Bloomberg on the New York murder rate: 'We just are not going back'
Bloomberg in Brownsville. Dana Rubinstein
9:42 am Jul. 13, 2012
"We used to be one of the murder capitals of the United States, and we just are not going back, at least not while I am here," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning, during his regular Friday morning appearance on the John Gambling radio show.
The mayor was calling in from an annual conference about media and technology in Sun Valley, Idaho, but much of today's conversation was about crime, which has spiked recently.
Gambling asked Bloomberg about a recent war of words between political leaders from high-crime neighborhoods and police commissioner Ray Kelly, who faulted them for protesting stop-and-frisk instead of protesting the crime in their backyards.
"Ninety-six percent of our shooting victims are people of color, yet these community leaders are not speaking out about that,” he said. “I'd like to see some political outcry ... I want them to be outraged that a three-year-old child is shot on the streets.”
"Ray Kelly is right and he's also the best police commissioner the city has ever had," said the mayor, later adding that he sympathized "with Ray's frustration."
"Everything the police do is wrong to certain groups of people and they can't possibly win," he said. "I don't know who wants to take us back to the bad old days, but I can tell you it's not Ray Kelly and it's not Michael Bloomberg, and we're not gonna do it."
The mayor compared New York's murder rate, which he says is on track to be less than 500 this year, to those of cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore, where it is higher.
"[In] the end, if the kid is on the street with a gun, we've got to get that gun out of his hands, and we've got to make the kids believe that the likelihood of being stopped is so great that they shouldn't carry a gun," Bloomberg said.
