said about the frozen number of shootings. Wait, so you're telling us that manhandling 72-year-olds ISN'T stopping murders?
“There are still too many guns," Bloomberg said, according to the News. "This is not a panacea for everything.” He added that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is “working on it”—but lest you think Bloomberg is getting soft in his third term, he reiterated his major talking point: “What is clear is that the number of murders have come down dramatically.”
While the murder rate has decreased, the number of shootings has not despite the record levels of stops-and-frisks. In 2002—Bloomberg's first year in office—1,892 people were shot, and 97,296 people were frisked. Last year, 1,821 people were shot, while over 684,000 people were stopped-and-frisked. "If you have a flat-line situation with shootings, and the stops are this high, you are throwing everyone up against the wall and you are losing the community, then you have to reassess," a former top NYPD official told DNAInfo. "We are not a militia, but a police organization serving a community. We don’t want to be seen as an occupying army. We need the large majority of the community to be involved with us."
Bloomberg has remained focused on an anti-gun platform throughout his administration, forming the Mayors Against Illegal Guns group and fighting for stricter gun-control laws in NYC. But as much as the mayor likes to tout the statistic that stop-and-frisk has "taken more than 6,000 guns off the streets in the last eight years," it seems those extra millions of stops haven't produced any results when it comes to shootings.
