Former NYPD Chief Kerik slams Bloomberg walkback on stop and frisk

Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik slammed Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg for walking back his past support of policing tactics that Kerik said lower violent crime and protect predominantly minority neighborhoods.

Kerik accused Bloomberg -- who while mayor of New York City presided over a sharp increase in police stops and searches -- of dialing back his support of those practices merely for political points now that Bloomberg is seeking the White House.

“That’s a political statement, it's not reality,” Kerik said in an interview with Just The News. “He knows that 'Stop, Question and Frisk' was an important tool for reducing crime in New York City. He’s saying he’s changing his mind because he abused it. That’s against the law.” 

Kerik said Bloomberg’s admission -- unearthed in a recording at the Aspen Institute -- that under his watch, police targeted minority "kids" whom cops must throw "up against the wall,” allowed for illegal policing tactics.

“That is against the law, you can’t do that,” Kerik continued. “The press and media and the Left, they focus, when they talk about this, they say ‘stop and frisk.’ But it’s actually stop, question and frisk.

"You stop someone, maybe you stop to see where they're going, or based on a suspect description. Then you question them. As a part of that questioning, depending on the answers they give you, it may raise your suspicion and therefore you want to pat them down to look for guns and to ensure that you yourself is safe in that confrontation. You don’t just stop somebody and throw someone on a wall and search them the way Bloomberg says.” 

The Bloomberg campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

President Trump pardoned Kerik last week of his 2010 criminal sentences on tax fraud charges that led to three years of imprisonment.

In his White House pardoning statement, Trump said Kerik "courageously led the New York Police Department’s heroic response to the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001," and that after his sentencing, Kerik became a "passionate advocate for criminal justice and prisoner reentry reform." 

“Keeping 'stop, question and frisk' intact is important, however, it’s got to be monitored,” Kerik also said. “It can’t be abused. It’s an excellent tool for reducing crime and taking guns off the streets. You can't abuse it the way that Bloomberg did. 

During his presidential campaign, Bloomberg has claimed he “cut” police stops by “95%” in the time he left office. However, the website FactCheck.org reported “nearly twice as many stops in his last year as mayor, compared with the year before he took office." 

“In Bloomberg’s first 10 years in office, the number of stop-and-frisk actions increased nearly 600% from what he ‘inherited,’ reaching a peak of nearly 686,000 stops in 2011,” reported FactCheck.org’s Robert Farley. “There were about 192,000 documented stops in 2013. Bloomberg gets to his figure of a 95% cut by cherry-picking the quarterly high point of 203,500 stops in the first quarter of 2012 and comparing that with the 12,485 stops in the last quarter of 2013 -- a decline that would not have been possible without the numbers ballooning earlier in Bloomberg’s tenure.”