22 Sep 2016 2:05 pm
Donald Trump Embraces Wider Use of Stop-and-Frisk by Police
Donald J. Trump on Wednesday called for the broad use of the contentious stop-and-frisk policing strategy in America’s cities, embracing an aggressive tactic whose legality has been challenged and whose enforcement has been abandoned in New York.
His support for the polarizing crime-fighting policy — which involves officers’ questioning and searching pedestrians — collides with his highly visible courtship of African-Americans, who have been disproportionately singled out by the tactic, data show.
Mr. Trump has long championed stop-and-frisk as a crime-fighting tool in his hometown, New York, but on Wednesday he recommended that it be deployed in cities across the country that are struggling to control violence.
Mr. Trump described his enthusiasm for stop-and-frisk during a town hall-style discussion, also in Cleveland Heights, after a voter pressed him on how he would reduce violence in black communities. “One of the things I’d do,” he said, “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.”
The largely white audience erupted into applause.
Stop-and-frisk has become a source of enormous tension between police officers and black residents in the cities that have deployed it as a crime-fighting tool.
Once credited with significantly reducing murders in urban centers like New York by removing weapons and drugs from the street, it has drawn protests and legal challenges.
A federal judge in New York, Shira A. Scheindlin, struck down the tactic as unconstitutional in 2013, saying the way the city was using it violated the rights of minorities.