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Trump’s Stop-and-Frisk Agenda
Trump’s Stop-and-Frisk Agenda
By Ronald Brownstein
May 25, 2024
Four years after George Floyd’s death, Trump wants to reverse the fitful progress toward police reform.
Even as Donald Trump relies on unprecedented support from Black and Latino voters, he is embracing policies that would expose their communities to much greater police surveillance and enforcement. The policies that Trump is pledging to implement around crime and policing in a second presidential term would reverse the broad trend of police reform that accelerated after the murder of George Floyd, four years ago today.
The magnitude of Trump’s plans on policing and crime has drawn little attention in the presidential race so far. But on virtually every front, Trump proposes to use Federal influence to reverse the efforts toward police reform that have gained ground over roughly the past decade, and especially since Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 spurred the largest nationwide protests since the 1960s. “We will give our police back their power and their respect,” Trump declared in his appearance at the National Rifle Association convention last weekend.
In a campaign video last year, Trump laid out a sweeping second-term agenda on crime and policing. He promised “a record investment” in Federal Funds to help cities hire and train more police. He said he would require local law-enforcement agencies receiving Federal grants to implement an array of hard-line “proven policing measures” including “Stop-and-Frisk, strictly enforcing existing gun laws, cracking down on the open use of illegal drugs,” and cooperating with federal immigration agencies “to arrest and deport criminal aliens.”
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Perhaps most dramatically, Trump has indicated that he will dispatch the National Guard and other Federal Law-Enforcement personnel “to restore law and order” in cities where “local law enforcement refuses to act”. Trump, in fact, has said on multiple occasions that one of his biggest regrets from his first term is that he deferred to city officials, who resisted his calls to deploy the National Guard or other Federal Law-Enforcement forces onto their streets.
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Trump’s most frequent promise has been his pledge “to indemnify all police officers and law-enforcement officials".
Exactly how Trump, at the federal level, could provide more legal protection to police officers is unclear. Experts point out that police officers already are shielded by the doctrine of “qualified immunity” against litigation, which the Supreme Court has upheld in multiple cases. Even in cases where law-enforcement agencies admit to misconduct, the damages are virtually always paid by the city, not the individual police officer.
Some states and local governments have since moved to weaken qualified immunity as a defense in state courts. Trump appears to envision passing national legislation that codifies broad protection for police and preempts any state effort to retrench it.
Trump could also face problems precisely defining the policing tactics he wants to require local officials to adopt as a condition for receiving federal law-enforcement grants. Trump, for instance, has repeatedly praised the Stop-and-Frisk program launched in New York City by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Under that program, the New York Police Department stopped large numbers of people—many of them young Black and Latino men—and claimed to be searching for drugs or guns. But eventually a federal district judge declared that the program violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as its guarantee of equal protection, and the city later abandoned the tactic.
Lopez, now a professor at Georgetown University Law School, says that Trump can’t order other police departments to precisely replicate the aggressive Stop-and-Frisk practices from New York City that have been found unconstitutional. But, she says, tying Federal Aid to Stop-and-Frisk and the other hard-line policies Trump is promoting could nonetheless exert a powerful signaling effect on local law enforcement.
“At the federal level, you can use your influence, your dollars, your training to encourage practices that are more or less alienating to communities,” she told me. Trump’s touting of Stop-and-Frisk, Lopez added, is “a signal that his administration is going to really promote some of the most aggressive, alienating practices that police departments have partaken in”.
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Full article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/05/trumps-extreme-plans-crime/678502/
Trump’s Stop-and-Frisk Agenda
By Ronald Brownstein
May 25, 2024
Four years after George Floyd’s death, Trump wants to reverse the fitful progress toward police reform.
Even as Donald Trump relies on unprecedented support from Black and Latino voters, he is embracing policies that would expose their communities to much greater police surveillance and enforcement. The policies that Trump is pledging to implement around crime and policing in a second presidential term would reverse the broad trend of police reform that accelerated after the murder of George Floyd, four years ago today.
The magnitude of Trump’s plans on policing and crime has drawn little attention in the presidential race so far. But on virtually every front, Trump proposes to use Federal influence to reverse the efforts toward police reform that have gained ground over roughly the past decade, and especially since Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 spurred the largest nationwide protests since the 1960s. “We will give our police back their power and their respect,” Trump declared in his appearance at the National Rifle Association convention last weekend.
In a campaign video last year, Trump laid out a sweeping second-term agenda on crime and policing. He promised “a record investment” in Federal Funds to help cities hire and train more police. He said he would require local law-enforcement agencies receiving Federal grants to implement an array of hard-line “proven policing measures” including “Stop-and-Frisk, strictly enforcing existing gun laws, cracking down on the open use of illegal drugs,” and cooperating with federal immigration agencies “to arrest and deport criminal aliens.”
.
Perhaps most dramatically, Trump has indicated that he will dispatch the National Guard and other Federal Law-Enforcement personnel “to restore law and order” in cities where “local law enforcement refuses to act”. Trump, in fact, has said on multiple occasions that one of his biggest regrets from his first term is that he deferred to city officials, who resisted his calls to deploy the National Guard or other Federal Law-Enforcement forces onto their streets.
.
Trump’s most frequent promise has been his pledge “to indemnify all police officers and law-enforcement officials".
Exactly how Trump, at the federal level, could provide more legal protection to police officers is unclear. Experts point out that police officers already are shielded by the doctrine of “qualified immunity” against litigation, which the Supreme Court has upheld in multiple cases. Even in cases where law-enforcement agencies admit to misconduct, the damages are virtually always paid by the city, not the individual police officer.
Some states and local governments have since moved to weaken qualified immunity as a defense in state courts. Trump appears to envision passing national legislation that codifies broad protection for police and preempts any state effort to retrench it.
Trump could also face problems precisely defining the policing tactics he wants to require local officials to adopt as a condition for receiving federal law-enforcement grants. Trump, for instance, has repeatedly praised the Stop-and-Frisk program launched in New York City by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Under that program, the New York Police Department stopped large numbers of people—many of them young Black and Latino men—and claimed to be searching for drugs or guns. But eventually a federal district judge declared that the program violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as its guarantee of equal protection, and the city later abandoned the tactic.
Lopez, now a professor at Georgetown University Law School, says that Trump can’t order other police departments to precisely replicate the aggressive Stop-and-Frisk practices from New York City that have been found unconstitutional. But, she says, tying Federal Aid to Stop-and-Frisk and the other hard-line policies Trump is promoting could nonetheless exert a powerful signaling effect on local law enforcement.
“At the federal level, you can use your influence, your dollars, your training to encourage practices that are more or less alienating to communities,” she told me. Trump’s touting of Stop-and-Frisk, Lopez added, is “a signal that his administration is going to really promote some of the most aggressive, alienating practices that police departments have partaken in”.
.
Full article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/05/trumps-extreme-plans-crime/678502/
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