Trump calls for nationwide ‘stop and frisk’ policing tactics
Republican nominee backs wider use of the unpopular New York policy that unfairly targeted blacks
Donald Trump called for the national introduction of “stop and frisk”, the controversial police tactic ruled unconstitutional, during a town hall meeting meant to appeal to black voters on Wednesday.
“I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to,” said the Republican nominee, speaking to Fox News’s Sean Hannity during the meeting in a church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, that was slated to touch on African American issues. “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, you understand, you have to have, in my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk.”
The town hall meeting, scheduled to air Wednesday night, was delayed by Fox News because of the ongoing live coverage of protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, after police there were involved in the fatal shooting of Keith Scott, an African American man whom they claimed was armed. His family has denied those reports. In the course of the protests, one person was on life supprt in what city authorities said was a “civilian-on-civilian shooting”.
The Republican nominee also addressed the police shooting of Terrence Crutcher, an unarmed African American, on Friday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “I don’t know if she choked,” Trump said of the policewoman who allegedly killed Crutcher. “He was walking, his hands were high, he was walking to the car, he put the hands on the car — now maybe she choked, something really bad happened.”
‘Worse than Afghanistan’
Trump also reiterated other familiar talking points in his efforts to reach out to black voters. He described the crime in Chicago as “worse than Afghanistan”, a label which the Republican nominee has frequently used for much of what he calls “the inner city”. He also proclaimed of the inner city that “it’s so unsafe, where you walk down the street and you get shot, or your child gets shot.” While crime rates have slightly increased in the past year, violent crime is at roughly a quarter of the level that it was 20 years ago.
But while Trump is polling in single digits among black voters, he did not face any scrutiny over his troubled relationship with the African American community including his longstanding insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the US, and a history of housing discrimination lawsuits against Trump-owned real estate projects. Although Trump seemingly acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States on Friday at a peculiar press event held in a Washington hotel, he told an interviewer on Wednesday that he only abandoned the birther conspiracy theory because “I wanted to get on with the campaign. A lot of people were asking me questions”.