theworldismine13
God Emperor of SOHH
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/opinion/keller-the-anti-weiner.html
Bill Thompson, the Anti-Weiner
By BILL KELLER
ON issue after issue in the race to be the next mayor of New York, Bill Thompson is the Goldilocks candidate — not too hot, not too cold. And, as a result, not too exciting. This is especially apparent when, as at a forum I attended last week, he is seated next to Anthony Weiner, who plays the hyperbolic huckster with such enthusiasm that he seems to be auditioning for a summer-stock production of “Elmer Gantry.” Thompson is, in his demeanor and his approach to public service, the anti-Weiner — even-keeled, not self-aggrandizing, careful, decent. His favorite adjective seems to be “balanced.” His oratory rarely rises above a simmer. (“No one will ever accuse him of being inflammatory,” Chris Smith dryly observed in New York magazine.) It is easy to forget that in 2009 he ran a close challenge to the seemingly invincible Michael Bloomberg despite being outspent 14 to 1.
His positions generally fall in the middle of a decidedly liberal Democratic pack. Christine Quinn promises to build 40,000 units of affordable housing; Bill de Blasio promises to “build or preserve” 200,000; Thompson, wouldn’t you know, comes in at 120,000. On education, where he speaks with some authority as a former president of the Board of Education, he is a moderate reformer: for charter schools, the Common Core and testing accountability, but for attempting to save failing schools before closing them, and for treating teachers as partners in reform rather than intransigent slackers. (His mother was a public-school teacher, and he has an endorsement from the teachers’ union.)
For a revealing demonstration of the Thompson way — his manner of taking the heat out of a hot-button issue — consider his handling of the police tactic called stop-and-frisk.
Stop-and-frisk, or, as its advocates prefer, stop-question-and-frisk, is as old as policing. Bill Bratton, the former New York police commissioner, former Los Angeles chief of police and the go-to policing guru for mayoral candidates of both parties this year, says the practice is indispensable and uncontroversial when done right: it should be based on a reasonable suspicion, it should be done with respect, and it should be employed consistently. In Los Angeles, which has a famously assertive police force and a population at least as diverse as New York’s, Bratton says stop-and-frisk is routinely employed with little protest.
In New York, though, the practice has been used — overwhelmingly against black and Hispanic men — on the vaguest of pretexts, often with little consideration for dignity. How did that happen? First, to keep the budget balanced, the city cut 6,000 police officers and tried to make up the manpower shortage by sending platoons of rookies to walk the beat in high-crime neighborhoods. Many of them had not acquired the confidence or learned the techniques to avoid leaving their subjects humiliated and angry. Second, Bloomberg’s management style is to give his lieutenants — in this case Commissioner Ray Kelly — wide latitude and use metrics to hold them accountable. So, formally or informally, those rookies were being evaluated based on the raw numbers of stops. Every teenager with a dark complexion and a hint of attitude thus became a potential career enhancer. And third, as Bratton points out, Bloomberg framed stop-and-frisk as a way of keeping guns off the street. This turned a valuable fringe benefit (729 guns discovered last year) into a justification for excess (582,911 stops). The abuse of this basic policing tool alienated whole communities, turning potential citizen allies into angry and uncooperative subjects.
Between them, black and Hispanic voters make up about half of the city’s electorate, so stop-and-frisk is an issue ripe for populist pandering. Candidate John Liu, following the lead of the Rev. Al Sharpton, insists on abolishing the practice altogether. Bill de Blasio doesn’t go that far, but he favors creating an independent inspector general to police the police, and he supports a bill that would let citizens sue the Police Department for racial profiling. Weiner has been less interested in specific reforms than in firing up the electorate; on one occasion he evoked Nazi Germany in his denunciations of stop-and-frisk.
Thompson, the only African-American in the race, could have played this issue Sharpton’s way, mobilizing the indignation of black and Latino voters (and many white liberals) to his advantage. But Thompson, whose father spent part of a long public career as an appellate judge — “a tough judge,” his son says proudly — understands that minority voters have a more complicated attitude toward the police. As much as they want to be treated with respect, they want safe streets for their kids.
“Those neighborhoods are entitled to safety,” Thompson told me. “They are entitled to be able to go outside like other neighborhoods at 10 o’clock at night and not worry about being mugged or shot.”
His approach to the issue is almost identical to Bratton’s, although the former commissioner is not backing any candidate. Thompson favors restoring 2,000 of those police jobs and pairing rookies with seasoned officers. He opposes the inspector general as superfluous and the racial-profiling bill as “the lawyer employment act.” (Thompson also has the endorsement of a coalition of unions representing the city’s law enforcement officials.)
“I don’t need the legislation to eliminate racial profiling,” he said. “I think a mayor who’s focused, who’s not going to tolerate that, who selects a police commissioner who also understands that we are not going to tolerate that ... then we don’t need a bill to eliminate profiling, which is illegal anyway.”
Perhaps his race and his middle-class upbringing in the tense precincts of Bedford-Stuyvesant give Thompson the credibility to be more nuanced on the subject, or perhaps his nuances get lost in the noisy hype of the campaign. But political calculation aside, Thompson has ended up at his natural destination. And on this issue, at least, the complicated, unexciting position also happens to be right.
“It’s not just striking a populist tone to get votes,” he added. “It’s about leadership.”
So accustomed are reporters to Thompson’s lack of fire, and so rarely does he talk about race, that it was deemed real news a couple of Sundays ago when he dropped by the Abundant Life Church in Brooklyn to summon the ghost of a dead black teenager, Trayvon Martin. There was no question, he said, that the young Florida man was followed, confronted and killed because of his race. Under stop-and-frisk, he declared, thousands of innocent black New Yorkers were being “profiled as Trayvon was profiled.” His remarks were described in news reports as “unusually soaring, provocative and personal” and “unusually passionate.” Thompson seemed a little taken aback by the coverage, almost embarrassed. Provocative? Really? Me?
“It was less of an indictment and more of a ‘We need to examine the way we do things. We need to look inside ourselves.’ ”
After we had talked policing and other issues for most of an hour in an Upper East Side coffee bar, I asked Thompson about his reputation for being charisma-challenged. He shrugged and then launched into an answer that I can only describe as Thompsonesque.
“I’m not a screamer. I do get things done, and I stand up for what I believe in. If that’s boring, so be it,” he said. He pondered for a minute. “Most of the people I meet won’t walk away and say, ‘Wow, he put me to sleep.’ Almost nobody says that. People are still awake when I’m talking to them.” Another pause. “It is the one thing that I’ve learned to live with: people will contrast you to people who shout, people who speak a lot louder and don’t get things done.”
