Donald Trump Wants To Expand Stop-And-Frisk

Donald Trump advocated expanding New York City's deeply controversial policy known as stop-and-frisk, saying it could be a solution to violence in black communities.

In a town hall event in Ohio with Fox News' Sean Hannity, scheduled to air Wednesday night at 10 p.m. Eastern, Trump lavished praise on the now-defunct policy.

"One of the things I'd do, Ricardo, is I would do stop-and-frisk," Trump said, answering an audience member's question about "black-on-black crime." "In New York City, it was so incredible, the way it worked."

Stop-and-frisk, a policing strategy which encourages officers to routinely stop and pat down civilians with minimal justification, was ruled unconstitutional in 2013 by a federal judge in Manhattan.

The reason? Judge Shira Scheindlin found that the policy gave police carte blanche to racially discriminate against members of the public. She argued that it violated both the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches, and the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.

Trump said of the policy, "We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well."

However, this is a highly contentious claim.

Since the policy was ended in New York after Scheindlin's ruling, crime has fallen slightly, not risen, as proponents of the policy predicted. Recently, the New York Daily News editorial board even admitted that, despite its dire warnings when the policy was ended, the city is doing just fine without stop-and-frisk.

Though the number of police stops in New York City plunged from 685,700 in 2011 to just 22,900 in 2015, there was no corresponding surge in criminal activity. In fact, crime fell slightly in the city between 2013 and 2015.

Eugene O'Donnell, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as well as a former NYPD police officer and prosecutor, spoke to Patch when the Daily News' editorial was published.

"One of the great failures historically is the failure to stop over-policing," he said. "[Stop-and-frisk] compromised the professionalism of the job, and it did exacerbate tensions. I do fear that there’s irreparable damage done to the police profession."

O'Donnell argued that policing solutions need to be community-specific and that the public should be wary of slogans and simple-sounding strategies.

"You should look at real crime patterns and swear off orthodoxy," he said.

But instead of following what many experts and even former proponents of the policy now recognize, Trump thinks stop-and-frisk is the policy we need in cities like Chicago.

"I see what's going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk," he told the audience.

Like the Daily News, Trump has long been a fan of the policy:

However, unlike the editorial board, Trump doesn't appear to have updated his views in light of the recent evidence.

Shortly after word got out about Trump's comments, the New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito released a statement denouncing the idea.

"Once again, Donald Trump is having trouble with the facts," it read. "Stop and frisk as it was applied in New York City was unconstitutional, it didn't reduce crime and it severely corroded the relationship between the police and the communities they serve."

Trump has also long taken a hard line on criminal justice policies. In 1989, he advocated for the death penalty in the case of the "Central Park Five," in which five black teenagers were accused of rape. They were later exonerated.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr