Trump Says He'll Fix Chicago With Stop And Frisk
By aaroncynic in News on Sep 22, 2016 4:11PM
Republican Presidential candidate and fascist demagogue Donald Trump threw another log on the fire of opinions from people who don’t live in Chicago Thursday morning: What the city really needs, he said, is more stop and frisk.
In a phone interview with the all-white, (and also not from Chicago) crew of Fox and Friends, the carnival-barking Republican presidential nominee clarified some comments he made on a town hall forum with Sean Hannity Wednesday evening where he called for the use of the controversial tactic.
“I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop and frisk,” Trump told an audience member according to a partial transcript Tweeted by NBC reporter Alexandra Jaffe.
Trump will propose nationwide stop-and-frisk to address violence in black community 2nite on Hannity: pic.twitter.com/HDSPYtepqb
— Alexandra Jaffe (@ajjaffe) September 21, 2016
As Fox and Friends showed clips of the protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, which began after police shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott and later turned violent after police showed up with riot gear and military hardware, Trump expanded on his statement:
“Chicago is out of control... They asked me about Chicago and I was talking about stop and frisk for Chicago. You had 3,000 shootings this year so far. Obviously you can’t let the system go the way it’s going. I suggested stop and frisk and some people think that’s a great idea. Some people probably don’t like it but when you have 3,000 people shot and so many people dying, it’s worse than some of the places we’re hearing about like Afghanistan.”
Trump’s latest comment is another in a very long list of remarks made by conservatives and others who don’t live in Chicago and haven’t spent much, if any, time in its neighborhoods. Last month, the “law and order” candidate said that he could stop the violence in “just one week.”
The fact that the controversial stop-and-frisk tactic disproportionately targets people of color and has been the source of widespread violations of civil rights was not discussed. A March 2015 report by the ACLU showed that Chicago police conducted a quarter million stops that did not lead to an arrest, surpassing that of New York City, which Trump said “really straightened things out with stop and frisk.”
“Chicago has been systematically abusing this practice, for reasons that are not justified by our constitution,” Harvey Grossman, legal director for the Illinois ACLU, said at the time.
And while Trump said that evidence showed police shaking down random people—mostly in communities of color—for no reason works, actual data shows something more complex. An extensive look at stops and the much maligned “contact cards” officers used to keep track of them in Chicago by WBEZ’s Chip Mitchell showed that as more cards were filled out, less happened:
“The records, obtained by WBEZ through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, show negative trends as officers reported more stops: Gun seizures dropped, detectives solved fewer murders, and a decade-long decline in gun violence ended.”
It's also worth noting that yet again, completely absent from the discussion was talk of addressing the root causes of crime, such as poverty, barriers to socioeconomic change, racism, mistrust between police and people who live in the community, and the long-term effects of segregation in the city.