By Tim Redmond
When New York City cops fired 50 shots outside a Queens nightclub, killing an unarmed 23-year-old African American man, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, quickly met with black leaders and publicly announced that the shooting was excessive and “unacceptable”. That’s a stunning move for any mayor; most civic leaders want to give the cops the benefit of the doubt, and they duck these situations by claiming they need to wait for the results of some long investigation.
But Bloomberg didn’t mess around: He told the truth, that “I can tell you that it is to me unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50-odd shots fired.”
Not surprisingly, the mayor is getting a pretty positive response.
Contrast that with how Mayor Gavin Newsom has dealt with past police shootings, including the Asa Sullivan killing, and you get a sense that the Democratic mayor of San Francisco doesn’t have any where near the guts of the Republican mayor of New York.