During a pre-taped “core black issues” town-hall interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump revealed Wednesday that he would like to see “stop-and-frisk” policing enacted nationwide as a way to end violence in black communities. “I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to,” he reportedly said in response to an audience member’s question about stopping “black-on-black” crime. “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.” Despite studies showing the practice wasn’t all that effective in making cities safer, and widespread criticism of its race-based tactics, Trump continued to extol stop-and-frisk’s virtues: “In New York City, it was so incredible, the way it worked.”
“Any politician who would go to a black community and say stop-and-frisk is the solution to your problems is showing no respect for the intellectual capacity of that community,” Jeff Robinson, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union and a policing expert for the organization, told The Daily Beast. “[Mr. Trump’s] message here is that in order to save the black community, we must destroy it," he continued. "I don’t know if Mr. Trump has ever been stopped and frisked by the police, but this concept that, ‘Oh, it’s just a nice, little friendly conversation...and it’s nothing to get upset about,’ that’s a concept that people who have never been through a stop-and-frisk experience with a police officer would think. Any politician who would suggest this as a solution has a serious credibility problem.”
The town-hall Hannity episode was scheduled to air on Wednesday night. Due to Fox News's breaking-news coverage of the Charlotte protests, the pre-taped Q&A was bumped to Thursday night.
— Asawin Suebsaeng
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