This past weekend, I and some friends went to see a standing-room-only performance of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 lefty-classic The Cradle Will Rock . It was written in heavy-handed Left-speak. Blitzstein music is always interesting to me and I thought the singers were great (See the New York Times review here .)

The reason I bring all this up is that "Cradle" raises the interesting question about how people are bought off by the bosses. Artists, writers, professors, doctors, ministers sign onto the play's anti-union crusade essentially for cold cash. Crude and untextured, it brought to mind, by contrast, last week’s teapot tempest of the hire by Mr. Mister Bloomberg of DMI Director Andrea Batista Shlesinger . Ms. Schlesigner’s real-life track record is stellar. It’s hard for those of us who’ve seen her from a middle distance to believe she’s lured just by the cash.

Our billionaire Mayor has significant public support, if polls accurately reflect public opinion . Some suggest influencing him was a Schlesinger-motive, since, some say, he’s likely winner (As 13 months ago, Ms. Clinton was so seen) In this context I think it’s important to look at Mr. B’s record on various issues to try to understand why they impact so little on his favorable polling numbers.

The first of the issues I want to direct attention to is Mayor Bloomberg’s “Stop and Frisk” police procedures. On the day following the 200th anniversary of the birth of Lincoln, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP, this policy is worth reviewing. What, in my opinion, Mr. Bloomberg has done by his Stop & Frisk policy is to strengthen the divisions between two New Yorks – one of white people and one of people of color. People of color are stopped more than whites, they are frisked more than whites and physical force is applied against them more than whites. None of this racially disparate shoving around has a legitimate law enforcement purpose, in my view. The minority stops and frisks produce no more weapons, contraband items or arrests than ones directed at whites.

Do you think I’m making this up? I only wish. The Center for Constitutional Rights has been suing Mr. Bloomberg about racist police practices in Floyd v. City of New York and in the course of civil discovery has gotten access to police reports over the last view years and the evidence is damning and appalling. You can review the CCR’s report here and the statistically minded can download the spread-sheets. In the light of Mr. Bloomberg's appalling record here, you'd think he'd rein in his police but the data shows NYPD is stopping and frisking more people with even fewer results .

Why, when Mr. Bloomberg mouths platitudes on Martin Luther King Day at some church or other, does hell not open up to claim him? What sort of people are we that we allow this level of mass injustice to continue and to support the principal perpetrator?

If you want to read a summery of Floyd v. City of New York which has links to some of the legal documents, click here.