Trump’s Stop-and-Frisk Agenda
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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.
Trump has endorsed a suite of proposals that would provide cities with more funds to hire police officers; pressure officials in major cities to employ more aggressive policing tactics, such as “stop and frisk,” in high-crime neighborhoods; and strengthen legal protection for law-enforcement officers accused of misconduct.
“I suspect that in many places, you would see policing that is much harsher, much more punitive, [and] not nearly as concerned about the racial disparities in the way that policing happens,” Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who led multiple federal investigations of racial bias in police departments around the country, told me. “All of those things that we have been working for years to dismantle will be built up again.”
The cumulative effect of Trump’s proposals would be to push
