http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/nyregion/what-donald-trump-got-wrong-on-stop-and-frisk.html 2016-09-27 23:07:14 What Donald Trump Got Wrong on Stop-and-Frisk In his debate with Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump uttered elaborate fiction about a tactic still used by the New York Police Department. === Among the senseless beatings inflicted on reality during the presidential debate on Monday night was the discussion of New York City’s Donald J. Trump This was multilayered fiction. Murder declined. A judge did not end stop-and-frisk. Neither did the current mayor. In fact, the Police Department By the way, did more blood run in the street? No, less blood did. Murder is down 32 percent since 2011, the last year of the old stop-and-frisk era, having dropped to 352 homicides in In the same period, stops were down by about 97 percent, said J. Peter Donald, a spokesman for the department. During the debate, “Under the current mayor, “No, you’re wrong,” Mr. Trump interjected. “You’re wrong.” “No, I’m not,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Murders are up, all right,” Mr. Trump said. “You check it.” All right, as Mr. Trump said, let’s check it. A Google search for “Historical New York City Crime Data” will bring you to a Frisks went down. So has murder, a steady decline that has continued, with slight annual variations, through this year. In the word-fact-salad-spinner used by Mr. Trump, those details land upside down. Also, he repeated a more common mistake about the decline of the stop-and-frisk tactics, attributing it to a federal judge hearing a class-action lawsuit against the city, and to Mayor “It was terminated by the current mayor,” Mr. Trump said. Actually, no. Last year, the city police conducted 22,939 stops, or about 63 a day. So stop-and-frisk was not terminated by Mr. de Blasio, or by anyone else for that matter. It’s true that the use of the tactic has declined. During the mayoralty of Mr. Bloomberg, the number of reported stops skyrocketed, but then was scaled back as the city faced pressure from the class-action litigation, brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. By the end of 2013, the year “But stop-and-frisk had a tremendous impact on the safety of New York City,” Mr. Trump said during the debate. “Tremendous beyond belief. So when you say it has no impact, it really did. It had a very, very big impact.” During the era praised by Mr. Trump, Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were being stopped every year so that the city could arrests tens of thousands for having weed. Applied almost exclusively to minorities, the stop-and-frisk tactics in New York became an elephantine government project that wasted time and money, degrading both to the personhood of the men and women who were stopped and to the professionalism of the people doing the stopping. It was poor social hygiene, not defensible as a matter of law or as effective law and order. As Mr. Trump said, it was “tremendous beyond belief.” Just so.