New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg attacked The New York Times Tuesday for showing racial bias against minority victims of crime.
“Last week, a Bronx resident named Alphonzo Bryant was shot and killed while standing with friends near his home,” Bloomberg said during a speech at the New York Police Department’s headquarters. “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.”
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In the speech, as reported by Capital New York, Bloomberg singled out The New York Times for failing to mention the death of a minority when the paper would never ignore the death of a white 17-year-old.
“But after his murder, there was no outrage from the Center for Constitutional Rights or the NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union]. There was not even a mention of his murder in our papers — 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,” Bloomberg said.
“Do you think that if a white, 17-year-old prep student from Manhattan had been murdered, the Times would have ignored it?” Bloomberg asked rhetorically. “Me neither.”
He went on to slam the Times yet again for daring to criticize New York City’s use of a “stop, question and frisk” crime program.
“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,” Bloomberg insisted. “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.
“Four days after Alphonzo Bryant’s murder went unreported by the Times, the paper published another editorial attacking ‘stop, question and frisk,'” he said. “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.”