Clinton is wrong on stop-and-frisk — and Trump’s right
Mayor de Blasio rushed to declare Donald Trump “literally all wrong” in saying Monday that stop-and-frisk is effective and constitutional. But the NYPD put out a statement that proves him wrong.
De Blasio was on MSNBC defending Hillary Clinton, who claimed that “stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional” and “ineffective,” adding that it “did not do what it needed to do.” Trump disagreed on both counts — and the facts back him up.
As the NYPD release rightly notes, “Stop, Question and Frisk is not unconstitutional,” and even Judge Shira Scheindlin’s disastrous 2013 ruling never said so.
Fact is, the Supreme Court found it constitutional back in 1968 and has never reversed or even modified that decision. Scheindlin ruled merely that the NYPD’s use of the tactic had shown “deliberate indifference” to constitutional rights, claiming racial bias.
Then the US Court of Appeals threw her off the case because her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
And it stayed her ruling — a step usually taken only when a decision is unlikely to survive the full appellate process.
But higher courts never finished examining her decision — because de Blasio, who’d won his race for mayor vowing to end the practice, squelched the city’s appeal.
Trump was also right to call Scheindlin “a very anti-police judge.” One of her own former clerks told The New Yorker that “she thinks cops lie.”
Scheindlin refused to even consider the tactic’s effectiveness in court. But study after study has shown it did help cut crime. After all, it took 8,000 guns off the streets in the decade before her ruling.
As for bias, Scheindlin completely ignored “the massive [racial] disparities in criminal offending” and “the reality of crime,” as Heather Mac Donald notes on the previous page.
The facts are clear: Trump’s right; Clinton and de Blasio are wrong.
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