After debate moderator Lester Holt on Monday night set the record straight about the failure of stop and frisk as a crime deterrent policy in New York City, Donald Trump tried to prove Holt wrong but ended up botching the facts.
Speaking about the issue of crime, Trump said simply, “We have to bring back law and order.”
“Now, whether or not in a place like Chicago, you do stop and frisk, which worked very well, Mayor Giuliani is here, it worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down,” Trump continued.
Holt informed Trump his allotted two minutes to respond had expired but didn’t let Trump off the hook.
“I do want to follow up, stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York, because it largely singled out black and hispanic young men –” the debate moderator began before Trump interrupted.
“No, you’re wrong,” the New York real estate mogul shot back. “It went before a judge who was a very against-police judge. It was taken away from her and our mayor, our new mayor, refused to go forward with the case. They would have won an appeal. If you look at it, throughout the country, there are many places –”
But Holt cut the GOP nominee off, saying, “The argument is that it’s a form of racial profiling.”
Trump didn’t back down.
“No, the argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and they are bad people that have them,” he said, pivoting to talk about violent criminals in cities like Chicago.
A 2013 report from the New York attorney general found that out of 2.4 million stops by police between 2009 and 2012, the stops resulted in a 3 percent conviction rate, and just 0.1 percent of the total stops went on to a violent crime conviction. A federal judge ruled the policy unconstitutional in 2013.
