He confronted racial tensions after police-involved shootings of black men in Oklahoma and North Carolina.
Advertisement
The Republican presidential nominee, who has used anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout his campaign, also said that charges that he is a racist are signs of desperation from Democrats. The candidate lamented a “lack of spirit between whites and blacks”, calling it a “terrible thing that we are witnessing”.
“If they see a person possibly with a gun or they think may have a gun, they will see the person and they’ll look and they’ll take the gun away”, Trump said Thursday on Fox News, laying out his vision of how the practice works.
In the wake of the attacks that occurred in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota last weekend. “So I think that would be one step you could do”, Trump continued.
The policy has since been abandoned in NY due to its disproportionately racist effect and lackluster results, which is exactly why Trump wants to bring it back, if his recent remarks are any indication.
“I was really referring to Chicago with stop-and-frisk”, Trump told “Fox and Friends”.
Donald Trump on Thursday tried to clarify his call to broadly employ the controversial “stop and frisk” policing tactic, a tool whose legality has been questioned for disproportionately targeting minorities. “They asked me about Chicago and I was talking about stop-and-frisk for Chicago”. We had tremendous shootings, numbers of shootings. “I’m sorry”, Bratton added.
And while Trump said that evidence showed police shaking down random people-mostly in communities of color-for no reason works, actual data shows something more complex.
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor.
In his appeal to African-American voters, Trump has lamented the woes of black communities, asking those who traditionally vote Democratic to take a chance on him. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, in Toledo, Ohio.
But opposition to the practice led police departments in NY, as well as Chicago and Newark, N.J., to agree to cut back on its use, in some cases submitting to outside monitoring and improving police training.
If you don’t know, stop-and-frisk is something that former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to do to patrol the dark streets of Gotham. That overuse of stop and frisk.
He said he thought police unfairly discriminated against black citizens and that he opposed stop-and-frisk.
Advertisement
Stop-and-frisk is a type of aggressive policing that allows – some say encourages – officers to detain a person on virtually any type of vague suspicion, search that individual without a warrant and arrest the person if any kind of illegal substance or weapon is found. But Clinton has criticized many of his proposals as unconstitutional attacks on American freedoms.
