Mayor Bloomberg Levels Racism Charge Against The New York Times [Video]

Michael Bloomberg has accused the New York Times of racially biased crime reporting.

The New York City Mayor is on the same “page” with the New York Times when it comes to gun control. But they completely part company on the NYPD stop and frisk policy, which Bloomberg believes is essential to law enforcement and safe streets.

Most of the candidates running to succeed Bloomberg as mayor (and virtually all of the Democrats), along with various so-called civil liberties groups, want to abolish stop and frisk because in their view it is tantamount to racial profiling. Bloomberg instead wants the mayoral hopefuls to stop what he calls playing politics with public safety in the city and insists that stop and frisk has reduced crime significantly in the five boroughs.

The Times opposition to the stop and frisk policy has a racially based double standard, Bloomberg argued in a speech today at police headquarters:

“Last week, a Bronx resident named Alphonzo Bryant was shot and killed while standing with friends near his home. He was 17. Like most murder victims in our city, he was a minority. As I said earlier, about 90 percent of all murder victims in our city are black and Latino. But we cannot allow Alphonzo to become a statistic. Alphonzo was a person. He had a loving mother, family, friends. It does not appear he was even the intended target of the shooters. He was just a victim of too many guns in our streets.”

Bloomberg wondered aloud why the New York Times never reported on this murder: “But after his murder, there was no outrage from the Center for Constitutional Rights or the NYCLU. There was not even a mention of his murder in our .. ‘paper of record,’ The New York Times. ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ did not include the murder of 17-year-old Alphonzo Bryant. Do you think that if a white, 17-year-old prep student from Manhattan had been murdered, the Times would have ignored it?’ ‘Me neither.’ ”

” … The fact of the matter is, when the police stop and ask a 17-year-old a question based on a reasonable suspicion of a crime, there is outrage. Yet when a 17-year-old is standing on the street corner near his home at 8:15 in the evening and gets shot and killed, there is silence.

Bloomberg then slammed the Times for its continued opposition to the stop and frisk practice while allegedly ignoring the Bronx murder: “Four days after Alphonzo Bryant’s murder went unreported by the Times, the paper published another editorial attacking ‘stop, question and frisk.’ They called it a wildly loathed practice, even though a growing number of mothers and fathers who’ve had their children murdered with guns have spoken out in support of ‘stop, question and frisk.’ Now let me tell you what I loathe. I loathe that 17-year-old minority children can be senselessly murdered in the Bronx and some of the media doesn’t even consider it news.”

Adolfo Carrion, Jr., an independent candidate for mayor, agreed with Bloomberg’s criticism of the New York Times . The coverage or lack thereof “points to the arrogance of the limousine liberal in American politics. If the kid was from an upper-class family in New York City, it would have been on the cover of the paper,” Carrion said.

Do you think Mayor Bloomberg’s accusations hold water?

Watch Bloomberg address coverage of New York City crime by the Times: