Donald Trump: 'Stop-and-Frisk Was Meant for Problems Like Chicago'
President Donald Trump encouraged Chicago Police to use stop-and-frisk methods to help curb crime in the city.
Chicago police officers stand outside the Leighton Criminal Courts Building as jury selection begins in the murder trial for Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke on Wednesday, September 5, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. – The trial of a white Chicago cop over the fatal shooting of a black teenager began Wednesday, September 5, 2018 as protesters accused authorities of a “cover up” in a case that has set America’s third-largest city on edge. Police officer Jason Van Dyke faces murder charges for shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in an October 2014 confrontation. The incident, captured on police dash-cam video, has upended the city’s politics with fears of violence if the officer is acquitted.
Outside the courthouse, dozens of protesters decried police shootings and demanded accountability, chanting, “Sixteen shots and a cover up.” (Photo by Joshua Lott / AFP) (Photo credit should read JOSHUA LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump is instigating again, calling on Chicago police to use “stop-and-frisk” methods in order to stem violence in the city.
“The crime spree is a terrible blight on that city,” The president said at a convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, according to the Associated Press.
According to Trump, he has called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “immediately” go to Chicago “to help straighten out the terrible shooting wave.”
“We’re going to straighten it out, we’re going to straighten it out fast,” Trump said, as the chiefs of police cheered. “There’s no reason for what’s going on there.”
What’s “going on there” is a consistent decline in violent crimes.
So far this year in Chicago, “the number of people murdered is down 20 percent compared to last year, from 520 in 2017 to 418 in 2018. There’s been an 18 percent drop in the number of shooting victims, from 2,217 in 2017 to 1,843 in 2018. In September 2018, there were 42 murders and 214 shootings, down from 60 murders and 257 shootings in September 2017,” ABC7 reports.
But what are facts, though?
Trump encouraged cops to rely on stop-and-frisk policing—policing that was deemed unconstitutional in New York due to its disproportionately harmful impact on Black and Latinx people.
“Gotta be properly applied, but stop-and-frisk works,” Trump said.
No, it doesn’t. And Chicago essentially agreed that the draconian policy was ineffective when they vowed to reform their policing.
Chicago had already reached at agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois in 2015, as the AP notes, restraining its use of stop-and-frisk after the civil rights organization threatened to file a lawsuit, due to its impact on minorities.
Matt McGrath, spokesperson for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, slammed Trump for bringing back up the noxious rhetoric.
“Even someone as clueless as Donald Trump has to know stop-and-frisk is simply not the solution to crime,” McGrath said in an emailed statement to the AP.
The ACLU of Illinois was also, predictably, unimpressed by the president’s statements.
The Trump administration has “encouraged strong-arm tactics and unconstitutional practices by police,” Karen Sheley, the Director of the Police Practices Project who is with the organization, told the AP. “The solutions to violence in Chicago are not going to come from Donald Trump.”
