Donald Trump has called for "stop-and-frisk" policing to be reinstated in Chicago. Photo / AP
Donald Trump has called for "stop-and-frisk" policing to be reinstated in Chicago. Photo / AP
Donald Trump has advocated for the use of "stop-and-frisk" policing to combat violence and crime in Chicago.
The United States President said the crime is "a terrible blight on that city", suggesting the practice of police randomly searching people for dangerous weapons and criminal activity would help "straighten it out".
But over the past decade, the policy has increasingly come under criticism, with research into its use in New York finding that it disproportionately targets racial minorities and has little positive impact on crime rates and violence.
What is stop-and-frisk?
Stop-and-frisk is a controversial process by which police stop, interrogate and search people — even if they don't have reasonable grounds to believe a person has committed a crime.
The policy first emerged in 1968 in the cases of Terry v. Ohio, Sibron v. New York, and Peters v. New York, in which the Supreme Court granted limited approval to officers to search for weapons if the officer believed the subject to be dangerous.
By the early 1990s, high-ranking police officials had the power to incorporate the "stop, question and frisk" policy, which became widely used.
Trump drew an enthusiastic response from a law-and-order crowd after he yesterday advocated the use of the policy in Chicago.
"The crime spree is a terrible blight on that city," he said at a convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police yesterday.
Trump said he had ordered Attorney-General Jeff Sessions to "immediately" go to Chicago "to help straighten out the terrible shooting wave".
He also encouraged the city to embrace the stop-and-frisk policing method. "Gotta be properly applied, but stop-and-frisk works," he said.
Trump drew an enthusiastic response from a law-and-order crowd after he advocated the use of stop-and-frisk in Chicago. Photo / AP
Chicago is the third-largest city in the US, with a population of over 2.7 million.
It's also a popular tourist destination, with more than 55 million tourists flocking to the city last year, hitting a record high amid a tourism push, including many Australians.
But the city has a serious problem with violence. A staggering number of people — 2303 in all — fell victim to shootings this year alone on the city's streets. Many were random hits, occurring amid ongoing gang rivalry.
Last month three students were shot outside Chicago's Chatham Academy Charter High School.
"Three male individuals were walking eastbound on 91st St, a vehicle approached those subjects, subject got out of the vehicle and fired multiple times striking all three," Chicago Police Chief Fred Waller said.
The afternoon shooting occurred about four blocks from where a 21-year-old man was shot earlier in the day.
In August, there was a period of three days where 66 people were shot. 12 died.
Chicago has long been plagued with violence. Photo / 123RF
What Trump failed to note, however, is this crime is on the decline in Chicago.
Last year's shooting figures totalled 2895, while in 2016, the bloodshed was even worse at 3281 shootings, according to statistics obtained by the Chicago Tribune. This isn't the first time Trump has raised the policy. During his 2016 election campaign, he raised the issue during an audience Q&A show aired by Fox News, when he was asked how he would address black-on-black crime.
"One of the things I'd do … is I would stop-and-frisk," he said. "I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind."
Why stop-and-frisk is so problematic
There is plenty of research to demonstrate that stop-and-frisk can actually do more harm than good.
The policy was implemented extensively in New York City until it was deemed unconstitutional in 2013 due to its overwhelming impact on minority residents.
In 2011, a record 685,724 stops were made. According to a 2014 New York Civil Liberties Union report, more than half of those detained and searched were black. Almost a third were Latino. All other races combined made up only around one-fifth of total searches.
Yet almost 90 per cent of those who were stopped were found to have done nothing wrong.
According to New York police data, the stops were happening 97 per cent less by 2015 — yet the overall crime stats stayed about the same. This suggests there was no correlation between stop-and-frisk, and that crime was falling in line with the national average.
In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the law was unconstitutional and "a form of racial profiling".
Plenty of research shows stop-and-frisk does more harm than good. Photo / 123RF
Even some of Trump's high-profile supporters agree with this. In 2018, conservative pundit Kyle Smith wrote an op-ed saying he was wrong to argue that reducing stop-and-frisk would increase the crime rate.
"Today in New York City, use of stop-and-frisk, which the department justified via the 1968 Terry v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, has crashed," he wrote in National Review. "Yet the statistics are clear: Crime is lower than ever. It's possible that crime would be even lower had stop-and-frisk been retained, but that's moving the goalposts. I and others argued that crime would rise. Instead, it fell. We were wrong."
He noted that "hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were unjustly subjected to embarrassment or even humiliation".
Another report on the practice released by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, an outspoken critic of the practice, found that stops of whites were twice as likely to result in the discovery of a weapon as the stop of a black person.
Griffin, who opposes De Blasio politically, said the Mayor was nonetheless "entitled to an I-told-you-so moment" on the issue.
Last week, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of black teenager Laquan McDonald. Photo / AP
Trump's renewed call for the controversy policy yesterday came three days after a jury convicted white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder in the death of black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Video showing Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times as he walked away from police carrying a knife stoked outrage nationwide and put Chicago at the centre of the debate about police misconduct and use of force.
Trump singled out politicians who have criticised police, saying: "Politicians who spread dangerous anti-police sentiment make life easier for criminals and more dangerous for law-abiding citizens."
