For years, lawyers and advocates fought the use of “stop and frisk,” a policing tactic that left a majority of Black and brown men who experienced it physically and mentally scarred and distrustful of law enforcement. After a lengthy legal battle, a federal judge in 2013 found it unconstitutional, essentially banning it.
Still, former President Donald Trump wants to bring it back.
A key pillar of Trump’s anti-crime platform demands police departments reinstate stop and frisk — which allows officers to randomly stop and search people for weapons — or else risk critical federal dollars flowing into their coffers.
“I will insist that local jurisdictions return to proven common sense policing measures, such as stop and frisk,” Trump said on his campaign website. “Very simple.”
Not for many Black men who are perplexed that Trump would claim to covet their vote but wants policy that has proven to target and hurt Black men. Travis Hunter, an author, is one. His first visit to New York about 20 years ago was supposed to be a joyful occasion. He had just signed a major book deal. But within seconds of his having left his hotel for a celebration dinner, he said, three white police officers jumped out of an unmarked car, demanding he press his palms against a wall and spread his legs.
When Hunter asked why, he said, an officer spat, “Shut up, n—–r.”
“Where are you coming from?” another officer demanded. “Where are you going?”
An officer pulled out Hunter’s wallet from his back pocket and studied his Georgia driver’s license.
“He tossed the wallet back at me, and they went back to the car and drove off,” Hunter recalled.
He was left standing on the street stunned, furious and so violated that he could not even stand to report the incident to authorities. “I couldn’t even eat after that,” Hunter said. “I felt totally violated. . . I still do.”
Trump’s calls for stop-and-frisk come as he is trying to appeal to more Black voters, hoping to siphon away support from a key constituency that sent President Joe Biden to the White House in 2020. Trump’s appeals have at times been effective — gaining the support Black entertainers like Ye and Sexy Red — and other times not, like saying Black voters relate to him because of his mugshot.
With stop and frisk, Trump appears to be catering to his supporters who want him to be tough on crime in urban areas — despite lows in the national crime rate — and hoping that the message also appeals to Black voters who are unenthused about Biden and who are more likely to support his economic policies.
But with more than 2 million Black men having experienced stop-and-frisk, even some Black conservatives who support Trump — like Shelley Wynter, a New Yorker who lives in Atlanta — say they are ambivalent about 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,” said Wynter, co-host of “Word on the Street,” with MalaniKai Massey, on WSB-FM in Atlanta. In addition to its unconstitutionality, he said, 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.”
On the other hand, Wynter said: “There are high crime areas where stop and frisk may work, but there are unintended consequences. And those unintended consequences are, you start to pull over and grab and frisk kids that have nothing to do with nothing. They’re going to school, minding their business. But if you have quality police training, then it can be effective.”
Pushing for stop and frisk policing, though, also requires better police training, “so that it’s not targeting the wrong people,” he added. “So it’s a nuanced thing.”
Before a federal judge found it unconstitutional, essentially banning it in 2013, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly defended the practice in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. He wrote that stop and frisk, which he described as proactive policing, prevented more than 7,000 homicides, mostly against men of color.
Despite many studies that show Black men were targeted more than any other demographic, Trump has indirectly put stop and frisk on the ballot for the November presidential election by asserting repeatedly over the last decade that he wants to federally reinstate it.
In this election cycle especially, Trump and his allies have courted Black voters — a critical bloc in a close race — as he simultaneously pushes for policies that have proven to over-police and traumatize Black people in general and Black men in particular.
Trump hailed the policy as being “so incredible the way it worked” at a 2016 campaign stop at a Black church in Cleveland. Two years later, addressing the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention in 2018, Trump said stop and frisk should be enforced in Chicago, even after the city had dropped the practice in 2015 under an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union.
In a campaign video last year, Trump laid out his agenda on reducing crime: “I will insist that local jurisdictions return to proven commonsense policing measures, such as stop and frisk — very simple — you stop them and you frisk them.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
A problematic policy
The aggressive practice can have an impact on people who experience it; a survey by the American Public Health Association said men who were stopped and frisked reported having anxiety and elevated stress stemming from the situation.
According to the ACLU of New York, most of those stopped were people of color, and a lopsided number of them were Black. Among 532,911 police stops in 2012, the last year of stop and frisk in New York, 89% of the people were innocent of crimes, according to the ACLU of New York.
U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ultimately ruled that the practice was unconstitutional, writing that “in their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective,” police officers have “willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting ‘the right people’ is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution.”
How Trump would execute a national stop and frisk policy is unclear, as policing falls under state and local laws, said Delores Jones-Brown, professor emeritus, City Colleges of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “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 said of Trump. “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.”
Los Angeles civil rights attorney Rodney Diggs said he finds it ironic that Trump has been actively courting Black voters in this election while pushing a tactic that has an outsize negative effect on them.
“Stop and frisk only serves to harass and discriminate against people of color,” he said. “And so to say, ‘OK, I want the Black vote, I want the people-of-color vote, but now I’m going to establish a law that does nothing but discriminate against you’ goes against logic. Not only is it a recipe for disaster; you’re increasing the distrust between the community and police officers when stop and frisk clearly is geared towards various communities of people of color.”
Yasser Payne, a professor of criminal justice and sociology at the University of Delaware and a co-author of the book “Murder Town, USA: Homicide, Structural Violence and Activism in Wilmington,” said the practice contributed to a “death culture” around policing Black male bodies. “Stop and frisk tugged on the worst parts of implicit biases in terms of imaginations around what a Black male is and does,” he said.
Joe Biden campaign spokesperson Jasmine Harris cited Biden’s signing of an “executive order that restricts chokeholds and no-knock warrants at the federal level, establishes a national database of officers who have been fired for misconduct, and requires federal agencies to update their policies on use of force.”
“Donald Trump is the racist who came into public life by falsely accusing the Central Park 5 and has continuously encouraged police departments to be more aggressive and adopt policies like stop-and-frisk,” Harris said in a written statement.
NBC News’ data from last year says 37% of Black men ages 18 to 49 view Biden positively and 27% view Trump positively. While Biden retains the edge Democrats have long held over Republicans, Trump has gained traction, especially among younger Black voters, since the 2020 election.
In recent months, Trump and his surrogates have turned to influential Black cultural figures and platforms while also emphasizing economic gains during his administration. Trump’s critics, however, say his rising cachet with some Black male voters does not square with his stance on more aggressive policing policies.
California Assemblyman Mike Gipson, a Democrat, was a police officer in Maywood, California. He says randomly searching people “is not an effective way to police — it’s taking down the guardrails and giving officers free rein to do as they please.”
“Even as a former police officer, when I get stopped by police as a civilian, it causes trauma. Stopped for no reason other than the color of my skin, the car I was driving or the neighborhood I was in. And to have officers who are disrespectful, who already feel that you’re guilty even before you had an opportunity to open your mouth and ask the officer, ‘Why’d you stop me?’ The disposition of guilt is already there, and we’re treated that way.”
During the last year of stop and frisk in New York, Black people were stopped in 55% of such cases, Latinos in 32% and whites in 10%. In addition, the murder rate fell to record lows after stop and frisk was banned, squashing rhetoric by Trump and others that the aggressive policy decreased crime.
The Black Male Voter Project focuses on increasing the number of Black men who vote and “trying to really expand the electorate by talking to brothers that have been made invisible by the electoral process,” said its founder, W. Mondale Robinson. The organization especially engages with Black men with challenging pasts who may be targeted by stop and frisk.
“Stop and frisk has been the policy du jour in America since slavery ended,” Robinson said. “So it doesn’t surprise me that Trump says he wants it back.”
Samuel T. White, 54, a construction project manager in Philadelphia, said he voted Democratic in every election, but he said he is unenthusiastic about Biden while worried about Trump.
“So you ask: What do I do? In the end, you talk about stop and frisk and you’re talking about the potential of my son and nephew and cousin — and me — being caught up in police drama for no reason,” White said. “And as someone who has been harassed by cops, I don’t wish that on anyone. So, yeah, I thought about Trump. But I think when Black men think about that policy alone — it’s one policy, but it’s an important one — they will rethink giving him their vote. … I hope.”
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