ATL Redline, Justice, Police, Politics

ICYMI: Stop & Frisk Was Wrong & Stupid

After Trump mentioned the controversial policy, moderator Lester Holt reminded him that stop and frisk had been ruled unconstitutional.

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Hillary Clinton And Donald Trump Face Off In First Presidential Debate At Hofstra UniversityCalling for the reinstatement of stop-and-frisk policing, in response to a question about tensions between the police and African-Americans, would be the most racially insensitive thing to happen in a normal presidential debate. Of course, in last night’s debate between “Every Professional Woman” versus “That Guy Who Didn’t Prepare For The Meeting,” Trump’s stop-and-frisk dog whistle paled in comparison to the out-front racism of Trump being proud for forcing the first black president to show him his birth certificate, while Trump himself won’t even show his taxes.

In fact, Trump managed to muddy the waters on the racism of stop and frisk by getting into a debate with moderator Lester Holt over the constitutionality of stop and frisk. After Trump mentioned the controversial policy, Holt reminded him that stop and frisk had been ruled unconstitutional. Trump said “no,” or “wrong,” or whatever guttural utterance Trump uses in place of a counter-argument, and what followed was a messy attempt to explain a multifaceted ruling from a guy who was only half-listening while Rudy Giuliani told him what to say.

To be clear, stop and frisk WAS STRUCK DOWN by U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin. The case was Floyd v. City of New York. It was a class action lawsuit brought by primarily black and Latino plaintiffs alleging unconstitutional racial profiling. Floyd is a landmark decision against said profiling.

New York, under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, appealed. That’s where things get messy. The Second Circuit kicked the case back down to the district court, removing Judge Scheindlin in the process. In the meantime, a new mayor was elected. New York reached a settlement with the plaintiffs, rendering the case moot (because Mayor Bill de Blasio has not reinstated stop and frisk).

I think Trump was trying to allude to this complicated procedural posture when he was saying things like “a very against-police judge,” and “our mayor, our new mayor, refused to go forward with the case.” Trump doesn’t understand it: not the practice, not the constitutional concerns, not the fact that a president can’t order local police departments to institute stop and frisk anyway. On this issue, Trump is just the orange sock-puppet, everybody can see that Rudy Giuliani is doing the talking.

On the Trump curve, his muddled answers about stop and frisk were likely out of basic ignorance, and not his normal tactic of malicious lying. The mere fact that it’s complicated will throw the media off his stink here, especially when there are much easier things to nail him on. Like his birtherism. Which is repugnant.

But I don’t want to let stop and frisk slip under the radar, because there are two things Trump is trying to signal, and both of them are bigger falsehoods than anything in the actual transcript:

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1. Trump thinks stop and frisk is a totally acceptable method of policing.
2. Trump thinks stop and frisk is an important tool for reducing crime.

Both of those ideas are wrong. Stop and frisk is racial profiling, plain and simple. And racial profiling is wrong. Behavioral profiling, go nuts. That works. Facebook told me what bike I was going to buy for my son’s birthday before I decided to buy him a bike. If the police can use data on actual actions to figure out if a person is more or less likely to blow up my subway car, godspeed. Use that on the cops too, and figure out which ones are going to shoot me before it happens.

But racial profiling is the lazy way to do it — which also happens to violate my equal protection under the law. It’s unacceptable in a free and diverse society. Take a look at some stats from the NYCLU during the height of stop and frisk:

In 2011, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 685,724 times.
605,328 were totally innocent (88 percent).
350,743 were black (53 percent).
223,740 were Latino (34 percent).
61,805 were white (9 percent).

In 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 532,911 times.
473,644 were totally innocent (89 percent).
284,229 were black (55 percent).
165,140 were Latino (32 percent).
50,366 were white (10 percent).

That represents the Trump and Giuliani version of “racial justice.” Innocent minority after innocent minority stopped and harassed simply because of the color of their skin, and then finally catching a bad guy and using him to justify racism towards entire groups of people.

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AND IT DOESN’T EVEN WORK. I would probably be against stop and frisk even if it was a crime fighting panacea. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do something. But I don’t even have to deal with that possibility because stop and frisk has been discredited as a useful method of police work.

The NYPD — no fans of de Blasio or liberals or black people who don’t want to be hassled — fact-checked Donald Trump in real time when the candidate started lying about crime statistics. This is from the feed of J. Peter Donald, Assistant Commissioner for Communication & Public Information for NYPD:

Republicans, like, how have you gotten to a life where the NYPD is busting up your nominee on Twitter?

To recap: In response to a question about flare-ups between the police and the African-American community, Donald Trump championed a discredited policy that violates the equal protection of minorities and lied so egregiously about crime in the city that he actually lives in that the police had to fact check the Republican nominee.

And that’s just the three minutes worth of normalized Trump foolishness I chose to focus on today.

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. If Trump loses, the documentary should be titled “Wow, Okay.”

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