As the nation reels from two recent fatal police shootings of black men, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Wednesday called for cities nationwide to adopt “stop-and-frisk”—a widely condemned police practice that New York City was forced to abandon after a federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional, finding that it disproportionately targeted minorities.
“‘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,” reports Reuters.
Trump’s “support for the polarizing crime-fighting policy—which involves officers’ questioning and searching pedestrians—collides with his highly visible courtship of African-Americans, who have been disproportionately singled out by the tactic, data show,” the New York Times writes.
“We did it in New York,” Trump said of the practice. “It worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive.”