New York City finally ended its racist “stop-and-frisk” policy, which allowed police to stop, question, and search citizens with little to no cause. The policy overwhelmingly targeted black and Latino residents. The program all but ended in 2014 after the New York Police Department’s own reports showed the staggering majority of citizens were completely innocent:
An analysis by the NYCLU revealed that innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 5 million times since 2002, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics. Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports.
Today Donald Trump held a town hall-style event on “African-American concerns” in Cleveland Heights. Based on firsthand reports and photos, the event appeared to have only a few black attendees in the audience. Trump fielded a question from an audience member about crime in black communities and the following jaw-dropping exchange occurred (via Alexandra Jaffe):
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I had a question about, there’s been a lot of violence in the black community—I want to know, what would you do to help stop that violence, you know, black-on-black crime…..
TRUMP: Right, well, one of the things I’d do, Ricardo, is I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically, you understand, you have to have, in my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk. In New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked. Now, we have had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you could do.
The disastrous policy was eventually ruled unconstitutional.
In a landmark decision today, a federal court found the New York City Police Department’s highly controversial stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional. In her thorough, 198-page ruling, Judge Shira Scheindlin found the NYPD’s practices to violate New Yorkers’ Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and also found that the practices were racially discriminatory in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In conclusion, Donald Trump’s solution to reducing violent crime would be to implement an unconstitutional, highly unpopular, racist policy nationwide. That should go over well with exactly nobody outside the Fox News audience.
Here are myth-busting facts on stop-and-frisk from the NYCLU:
Stop and Frisk Facts
Myth #1: Stop-and-Frisk reduces crime and keeps people safer.
“[Stop-and-Frisk] is a program that is effective… you used to not be able to walk down the streets of this city safely and today you can walk every neighborhood during the day and most neighborhoods at night. .” – Ray Kelly
FACT: No research has ever proven the effectiveness of New York City’s stop-and-frisk regime, and the small number of arrests, summonses, and guns recovered demonstrates that the practice is ineffective. Crime data also do not support the claim that New York City is safer because of the practice. While violent crimes fell 29 percent in New York City from 2001 to 2010, other large cities experienced larger violent crime declines without relying on stop and frisk abuses: 59 percent in Los Angeles, 56 percent in New Orleans, 49 percent in Dallas, and 37 percent in Baltimore.
Stop-and-Frisk abuses corrode trust between the police and communities, which makes everyone less safe. Don’t believe us? Then listen to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2000: “[A] large reservoir of good will was under construction when I left the Police Department in 1994. It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.”
Myth #2: Mayor Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policies cut the number of murders in half.
“Over the past 10 years, there were 5,430 murders in New York City, compared with 11,058 in the decade before Mayor Bloomberg took office. That’s a remarkable achievement — 5,628 lives saved — attributable to proactive policing strategies that included stops.” – NYPD Spokesperson Paul Browne
FACT: The murder drop happened before Bloomberg took office and before the explosion in stop-and-frisk. The year before the mayor took office there were 649 murders in New York City. In 2011, there were 526 murders. This 19 percent drop is important, but to suggest that murders were cut in half because of stop-and-frisk is simply wrong.
Further, stop-and-frisk has not reduced the number of people who fall victim to shootings. In 2002, there were 1,892 victims of gunfire and 97,296 stops. In 2011, there were still 1,821 victims of gunfire but a record 685,724 stops.
Myth #3: Stop-and-Frisk gets guns off the street and, therefore, prevents murders.
“There’s no denying that stops take guns off the street and save lives.” –Ray Kelly
FACT: Guns are found in less than 0.2 percent of stops. That is an unbelievably poor yield rate for such an intrusive, wasteful and humiliating police action. Yet, stop-and-frisk has increased more than 600 percent under Bloomberg and Kelly. And the rate of finding guns is worsening as the NYPD stops more innocent people each year.
Myth #4: Stop-and-Frisk is not discriminatory.
“ [B]lacks made up 53 percent of the stop subjects and were 66 percent of the violent crime suspects in 2011... For Hispanics, 34 percent were stop subjects and 26 percent were violent crime suspects.” – NYPD Spokesperson Paul Browne
FACT: Comparing police stops to violent crime suspects is bad math. Only 11 percent of stops in 2011 were based on a description of a violent crime suspect. On the other hand, from 2002 to 2011, black and Latino residents made up close to 90 percent of people stopped, and about 88 percent of stops – more than 3.8 million – were of innocent New Yorkers. Even in neighborhoods that are predominantly white, black and Latino New Yorkers face the disproportionate brunt. For example, in 2011, Black and Latino New Yorkers made up 24 percent of the population in Park Slope, but 79 percent of stops. This, on its face, is discriminatory.
