Fact-checking the ninth Democratic debate

The ninth Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 campaign, hosted by NBC, MSNBC and the Nevada Independent, had six candidates, lasted two hours — and did not have many statements that merited fact-checking. Here are seven claims that caught our attention. Our practice is not to award Pinocchios in debate roundups.

“If I go back and look at my time in office, the one thing that I’m really worried about, embarrassed about, was how it turned out with stop-and-frisk. When I got into office, there were 650 murders a year in New York City. And I thought that my first responsibility was to give people the right to live. That’s the basic right of everything. And we started it. We adopted a policy which had been in place. The policy that all big police departments use of stop-and-frisk. What happened, however, was it got out of control. And when we discovered, I discovered, that we were doing many, many, too many stop-and-frisks, we cut 95 percent of it out.”

— Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s claim that he cut 95 percent of stop-and-frisk incidents, which disproportionately targeted black and Hispanic men in New York while he was mayor, relies on a selective parsing of the data.

He inherited the city’s stop-and-frisk policy from his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, but it was the Bloomberg administration that ramped up the practice by New York police. In Bloomberg’s first 10 years in office, stop-and-frisk incidents increased nearly 600 percent, reaching a high point of about 686,000 actions in 2011.

According to FactCheck.org, “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.”