“Stop And Frisk” made its return to the national stage thanks to Donald Trump and his insistence that the controversial process worked. Several entities, including debate moderator Lester Holt and Merriam-Webster Dictionary, were quick to tell Trump that the process was cited as unconstitutional. This hasn’t stopped Trump or his supporters, though, forcing The Daily Show to dive deep into its inner workings to really see if it is effective or another reason to target minorities.
Trevor Noah kicks off the segment with a video montage of people describing their stop and frisk experience, followed by a few clips showing it in action. It’s not a positive look. According to Noah, 700,000 stop and frisk searches in New York were happening at its peak, with 88% of those turning of no violations at all. That’s 605,000 stops where no laws were broken and nobody did anything wrong. On top of that, 90% of the 4 million NYPD stops were of minorities, with similar statistics coming out for cities like Chicago and Philadelphia. Yet this is meant to heal the racial divide according to supporters stop and frisk.
Noah then goes into detail about what would constitute a stop and frisk according to an NYPD worksheet, going into some interesting chatter about “bulges” and what that might lead to in a stop and frisk encounter. It all leads to the host saying that stop and frisk did help on some matters, but it was overall worthless for the reasons it is being sold to the public. Noah then adds that police and authorities should be more honest with the reasons behind stop and frisk, even giving them a handy PSA to use if they want it to make a full comeback.
(Via The Daily Show)