Trump Calls for National Stop-and-Frisk Policy Targeting Black and Latino Men in Cities

During a September 21, 2016 town hall on Fox News, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump endorses expanding "stop and frisk" — a police tactic that New York federal courts struck down as unconstitutional racial profiling in 2013 — to a national policy targeting violent crime in cities. "I would do stop and frisk," Trump tells moderator Sean Hannity. "In New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked." In Floyd v. City of New York (2013), U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments because 88% of stops targeted Black or Latino men, 98% of whom were innocent. Trump does not acknowledge the ruling. His call comes one week after he finally and without apology abandoned his five-year birther campaign against Barack Obama, and in the same week he launches his "law and order" outreach to Black voters, which critics call performative in light of his simultaneous endorsement of a policy courts found racially discriminatory.