'The View's' Sunny Hostin confronts Michael Bloomberg over stop-and-frisk apology: 'Sounds like a political move'

"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin confronted presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg over stop and frisk.

Stop and frisk is a controversial police practice in which police officers briefly stop a person, question them, and pat them down to check for any weapons or other contraband. Many New Yorkers believed that the practice allowed law enforcement officers to unfairly target minorities.

You can read more about the practice and its background here.

What happened during the exchange?

Bloomberg appeared on Wednesday's broadcast of "The View," where he discussed his 2020 presidential aspirations.

At one point during the panel discussion, Hostin pressed Bloomberg over his recent apology over employing stop and frisk — a policy he defended for years before announcing his candidacy for Democratic nominee.

Saying that the apology felt like a political stunt, Hostin said, "[Stop and frisk] has caused 600[%] increase in police stops that disproportionately targeted black and Latino men, 90% of whom were innocent."

"We're talking about 14 stops out of 10,000 only produced a gun, OK?" she continued. "Many questioned the authenticity of that policy, Mayor Bloomberg, myself included, only because in January of that year you stood up for stop and frisk. So what happened between January and November that caused this change of heart? Because it sounds like a political move to me."

Bloomberg hemmed and hawed before responding that the practice "saved a lot of lives" but "got out of hand."

"You're never going to have everybody that you stop with a gun, we don't know, but the courts had said you can do this, that, or the other thing," he reasoned. "The bottom line is when I saw it was, we had gone way overboard, I stopped it and before I left office, we cut 95% of it out."

"Then," he continued, "I apologized when enough people said to me 'You were wrong,' and I thought about it, and I wish I had done it earlier. I just didn't. So you apologize, and you go on."

(H/T: Mediaite)