As his lack of preparation quickly became apparent, the reality-TV star tried to make up for it with a flurry of exciting half-truths and overgeneralizations. He called for Chicago in particular to begin using “stop-and-frisk” tactics to put the brakes on what he has been calling a “crime wave.”
He apparently didn’t know that Chicago, like his native New York, has not abandoned stop-and-frisk. The city only has tried to make it less racially and ethnically discriminatory, a policy with which Trump has not shown himself to be very impressed.
Trump spoke admiringly of stop-and-frisk in New York, which began under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and intensified in its aggressiveness and controversy under later Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Trump credited the policy for New York’s dramatic decline in murders since the early 1990s and called for its nationwide expansion.
But the city also began to wind down the practice, even before it was condemned as unconstitutional by a federal district judge in a decision later criticized by a federal Court of Appeals panel.
Debate moderator Lester Holt of NBC News fact-checked Trump by citing the New York judicial ruling that found “stop-and-frisk” to be unconstitutional in that state, because it largely singled out young black and Hispanic men.
Trump argued back. “No, you’re wrong. It went before a judge who was a very against-police judge,” he said. “It was taken away from her, and our mayor — our new mayor — refused to go forward with the case. They would have won on appeal….”
“The argument is that it’s a form of racial profiling,” said Holt.
“No,” Trump fired back. “The argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and that are bad people that shouldn’t have ‘em.”
No, the critical issue on which now-retired federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s decision turned was indeed racial profiling, no matter how little that concern may mean to Trump.
Contrary to popular notions, Scheindlin explicitly said that she was not banning stop-and-frisk, which generally has been upheld by the courts as long as it is conducted in a nondiscriminatory manner. A 1968 Supreme Court ruling, Terry v. Ohio, upheld the practice on those grounds.
Scheindlin nixed the use of stop-and-frisk as unconstitutional in the way it was applied by police in New York, not the practice itself.
That’s important because the issue is bit more complicated than the all-or-nothing way that “stop and frisk” usually tends to be discussed.
Yet even Giuliani, a Trump supporter, seemed to acknowledge in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that stop-and-frisk had little to do with the city’s dramatic crime drop during his watch.
And contrary to forecasts of gloom and doom if the practice was scaled back have not materialized. So far, New York crime rates have continued their previously low levels.
Alas, if there’s one thing for which Trump is not known, it’s nuance.
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