Trump’s stop-and-fabricate policy puts him in wrong again

By Clarence Page

Saturday, Oct. 8, 2016 | 2 a.m.

As with many topics, Donald Trump doesn’t know much about the policing policy widely known as “stop and frisk,” but that doesn’t deter him one bit from Trump-splaining it to us with unbridled self-confidence.

The policy, which involves warrantless stops of people who are suspected of criminal activity to search them for weapons, became a highlight in Republican Trump’s first debate with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

As his lack of preparation quickly became apparent, the reality-TV star tried to make up for it with a flurry of exciting half-truths and overgeneralizations. He called for Chicago in particular to begin using “stop-and-frisk” tactics to put the brakes on what he has been calling a “crime wave.”

He apparently didn’t know that Chicago, like his native New York, has not abandoned stop-and-frisk. The city only has tried to make it less racially and ethnically discriminatory, a policy with which Trump has not shown himself to be very impressed.

Trump spoke admiringly of stop-and-frisk in New York, which began under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and intensified in its aggressiveness and controversy under later Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Trump credited the policy for New York’s dramatic decline in murders since the early 1990s and called for its nationwide expansion.

But the city also began to wind down the practice, even before it was condemned as unconstitutional by a federal district judge in a decision later criticized by a federal Court of Appeals panel.

Debate moderator Lester Holt of NBC News fact-checked Trump by citing the New York judicial ruling that found “stop-and-frisk” to be unconstitutional in that state, because it largely singled out young black and Hispanic men.

Trump argued back. “No, you’re wrong. It went before a judge who was a very against-police judge,” he said. “It was taken away from her, and our mayor — our new mayor — refused to go forward with the case. They would have won on appeal. …”

“The argument is that it’s a form of racial profiling,” said Holt.

“No,” Trump fired back. “The argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and that are bad people that shouldn’t have ‘em.”

No, the critical issue on which now-retired federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s decision turned was indeed racial profiling, no matter how little that concern may mean to Trump.

Contrary to popular notions, Scheindlin explicitly said she was not banning stop-and-frisk, which generally has been upheld by the courts as long as it is conducted in a nondiscriminatory manner. A 1968 Supreme Court ruling, Terry v. Ohio, upheld the practice on those grounds.

Scheindlin nixed the use of stop-and-frisk as unconstitutional in the way it was applied by police in New York, not the practice itself.

That’s important because the issue is bit more complicated than the all-or-nothing way that “stop and frisk” usually tends to be discussed.

Yet even Giuliani, a Trump supporter, seemed to acknowledge in a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending Trump’s position, that stop-and-frisk had little to do with the city’s dramatic crime drop during his watch.

The practice only escalated to a level that stirred a strong backlash, particularly from minority communities, under Bloomberg.

And contrary to Trump’s assertion that the city’s stop-and-frisk policy “worked incredibly well” in reducing New York’s crime rate, forecasts of gloom and doom if the practice was scaled back have not materialized. So far, New York crime rates have continued their previously low levels.

Less arguable is the common-sense conclusion that stop-and-frisk left unleashed stirs more distrust and undermines cooperation between police and the communities they are supposed to protect — which can hurt law enforcement more than it helps.

In Chicago, a similar stop-and-frisk policy was changed when the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois considered suing the city over the excessive use of the practice and racial profiling.

But after Chicago cops made stop-and-frisk stops at a far higher rate than New York City cops mounted at the height of their stop-and-frisk policy, according to the Illinois ACLU, police-community trust is not easy to rebuild. Stop-and-frisk is not an all-purpose cure for high crime. We need something more nuanced than that. Alas, if there’s one thing for which Trump is not known, it’s nuance.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.