America’s first black president took issue with the Republican nominee’s suggestion this week that “African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape than they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever”.
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Addressing unrest in North Carolina in the wake of a police killing of an African-American man, Trump said peaceful protest is an American right, but he condemned demonstrators who turn violent. And he said so at a town hall in Cleveland, Ohio, geared towards getting him more support in the African-American community. “I would do stop-and-frisk”, the Republican said.
Trump also accused Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton of blaming the police for problems in Charlotte and elsewhere, and described the law enforcement community as “the line separating civilization from chaos”.
Mrs Clinton, who did not immediately respond to Mr Trump’s remarks on Thursday, has pushed for stricter gun controls to help rein in gun violence and called for national guidelines on the use of force by police officers.
Mr. Trump has also used the arrest of an Afghan-American youth in connection with the bomb blasts in NY and New Jersey to reiterate their position in favour of increased surveillance of Muslim neighbourhoods and stricter immigration norms.
“And if you’re not aware, drugs are a very, very big factor in what you’re watching on television at night”, Trump ad libbed during a speech to a group of shale gas producers. “I think local police, in local communities, need to make those decisions”.
“Stop and frisk worked”, Trump said on Fox & Friends on Thursday. A white Tulsa officer was charged with first-degree manslaughter on Thursday after the shooting.
Police tactics and deadly encounters with African-Americans, many of them unarmed, have sparked protests and unrest across the country in recent years.
“I just don’t feel I can trust her”, said Jesse Weber, 21, a college senior who’s undecided.
“We would ask Donald Trump to bone up on his knowledge of what is constitutional and what is unconstitutional”, said New York State Representative and Congressional Black Caucus member Yvette Clark (D-New York) of the presidential candidates proposal to implement nationwide stop-and-frisk procedures.
“We have a much better understanding than Mr. Trump”, she told Costello.
“When you see how well it works for Donald Trump, do you ever think to yourself, ‘Oh maybe I should be more racist?”
The argument for stop-and-frisks is that it cuts crime. “And they won’t have anything to shoot with”, he said.
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“I would do stop-and-frisk”, Trump said. Trump again credited policing under the Republican mayor with reducing crime in the candidate’s hometown.
“The history is that Bill Bratton came in in 1994 and instituted CompStat, which was a systematic, strategic approach to policing”. The United Nations’ assistance mission in Afghanistan documented a total of 11,002 civilian casualties in 2015 – 3,545 people killed and 7,457 injured, exceeding the previous record set in 2014.
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Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia Law School whose analysis of NY stop-and-frisk data led to a federal judge’s ruling that the NYPD’s tactics were unconstitutional, said the impact dates much further back – to the late 1960s, when rioting in several American cities began with police stops that went wrong.
