Mayor Bloomberg claimed that people of color should be stopped and frisked more -- not less -- while whites are stopped too frequently.
"I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they say," Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show, in response to the City Council pa**ing two bills aimed at reining in the controversial policing tactic.
"I don't know where they went to school but they certainly didn't take a math course. Or a logic course.”
The mayor was referring to statistics showing that a majority of serious crimes in the city are carried out by young men of color.
But candidates vying to replace him wasted no time in denouncing the comments.
“It's out of touch, it's insensitive and I dare say it is hurtful to people all over the city,” said Bill DeBlasio.
"As a New Yorker, as a father, as a son of the city, I found Mayor Bloomberg's comments today on his radio show to be outrageous and insulting."
Mayoral candidate Bill Thompson piled on.
"The mayor's comments seem to indicate that if you're black or Latino, you're automatically a murder suspect in the city of New York,” he said. "How ... insulting it is to have even uttered those comments. And what he indicates to the hundreds of thousands of people who are stopped and frisked unnecessarily in past years, is that we're sorry we didn't stop more people in the city of New York.
“It indicates to those who have been stopped, that it isn't that we're sorry, it's that we're sorry we didn't stop more people.
Eighty seven percent of all stops last year were for blacks or latinos, who constituted 90 percent of murder suspects, according to city stats. Only nine percent of stops were for white people, who made up 7 percent of all murder suspects.
“People say, well you know, cops shouldn't be stopping so many of any one group,” he said. “The cops' job is to stop so many of groups fitting the description. It's society's job to make sure that no one group is disproportionately represented as potential perpetrators.
"That's not the test. The test is are you stopping a disproportionate percentage of people who fit the description that witnesses or victims have come up with of crimes that have been committed."