NY Daily News Editorials
September 27, 2016
Claiming the mantle of law-and-order candidate, Donald Trump touts stop-and-frisk as a crime-fighting tool. He cites New York as offering proof that the tactic would be effective in crime-ridden American cities.
As usual, Trump has no clue what he is talking about. His every statement about the NYPD’s program in Monday night’s debate was irresponsibly wrong.
Let’s start with Trump’s statistics. He stated:
“In New York City, stop-and-frisk, we had 2,200 murders, and stop-and-frisk brought it down to 500 murders. Five hundred murders is a lot of murders. It’s hard to believe, 500 is like supposed to be good? But we went from 2,200 to 500. And it was continued on by Mayor Bloomberg.”
Citing the figure of 2,200 murders, Trump starts his crime countdown in 1990, New York’s most violent year.
At the time, the NYPD had no centralized program for stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people suspected of criminality. Cops stopped people as the situation warranted, or just because they wanted to.
Crime began slowly declining after the city beefed up the NYPD. The gains accelerated in 1994 when then-Commissioner Bill Bratton introduced so-called broken windows policing and, more important, CompStat, a system of crime analysis that held commanders accountable for targeting identified trouble spots.
In that era, attempts to identify why crime was falling rarely, if ever, considered stop-and-frisk as a significant factor. Meanwhile, in 1995, CompStat was credited with pushing murders down to 1,181, or almost 50% from the high point.
Four years later, then-state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer did the first count of how often NYPD officers stopped people for questioning.
He put the number at 175,000 stops from January 1998 through March 1999. The annual murder count then stood at 629, with CompStat universally credited with increased public safety.
Meanwhile, NYPD stops fell precipitously to 97,300 in 2002, by which time murders had dropped to 587.
To follow the numbers is to see clearly that stop-and-frisk and murders fell in tandem — the opposite of Trump’s claim.
Regardless, at that point, the NYPD started to employ stop-and-frisk at ever higher levels. Stops soared to a high of 685,700 in 2011 — a 600% leap in the annual count. Over the same period, murders fell by only 12%, suggesting at best a limited connected between more stops and less crime.
Since then, the NYPD has steadily abandoned stop-and-frisk, with stops falling by 97% to 22,900 last year. Meanwhile, murders continued to fall — by nearly one-third, to 352. This year, contrary to Trump’s assertion of greater violence, murders are down an additional 4%.
This statistical analysis is brought to you by an Editorial Board that fully supported stop-and-frisk as a crime-fighting tactic only to be persuaded that the long-term facts proved just the opposite of Trump’s claim.
Finally, the Republican nominee blatantly lied when he said that debate moderator Lester Holt had been “wrong” in saying that stop-and-frisk “was ruled unconstitutional in New York because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.”
After a trial, Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled exactly that. Mayor de Blasio dropped an appeal, so the decision stands.
Armed with less knowledge than could fit on a bumper sticker, Trump is grossly misinforming America about a critical, racially charged criminal justice issue.
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