Here was the problem with stop and frisk, as someone who lived under it.
It didn't work. This is something that gets lost in the debates about it being racist or targeting low income neighborhoods. It was also incredibly ineffective. Crime was declining in NYC over the years it was in effect, but it had been declining for years prior and has continued to decline in the aftermath. Most New York pundits who supported the policy were forced to admit that it had no appreciable effect. And more to the point, we can see, as was widely reported at the time, that it didn't yield any investigative advantage to balance out the discriminatory nature of the policy.
1% of stops yielded weapons or drugs.
For a program to have had so much press, so much controversy, been such a clear violation of civil rights (as the courts found) and to have been generally unpopular even among some in the NYPD and then to have also been wildly ineffective is astonishing. More astonishing is how stop and frisk seems to resonate with "common sense" to people despite this repeatedly proven ineffectiveness.
The idea that cops could theoretically make anyone a suspect and stop them and search them just because they look a certain way in a certain neighborhood should on face value seem ridiculous. Even forgetting about civil liberties for a moment, there's just no way it works logically. Few people who sell drugs do so on the street. Few people who intend to shoot someone walk around armed all the time, at least in New York. It's just a fundamental misread of the way crime even happens and it was mostly designed to boost arrest numbers so the NYPD could feed off the bloated budgets it felt entitled to after 9/11 (despite the officers not having a contract for years under Bloomberg).
So when this old Bloomberg clip gets trotted out it resonates with the kind of ho hum lazy thinking that people usually apply to crime and policing. It was emblematic of the corporate managerial approach to being the mayor Bloomberg brought to everything where you come up with a dumb idea, have toadies who tell you it's great to impress you, then never care about the actual facts. In common ears, it seems to make sense, except it didn't yield results, can't be said to in any way account for the decline in crime in NYC, and was fundamentally discriminatory and unconstitutional.