SB 1070 problem for Bloomberg?

Mike Bloomberg is getting ready for a fight in Arizona.

He’s hiring staff, opening offices and spending money, betting he can flip the state for the Democratic Party. Digging in early is a smart move. Bloomberg has to win a battle for trust among minority voters here and in other live-wire states to give himself the best shot at securing his party’s presidential nomination and an opportunity to bang Donald Trump out of the White House in November.

Bloomberg hasn’t been involved in the primary debates, meaning there’s a huge group of voters who don’t know him outside of the heavy criticism he’s taken over the “stop-and-frisk” practices that police used to unfairly target blacks and Latinos when he was mayor of New York City.

It’ll be a particular issue in Arizona, where his opponents will blast the policy as an East Coast version of the “show me your papers law,” Senate Bill 1070.

Arizona’s restrictive immigration law that required police to check the immigration status of people they suspected were in the country illegally was nothing more than legislatively mandated racial profiling against Hispanics, and a series of court battles and protests eroded the measure — and its copycats in a handful of other states — into irrelevance by 2016.

But the memory remains strong. It’ll be hard for Bloomberg to downplay the similarities, especially since an array of statistics and lawsuits show that the “stop-and-frisk” strategy of detaining and questioning people based on simple suspicion was most effective at creating an adversarial relationship between police and the communities they were employed to serve and protect.

His campaign knows it’s a liability. Minority support is essential to the success of a Democratic candidate.

And Bloomberg doesn’t have much time to clean things up.

He’s betting on widespread support in March primaries — Arizona voters will hit the polls March 17 — as his pathway to the nomination.

His strategy to establish trust has been to apologize, clearly and directly.

He said in November that “stop-andfrisk” wasn’t the right policy and that he should have recognized that sooner. “Our focus was on saving lives, but the fact is, far too many innocent people were being stopped,” he told congregants at a New York church.

The timing was curious. He apologized right when his name was being increasingly mentioned as a legitimate candidate.

But it was good enough for former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter.

“The timing is the timing,” he said in a phone conversation with The Arizona Republic.

“What’s not a question for me is the sincerity of the apology.”

Nutter, an African American who supported “stop-and-frisk” in his city, cited Bloomberg’s record as evidence that the candidate’s motives were genuine.

“He created a program called the Young Men’s Initiative that was solely focused on black and brown men who found it difficult to find employment, their job skills were maybe not where they needed to be to go on with their lives,” Nutter said.

“He created the new program out of nothing, a $130 million program, funded with $30 million of his own money … it was a highly successful program in New York City, which then became the model for what President Obama ultimately created, which is My Brother’s Keeper.”

For Nutter, “stop-and-frisk” can be used legally to improve public safety. He’s not an SB 1070 expert, but he doesn’t think there’s any way it could be applied constitutionally.

Regardless, Bloomberg is focused on making things better, Nutter said.

“Mike Bloomberg is a leader. He’s a listener. He’s a learner. … If something’s not going right, he takes responsibility for what he did or did not do properly. And then he moves forward.”

The message is clear and direct. It’s a good way to begin winning trust.