In a Fox News interview Thursday, Donald Trump all but guaranteed that a victory for him in November would lead to increased use of stop and frisk, the police practice known to facilitate racial profiling.
The former president, who of course has been convicted of felonies himself, has endorsed the tactic in the past. He voiced support again Thursday while also endorsing the confiscation of guns, which certainly undercuts the GOP’s Second Amendment absolutism.
During his meandering “Fox and Friends” interview, Trump said:
You have to do a policy of stop and frisk. When you see a guy coming down the street and you can — the police know every one of them, they know their middle name, they know where they live, they know every one of them, the local police. And they’re great. You gotta let them do their job — stop and frisk and take their gun away. You’ve gotta do it … because they have all these guns.
Just like officials who have relied on stop-and-frisk policies over the years, Trump spoke in generalities to justify his approach. Police do not know everything about everyone walking down the street, and, in fact, there’s ample evidence that such stops are rather fruitless endeavors that do little to stem crime and often subject racial and ethnic minorities to bias and violations of their civil rights.
The New York state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, compiled data from the New York Police Department — which saw a federal judge find its stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional in 2013 — showing that the majority of the people stopped over the past two decades have been people of color and a “vastly disproportionate” number were Black. In addition, the ACLU found that the “overwhelming majority of people stopped by the NYPD have been innocent, meaning the NYPD found no evidence of wrongdoing and the civilian was not given a summons or arrested.”
So why is Trump backing it?
I suspect there are two reasons. First, Trump has been known to promote false and outright racist allegations about Black and Latino people on his own, so it follows that he would endorse a policy that allows police to do the same. And secondly, his claims about wanting police to be unencumbered helps distract some people from something we already know after his guilty verdicts and massive civil penalties: He doesn’t have any regard for the law.
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