The fight over stop-and-frisk in New York City is going national, with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sparring at Monday's debate over the police tactic found to violate constitutional rights the way the NYPD was carrying it out. Grace Rauh filed the following report.
When you have two New Yorkers facing off for the White House, local issues can get thrust onto the national stage.
Such is the case with stop-and-frisk, the policing tactic that flourished under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were stopped and searched each year. Nearly all of them were black and Latino.
"Stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional, and in part because it was found to be ineffective," Hillary Clinton said.
"Stop-and-frisk had a tremendous impact on the safety of New York City," Donald Trump said.
A district court judge in 2013 did rule that the way the NYPD used stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional and discriminatory because it targeted minorities. Critics of stop-and-frisk have questioned its effectiveness too, pointing to the city's declining murder rate to illustrate that public safety has improved even as the number of stop-and-frisk encounters have plummeted.
Trump: Murders are up.
Clinton: No. No.
Trump: You check. You check.
Clinton: New York has done an excellent job.
Murders in the city are down so far this year compared to last. But there have been slightly more compared to the same period two years ago. Overall, though, the figures have plummeted over the last two decades.
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani waded into the fight, emphasizing that the district court judge's stop-and-frisk ruling only applied to the NYPD's approach. Police are allowed to stop and search people if they have reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
"No, it wasn't ruled unconstitutional. And maybe Hillary Clinton got it wrong because she failed the bar exam the first time," Giuliani said.
Former Mayor David Dinkins refrained from dismissing stop-and-frisk when NY1 asked him about it.
"Stop-and-frisk is a tool, if appropriately used," Dinkins said.
Indeed, the NYPD still conducts stop-and-frisks, but only a tiny fraction of the cases they initiated only a few years ago.