Why Do DJ Envy And Donald Trump Believe Stop-And-Frisk Is Effective When It Actually Isn’t?

Looks like Donald Trump may have found a supporter in DJ Envy. On Tuesday morning’s show, The Breakfast Club co-host revealed, just like Trump, he’s a big proponent of stop-and-frisk, the policing method that lets police officers stop and pat down any person they deem to look “suspicious.” Except stop-and-frisk disproportionately targets black and Latino men.

“You should absolutely and positively check and see who’s on the streets,” DJ Envy ranted on radio. “There shouldn’t be kids and people hanging on the corner at 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning, doing what they do. You and I both know if that if you’re from the hood, you know what n****s is doing at the corner at 11:00pm and 12:00am.”

Envy said his mother was right when she warned him as a child not to hang out with neighborhood kids because they were bad seeds. “Nine times out of 10, they were robbing, they were selling drugs and they need to be getting off the corner. Those kids need to be stopped and frisked,” Envy added. “If you’re out there doing bad or in the area, then yes you should be stopped and frisked.”

Envy, who also said he crosses the street when he sees a black man in a hoodie, continues to hang on to the notion that stop-and-frisk is effective policing. Donald Trump also sang its praises at Monday night’s debate, falsely claiming that it brought “crime way down in New York City.”

When moderator Lester Holt, a black man, informed Trump stop-and-frisk was a form of racial profiling, Trump denied the facts and said the program was about “getting the guns away from bad people and felons that shouldn’t have them.” However, the NYPD’s reports prove that couldn’t be any further from the truth.

Over 90 percent of people stopped by the NYPD under stop-and-frisk from 2002-2015 were innocent, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union’s analysis of the NYPD’s reports. Nearly 55 percent of people stopped during that same period were black, 30 percent were Latino and 10 percent were white. Crime experts have all disagreed on whether or not stop-and-frisk actually has any impact on crime, but agree that it does foster distrust between urban communities and police.

“Stop-and-frisk creates an air of distrust,” said Donna Clopton, president of the 103rd Precinct Community Council in Jamaica, an area that led Queens, New York in stops in 2012. “I’ve heard from the kids, ‘I don’t trust cops after being stopped.’”

As NBC News’ Katy Tur noted after the debate, both shooting incidents and murders in New York City have gone down considerably since stop-and-frisk was deemed unconstitutional in 2011 for violating our fourth amendment rights.

Even co-host Charlamagne Tha God tried to educate Envy on the stats, informing him that stop-and-frisk cases from 2009-2012 only resulted in a three percent conviction rate and 0.1 percent of stops went on to violent crime convictions. But according to Envy, no matter the numbers, stop-and-frisk still “got tons of guns off the streets which is the most important thing.”

Obviously, Envy’s Twitter mentions are in complete disarray right now, not that it matters.