Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Thursday against embracing the “stop and frisk” police tactic that he said would worsen relations between police and community in the country.
Trump has praised the anti-crime tactic in which police stop, question and search pedestrians for weapons or contraband and said on Fox News on Thursday it “massively changed” the crime statistics in New York City.
“Stop and frisk worked,” Trump said on Fox & Friends on Thursday. He said the crime-ridden city of Chicago needed to adopt the tactic.
De Blasio rejected that claim and attributed the sharp drop in crime to another strategy adopted by Bill Bratton, the city’s longtime police commissioner who retired less than a week ago.
Bratton championed the “broken windows” policing strategy that emphasizes pursuit of crimes no matter how minor. In his resignation letter he attributed the decline in crime in New York City, the nation’s largest with 8.5 million people, to additional officers and an emphasis on building bonds within neighborhoods.
“Donald Trump talks about stop and frisk like he knows the facts,” de Blasio said in an interview with CNN. “He has had no experience with policing, no experience with public safety.
“He should really be careful because if we reinstitute stop and frisk all over this country, you would see a lot more tension between police and community.”
Police tactics and deadly encounters with African-Americans, many of them unarmed, have sparked protests and unrest across the country. A state of emergency was declared in Charlotte, North Carolina, after a second night of unrest sparked by the fatal police shooting of a black man.
There have also been protests in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in recent days after a police officer was arrested in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man who a video shows had his hands in clear view at the time.
The stop and frisk policy gained traction in New York City under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now a top Trump supporter. De Blasio promised to end the practice during his 2013 mayoral campaign.
De Blasio also credited the continued drop in crime in New York City in recent decades to a crime reduction strategy adopted by the Bratton called CompStat, which adopts statistical strategies to achieve more effective policing.
“That’s what changed things in New York City,” de Blasio said, adding crime has gone down in the three years since his administration curtailed the use of stop and frisk.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Daniel Bases)
Photo: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks during a news conference at Rikers Island jail in New York City, U.S. September 1, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid –
U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, in remarks at an African-American church on Wednesday, praised “stop-and-frisk” policing methods that have aroused protests and successful legal challenges, for singling out minorities.
The anti-crime tactic in which police stop, question and search pedestrians for weapons or contraband, gained traction in New York City under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now a top Trump supporter.
But opposition to the practice led police departments in New York, as well as Chicago and Newark, New Jersey, to agree to cut back on its use, in some cases submitting to outside monitoring and improving police training.
“I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to,” Trump said, according to excerpts of a Fox News “town hall” in Cleveland, after a listener asked what he would do to reduce crime in predominantly black communities across the nation.
“I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk. In New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked,” he added.
Ending the practice in New York was a key plank of Democrat Bill de Blasio’s successful 2013 run for mayor.
As the race between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton tightens ahead of the Nov. 8 election, he has been reaching out to African-American voters, shown by opinion polls to largely favor Clinton.
Trump has portrayed himself as the “law-and-order candidate.” But Clinton has criticized many of his proposals as unconstitutional attacks on American freedoms.
Clinton’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s statement.
“Stop and frisk” had saved lives and reduced crime in New York City under Giuliani, the Trump campaign said in a statement.
“Mr. Trump believes that a locally tailored version of ‘stop and frisk’ should be used in Chicago to help reduce skyrocketing violence and make our Chicago safe again,” spokesman Jason Miller said.
‘WE ARE VICTIMS’
Anger over police tactics has risen as their fatal encounters with African-Americans, many of them unarmed, have sparked protests and unrest across the country.
In his appeal to African-American voters, Trump has lamented the woes of black communities, asking those who traditionally vote Democratic to take a chance on him. But his often dire portrayals of their lives have left some black voters unmoved.
Connie Tucker, a pastor at Father Heart Ministries in Columbus, Ohio, said she liked policies that brought results, so if stop-and-frisk helped cut crime, she backed it.
But Tucker, who is white, said she sensed discomfort in the room at Trump’s remarks. “I felt like there was a pause,” she said.
Another attendee, Geoff Betts, 38, who is black, said he felt dismayed by Trump’s response.
Betts, a hair products distributor, said he was registered to vote as an independent and attended to learn how Trump would try to win over black voters.
He said he thought police unfairly discriminated against black citizens and that he opposed stop-and-frisk.
“We are victims,” he said, adding that he had walked out of the meeting. “I just couldn’t take it anymore, I had to go. I don’t think that Donald Trump gets it.”
(Reporting by Emily Flitter, Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson in Washington; Editing by Peter Cooney and Clarence Fernandez)
Photo: Members of the clergy lay hands and pray over Donald Trump at the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Did Eric Garner have his “face” shoved to the ground, or his “head”? Which sounds better?
These are the kind of details that the NYPD has been quietly amending in a series of Wikipedia pages focusing on police brutality and overreach, according to a detailed report by Capital New York.
The Wikipedia article on the “Death of Eric Garner” was subject to several instances of narrative adjustment, as reported by Capital:
Wikipedia pages are constantly in flux, the product of endless revision and re-revision by myriad volunteers, and all changes are recorded in a page’s edit history. If an anonymous user makes changes to any entry, the edits will be logged and tagged with the user’s IP address. Capital identified no fewer than 85 unique addresses making changes, which were registered to NYPD computers.
Among the other articles the NYPD made revisions to were entries on the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates complaints against the Department; the controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy; and the 2006 incident in which Sean Bell was shot 50 times by police while unarmed.
According to the site’s policies, all edits must be made from a neutral vantage point, based on reliably sourced information. The article on Garner’s death has since been placed under semi-protected status, meaning unregistered users cannot make changes, a standard response when a page has been subject to a “significant amount of disruption or vandalism from new or unregistered users.”
The NYPD is not the first institution to meddle with the world’s most relied-upon reference site. In 2007, computers belonging to the FBI and CIA were caught tweaking articles about the Iraq War and Guantánamo Bay.
Capital has a more comprehensive list of the revisions here.
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