As Donald Trump appeared to try and court African-American voters in Cleveland Wednesday at a town hall taped by Fox News, he expressed support for establishing the policing policy of “stop-and-frisk” on a national level.
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“Police are entrusted with vast responsibility, and we must do everything we can to ensure they are properly trained, that they respect all members of the public, and that any wrongdoing is always vigorously addressed”, Trump said. “I mean how it’s not being used in Chicago is, to be honest with you, it’s quite unbelievable, and you know the police, the local police, they know who has a gun who shouldn’t have a gun”.
“Donald Trump talks about stop-and-frisk like he knows the facts”, de Blasio told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day”.
Stop-and-frisk was implemented by then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 2000s, and drew condemnation from minorities who said they were disproportionately targeted for searches by police when they had done nothing wrong.
“He should really be more careful because if we reinstituted stop and frisk all over this country, you’d see a lot more tension between police and communities”.
Mayor Bill de Blasio even blasted Trump for his misguided suggestion, asserting that the controversial practice would only “alienate the very people who we need to be partners with in the fight against crime”. I think you have to. Police said they found a gun on Scott, and he was killed because he presented “a lethal threat”.
The former reality TV star has always voiced his support of stop-and-frisk policing, citing its success in his hometown of NY.
NYC mayor Bill de Blasio says Donald Trump “has no idea” what the stop-and-frisk policing policy was about and that since he ended it, NY has become a safer city. “They asked me about Chicago”.
The zero tolerance tactic, made prominent by the Giuliani administration in New York City, gave police officers the authority to conduct searches if they had “reasonable suspicion” a person was armed and unsafe. Between 2002 and 2015, some five million people were subjected to searches and interrogations on the street, and almost 90 per cent were innocent; 90 per cent were also either black or Latino.
And the president made a more earnest effort to rebut Trump when he spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus gala on Saturday, and said that he would consider it a “personal insult” to his legacy if black voters didn’t turn out for Clinton. In New York City, it was so incredible the way it worked.
His initial answer came in response to a question that did not mention Chicago, though Trump cited the city in a previous answer as a place that is “out of control”.
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Statistics showed that police stopped black citizens 52% of the time, Hispanics 31%, and whites 10%, even though blacks make up only 23% of the city population, Hispanics 29%, and whites 33%. Under a settlement, the police department agreed to expand the information on “contact cards” that officers have been required to fill out when they stop someone on the street for questioning. Chicago stops a shocking number of people, the ACLU report said, pointing to more than 250,000 stops without arrests in the summer of 2014 alone.
