Lester Holt was wrong on the subject of "stop and frisk" during Monday's presidential debate. Is that criticism coming from supporters of Donald Trump? Yes but, more importantly, it is also coming from liberal sources as well including Ed Kilgore of the not exactly Trump-friendly New York Magazine.
You can see Holt make his claim about "stop and frisk" being ruled unconstitutional in the video below followed by Kilgore's critique:
In the debate, moderator Lester Holt raised Trump’s call for nationwide stop-and-frisk and asked him if he was aware of the judicial ruling in New York. The exchange has drawn fire from commentators on the right, who argue that Holt’s challenge of Trump was factually inaccurate:
HOLT: “Stop-and-frisk” was ruled unconstitutional in New York because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men.
TRUMP: No, you’re wrong. 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 on appeal. If you look at it, throughout the country, there are many places where it’s—
HOLT: The argument is that it’s a form of racial profiling.
TRUMP: No, the argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and that are bad people that shouldn’t have ’em.
While the entire exchange was characterized by half-truths and overgeneralizations, Holt’s critics have a point. The NBC anchor (and by extension Clinton) was correct that a single district-court judge declared the particular use of stop-and-frisk in New York unconstitutional — but he didn’t make it clear that stop-and-frisk has generally been upheld if conducted in a nondiscriminatory manner, most famously by Earl Warren’s Supreme Court in the 1968 case of Terry v. Ohio. Trump was right that the decision in New York was of dubious value as precedent (he didn’t use those words, of course, though he seemed to be gesturing in that direction), but was arguably wrong that stop-and-frisk had much if anything to do with crime reductions in New York — and also wrong in attributing the heavy use of the tactic to his buddy Rudy.
The New York Daily News would beg to differ on how effective stop and frisk was in a report last year on whether it reduced crime:
A dramatic drop in stop-and-frisk encounters has emboldened criminals and made cops more reluctant to take proactive police action, even as murders and shootings are on the rise in the city.
The frightening message — echoed by police supervisors and union leaders — comes as stop-and-frisk encounters are on pace to plunge by 42% this year, with 20,000 fewer street stops.
There were 11,652 stops across the city through June 3 — projecting to roughly 28,000 for the year, records obtained by the Daily News show. As the number of stops fell, the number of murders spiked 19.5% during the first five months of the year, the number of people shot is up 9.2% and the number of shooting incidents jumped 9%.
So will we ever hear an "Oops!" from Lester Holt?
