On Wednesday while recording a “core black issues” town hall interview conducted by Sean Hannity, Donald Trump took an audience question about stopping “black on black crime.” Trump’s answer, which will air as part of a Fox News Channel broadcast, was pretty to the point: He’d institute a “stop-and-frisk” law on a nationwide level.
Stop-and-frisk programs are exactly what you’d expect them to be: They allow police to stop someone on the street based on suspicion of criminal activity. However, while Trump said that “[I]n New York City, it was so incredible, the way [stop-and-frisk] worked”, studies showed it wasn’t effective and it was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013.
In the ruling, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin noted that “the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent — not criminal” and that there’s “no basis for assuming that an innocent population shares the same characteristics as the criminal suspect population in the same area.” Perhaps most tellingly, though, she also wrote that the law targeted “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”
For his full thoughts on the matter, here is the unedited transcript of Trump’s stop-and-frisk answer:
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 had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think it could be one step you could do.
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