Trump Calls for More 'Stop and Frisk' of Citizens While Stumping for the Black Vote
What Fourth Amendment?
Tonight Fox News will be airing a town hall meeting put on by Donald Trump in Cleveland, where he is purportedly attempting to appeal to African-American voters, who are currently swinging toward Hillary Clinton in massive poll numbers.
At one point Trump was asked about black-on-black crime and violence, which was apparently his cue to declare his support for New York City's "stop-and-frisk" program. NBC reporter Alexandra Jaffe posted an image that transcribed what he actually said:
The mayor he's praising is, of course, Rudy Giuliani, who is now part of the Trump circle. Reuters notes that Trump's praise didn't exactly win over at least one minority member of the crowd, given that the technique was used largely on minorities with absolutely no evidence or suspicion they were involved in any sort of crime:
[Geoff] Betts, a distributor of hair products, said he is registered to vote as an independent and that he attended the town hall because he was curious about what Trump would say to try to win over black voters. He said he thinks police unfairly discriminate against black citizens and he is against stop-and-frisk.
"We are victims," he said, adding he walked out of the town hall while it was still under way.
"I just couldn't take it anymore, I had to go," he said. "I don't think that Donald Trump gets it."
Besides being an obvious violation of the Fourth Amendment protections of citizens to be free from unwarranted and unreasonable searches, no "stop and frisk" is not what caused crime to go down in New York City, and abandoning the practice didn't cause crime to go up. As Anthony Fisher noted in August, even the panicky New York Daily News has come around to finally realize that "stop and frisk" was not a tool of effective policing.
It should also go without saying that the president of the United States does not have any sort of authority to permit officers to engage in "stop-and-frisk" policing, not that such a distinction will matter whatsoever in this race.
Read more from Reason on the terrible, ineffective use of "stop-and-frisk" policing (and its end) here.