It’s mayor vs. mayor — the Democratic primary edition.
Mayor de Blasio lashed out at Michael Bloomberg Thursday for suggesting that the current occupant of Gracie Mansion had to “learn” something about the racially charged stop-and-frisk policy.
“What planet are you on, dude?” Hizzoner rhetorically asked Blooomberg at a City Hall press conference. “A decade ago, people knew it was wrong and tried to tell you and you wouldn’t listen.”
“How about a real apology where you like recognize that everyone and their kid brother were telling you it was wrong and you ignored it?” raged de Blasio.
De Blasio, who dropped out of the presidential race after polling at 0% in polls, called Bloomberg a “narcissistic billionaire” who is seeking to write history to suit his White House ambitions.
“I called for an end to your broken policies, got elected + changed them,” de Blasio wrote on Twitter earlier Thursday morning.
Bloomberg has spent a big chunk of his Democratic primary campaign apologizing for stop and frisk, under which police disproportionately targeted black and Latino men for searches and arrest.
The billionaire ex-mayor went even further Wednesday night when he suggested on a nationally televised CNN Town Hall that “hopefully my successor learned from my mistake.”
In fact, Bloomberg defended stop and frisk long after leaving office in 2013 and only explicitly apologized for the policy as he launched his Democratic presidential bid. De Blasio, on the other hand, ran for mayor on a platform of more equitable policing, including an end to stop and frisk.
Stu Loeser, a Bloomberg adviser, mocked de Blasio for tweeting about Bloomberg at 4:16 a.m., several hours after the former mayor spoke on CNN.
“So either @CNN replayed @MikeBloomberg’s town hall overnight or a thin-skinned New Yorker … is watching @TiVo in his (our) executive mansion,” Loeser said, without addressing the substance of de Blasio’s attack.
De Blasio said he has been having trouble sleeping because he recently underwent knee surgery. He said he was stunned at what he called the arrogance of Bloomberg’s remarks.
“There was surrealism to it that just drove me crazy,” de Blasio said. “It was like: ‘Oh, you know, we have received wisdom from him and now we will understand that stop and frisk was wrong.’”
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