In the final, desperate days of his seemingly unending mayoralty, New York City's Michael Bloomberg has been handed yet another stinging defeat.
First, a new mayor was elected on a platform that essentially rejects Bloomberg's vision. Then his dream of a high-rise kingdom on Manhattan's East Side was killed by the City Council. And yesterday, an appeals court declined Bloomberg's attempt to keep the NYPD's Stop and Frisk tactic intact, all but ending the argument once and for all.
In August, Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court found the NYPD's Stop and Frisk policy, which stopped young minority men on the street under the slightest of suspicions, to be unconstitutional. But Bloomberg vowed to fight the ruling, and actually scored some minor victories as Scheindlin was removed from the case and her order for an independent monitor to oversee the police department was blocked.
Yesterday, however, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that Scheindlin's ruling still stands, and that the appeal process should continue to run its course over the next few months. But Bloomberg is out of time. In just over a month, Bloomberg will no longer be mayor of New York, and the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has vowed to end the city's appeal of the ruling.
"This marks the end of the Bloomberg administration's effort to short-circuit the appeals process and undo the district court's rulings before Bill de Blasio takes office," Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times.
While the city will still appeal the ruling over the next few weeks, there's little chance any appeal would be successful in that time frame. 12 years in office was still somehow too short for Bloomberg's agenda.
