Donald Trump was at a speaking engagement on Monday in Florida when he started talking about crime in Chicago.
Trump was speaking before the International Association of Chiefs of Police when he began sounding off on his plan to deal with crime in Chicago.
His plan for Chicago, apparently, is to send representatives from the U.S. Attorney General’s office (currently headed by Jeff Sessions) to “work with local authorities to try to change the terrible deal the city of Chicago entered into with ACLU, which ties law enforcement’s hands, and to strongly consider stop-and-frisk,” according to the Chicago-Tribune .
“Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, had a very strong program of stop-and-frisk, and it went from an unacceptably dangerous city to one of the safest cities in the country and I think the safest big city in the country. So it works,” Trump said.
Trump is apparently talking about a deal made by Chicago and the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, in 2016. Per the terms of the deal, police officers must thoroughly document street stops they make. This was done in an effort to put a stop to racial profiling.
According to this speech in Florida, Trump wants stop-and-frisk policies in Chicago to be employed “to help straighten out the terrible shooting wave.”
It was my great honor to address the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Convention in Orlando, Florida. Thank you! #IACP2018 #LESM https://t.co/Z0nY5bSNr6
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2018
After the rate of homicide in Chicago spiked in 2016, the rate has dropped again. Shooting incidents and homicides are both down from 2016 numbers in the city. However, as Yahoo! News reports, Chicago’s homicide rate is still higher than that of New York City and Los Angeles combined.
Stop-and-frisk policies, once heavily used in New York and many other major American cities, have been ruled as unconstitutional and a form of racial profiling, as reported by Business Insider .
Additionally, stop-and-frisk rarely reveals criminals to police officers. Data provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that almost nine out of 10 people who were stopped and frisked in New York were innocent.
Trump made his comments just three days after Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of teenager Laquan McDonald. Van Dyke was recorded on video shooting McDonald, an African-American teenager, 16 times.
