I saw this on HuffPost and thought “how could a man running for president other than Trump give such a lame answer to a question he should have expected and not have had a well thought out answer?”
Consider this from HuffPost:
“I’ve been away from it for so long, I just really can’t respond because I just don’t remember,” Bloomberg, who served as New York City’s mayor from 2002 to 2013, said at a campaign event in Alabama on Monday.
Bloomberg’s mayoral administration spent years and millions of dollars fighting a civil lawsuit filed by the Five that alleged racial discrimination, malicious prosecution and emotional distress. As mayor, he vigorously defended the actions of police and city officials in the case, arguing that they’d acted in good faith when they arrested and charged five Latino and Black teenagers for the 1989 rape and assault of a white woman in Central Park.
Even though the crime and trial occurred over 30 years ago it’s not like the Central Park Five have disappeared from the news, especially in New York. For example this is from the October 17, 2019 New York Daily News:
ALBANY ― Three members of the Central Park Five wrongly convicted of the rape of a jogger when they were teens are working with advocates and lawmakers to push for far-reaching criminal justice reforms that could have prevented their own incarceration.
Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam, hoping to save others from suffering the same fate, are joining forces with the Innocence Project and others to push for measures outlawing the use of deceptive interview tactics to induce confessions, provide counsel to young people being interrogated and make compensation available to the wrongfully convicted.
“Nearly 30 years ago, we were imprisoned for a brutal crime we did not commit, and collectively spent decades behind bars for it," Salaam and Richardson said in a statement to the Daily News. “At the heart of the circumstances that conspired to strip us of our freedom and forever change the trajectory of our lives were false confessions.”
A proposal by state Sen. Zellnor Myrie would bar police from using deception in the interrogation room and ensure courts consider the reliability of a confession before it is admitted as evidence. There is currently nothing stopping a cop from lying when interrogating suspects or using tactics such as expressing sympathy or presenting false evidence..
There is even a Netflix mini-series about them which got rave critical and audience reviews.
This story was in The New York Times on May 30, 2019:
One morning earlier this month, a group of 10 men and teenage boys gathered for a photo shoot in a small studio on the Lower East Side. The overall mood was chill; as the music of Nipsey Hussle, 50 Cent and Wale filled the room, they chatted amiably in between shots, laughing, joking and moving along to the beats.
The occasion for this gathering was bittersweet: Five of the subjects were Korey Wise, 46; Kevin Richardson, 44; Raymond Santana, 44; Antron McCray, 45; and Yusef Salaam, 45, known collectively as the Central Park Five. Their stories are being retold in “When They See Us,” a new Netflix mini-series created and directed by Ava DuVernay.
In 1989 the men — then teenagers — were arrested in connection with the rape and assault of a white female jogger, and eventually convicted in a case that came to symbolize the stark injustices black and brown people experience within the legal system and in media coverage. They were convicted based partly on police-coerced confessions, and each spent between six and 13-plus years in prison for charges including attempted murder, rape and assault.
Aside from how anybody feels about someone buying himself into the primary, there are three elements with what happened with Michael Bloomberg that gives me pause when considering his qualifications to run for president let alone to actually be president.
Obviously the first is the he should be well informed about how members of the Central Park Five are working for criminal justice reform. Its is a New York City story but it is also a national story not only three decades old, but today.
The second is that thing that gives me pause is that when he realized in the instant that he hadn’t given the issue enough thought to have a good answer his response, while perhaps refreshingly honest, was to be charitable, awkward.
Here is a 77 year old man who professes to be qualified to be president who can’t remember a major event he participated in 30 years ago.
The third is that Bloomberg should have expected this question and done his homework because this has been an issue with Donald Trump who refused to apologize for the ad he took about advocating for the death penalty for these young men:
Bloomberg has raided his petty cash drawer and thrown millions into running for president. He has spend millions helping other Democratic candidates before with considerable success. This is what he should be focusing on now. He could help the Democrats take control of the Senate if he merely split the money he’s spending on himself into helping to fund a few key Senate races.
Afterthought:
I could have written about another elder running for president making an ill-advised statement. This is Joe Biden saying he’d consider running with a Republican as his VP. What do these people who are approaching 80 think? That they will live forever? If Biden died during his first term a Republican would become president. If he didn’t, or even if he did, he’d be positioning a Republican to run for president in 2024.