In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Donald Trump virtually ensured that his election victory in November would lead to increased use of stop-and-frisk measures, a police practice known to encourage ethnic profiling.
The former president, who of course has been convicted of serious crimes himself, has endorsed this tactic in the past. On Thursday, he again voiced his support while also arguing for gun confiscation, which certainly undermines Republican absolutism when it comes to the Second Amendment.
During his lengthy interview with “Fox and Friends,” Trump said:
You have to have a stop and frisk policy. If you see a guy walking down the street and you can – the police know every single one of them, they know their middle name, they know where they live, they know every single one of them, the local police. And they’re great. You have to let them do their job – stop and frisk and take away their gun. You have to do it… because they have all these guns.
Like officers who have relied on stop-and-frisk policies over the years, Trump justified his approach with platitudes. Police don’t know everything about every person on the street, and in fact there is ample evidence that such stops are rather fruitless endeavors that do little to reduce crime and often result in members of racial and ethnic minorities being subjected to prejudice and violations of their civil rights.
The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has compiled data from the New York Police Department – whose stop-and-frisk policy was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013 – showing that the majority of people stopped over the past two decades were people of color, and a “disproportionately high” number were black.. In addition, the ACLU found that the “overwhelming majority of people stopped by the NYPD were innocent. This means that the NYPD found no evidence of wrongdoing and the civilian was neither cited nor arrested.”
So why does Trump support this idea?
I suspect there are two reasons for this. First, Trump is known for spreading false and openly racist accusations against blacks and Latinos himself, so it follows that he would support policies that allow police to do the same. And second, his claims of wanting to defund the police distract some people from something we already know after his convictions and massive civil penalties: He has no respect for the law.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com.
