He called the unconstitutional police tactic a “common-sense policing measure.”
As the presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump continues his campaign and his efforts to reach out to Black voters, he has continued to issue contradictory narratives. In an update to his criminal justice campaign platform on his website, the convicted felon called for the return of the controversial practice of “stop-and-frisk” by the New York City Police Department. He also called the police tactic a “common-sense policing measure.”
Trump has said he will require all police departments to implement stop & frisk as a condition of receiving federal law enforcement dollars. That could mean hundreds of thousands of more arrests annually for young non-white men, as I discussed here: https://t.co/ywlYi9E9Lb https://t.co/5tVWupchax— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) July 5, 2024
Black conservatives question the wisdom of Trump’s renewed push for “stop-and-frisk” due to its impact on Black men. This comes despite Trump’s efforts to target this group by employing Sen. Tim Scott as his de facto Black outreach director.
Shelley Wynter, a conservative Black New Yorker living in Atlanta and co-host of “Word on the Street” on WSB-FM, expressed his concern about the “unintended consequences” of the policy.
“Stop-and-frisk, in theory, is not a bad plan and I’m not opposed to it. Stop-and-frisk in its activation becomes problematic,” Wynter said, before stating that the “other problem is in its implementation, because what you do is you give carte blanche to the police to just do whatever they want, and you live in a constant state of police.”
However, Delores Jones-Brown, professor emeritus at the City Colleges of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, warns that although stop-and-frisk has been ruled unconstitutional, Trump can dangle federal funding in front of police departments to get them to do his bidding. “He can try to do whatever he wants or he thinks he can do, but it will be up to the police departments to resist,” Jones-Brown told NBC News. “He can’t mandate it. But police departments are notoriously attracted to federal funds and are willing to do things if it will result in increased federal funding. So, he could say, ‘I’m making this pot of money available for police departments that will aggressively use stop and frisk.’ And there will be some who fall in line with that for the funding, regardless of community objections.”
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Source: Black Enterprise
