There are almost as many things wrong with Donald Trump’s defense of expanding “stop and frisk” as there are words in this back and forth between Trump and moderator Lester Holt.
HOLT: Your two -- your two minutes expired, but I do want to follow up. Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York, because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.
TRUMP: No, you're wrong. It went before a judge, who was a very against-police judge. It was taken away from her. And our mayor, our new mayor, refused to go forward with the case. They would have won an appeal. If you look at it, throughout the country, there are many places where it's allowed.
HOLT: The argument is that it's a form of racial profiling.
TRUMP: No, the argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and they are bad people that shouldn't have them.
These are felons. These are people that are bad people that shouldn't be -- when you have 3,000 shootings in Chicago from January 1st, when you have 4,000 people killed in Chicago by guns, from the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama, his hometown, you have to have stop-and-frisk.
You need more police. You need a better community, you know, relation. You don't have good community relations in Chicago. It's terrible. I have property there. It's terrible what's going on in Chicago.
The problem, of course, is that America doesn’t require felons to wear a scarlet “F” (or at least, pre-Trump America does not). “Stop and frisk” targets people who look suspicious to the police, and the record shows that looking suspicious is more or less synonymous with being black or Latino.
And then there’s the fact that “stop and frisk” doesn’t work. ...
Want to reach millennial voters in swing states to win this election? No matter where you live, volunteer with NextGen Climate to make phone calls, texts and other ways to help out.
“Stop and frisk” absolutely was ruled unconstitutional because the way it was applied was absolutely discriminatory.
Among people who were stopped by police, 52 percent were black, 31 percent were Hispanic and 10 percent were white. These stops were disproportionate to the racial breakdown of New York City in 2010: about 23 percent black, 29 percent Hispanic and 33 white.
Blacks were twice as likely to be stopped, but those stops were less likely to find a weapon. Overall, 98.5 percent of all stops failed to produce a weapon. At the peak of the program, over 675,000 New Yorkers were stopped for no reason in one year.
That’s why Bill de Blasio didn’t just end the program, he ran on ending the program.
And when it comes to the relationship between “stop and frisk” and decreasing crime, the picture is a lot murkier than Donald Trump suggests.
While Donald ascribes “stop and frisk” to his pal Rudy, the real lover of the program was “that little guy,” Michael Bloomberg.
In 2002, when Michael Bloomberg — still a firm believer in stop-and-frisk's ability to "keep New York safe" — first took office as mayor, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 97,296 times, according to the NYCLU. Stops peaked in 2011, still under Bloomberg's purview, with 685,724 stops.
But while Bloomberg was ramping “stop and frisk” up, and up, and up, crime was not coming down, down, down. In fact, after a drop in 2006, crime fluctuated and more or less flattened out, even though stops were still increasing rapidly. It was only after “stop and frisk” was steeply reduced, that crime began to fall again.
When the murder rate leveled out in 2013, it did so at a rate that was a fraction of what was experienced in the best years under Giuliani. Overall the correlation between levels of stop and frisk and the crime rate is pretty much nonexistent.
While it’s true that crime began to fall steeply around when stop and frisk was first officially implemented in New York City, the timing between “stop and frisk” doesn’t actually match when things started improving rapidly.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton credit their broken-windows-style reforms for crime’s sharp decline after taking office in 1994. But scholars are quick to note the trend actually began in 1990.
“Stop and frisk” didn’t start a wave. It came late to a wave that was already underway, and stop and frisk was a local program while crime was decreasing nationally.
In the early 1990s, U.S. crime rates had been on a steep upward climb since the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency. …
Then crime rates went down. And then they kept going down.
By decade’s end, the homicide rate plunged 42 percent nationwide.
“Stop and frisk” had nothing to do with it. Couldn’t have had anything to do with it. Because the decrease happened just as quickly, and sometimes more so, in areas where nothing like the New York plan was implemented.
Giuliani and Bratton were in the right place at the right time to collect the credit. It doesn’t mean they did anything to deserve it. They were in the nation’s news capital when things in the nation were improving. That’s it.
And one other thing ...
By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.
Though thanks to the 24/7 news channels, it’s hard to convince anyone that they, and especially their children, are much, much safer than a few decades ago.
And that news certainly hasn’t reached Apocalypse Now Trump.
