New York: Donald Trump called for the national introduction of “stop and frisk”, the controversial police tactic ruled unconstitutional, during a town hall meeting meant to appeal to black voters on Wednesday.
“I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to,” said the Republican nominee, speaking to Fox News’s Sean Hannity during the meeting in a church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, that was slated to touch on African American issues. “We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically, you understand, you have to have, in my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk.”
The town hall meeting, scheduled to air Wednesday night, was delayed by Fox News because of the ongoing live coverage of protests in Charlotte, North Carolina, after police there were involved in the fatal shooting of Keith Scott, an African American man whom they claimed was armed. His family has denied those reports. In the course of the protests, one person was on life supprt in what city authorities said was a “civilian-on-civilian shooting”.
The Republican nominee also addressed the police shooting of Terrence Crutcher, an unarmed African American, on Friday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “I don’t know if she choked,” Trump said of the policewoman who allegedly killed Crutcher. “He was walking, his hands were high, he was walking to the car, he put the hands on the car — now maybe she choked, something really bad happened.”
Trump also reiterated other familiar talking points in his efforts to reach out to black voters. He described the crime in Chicago as “worse than Afghanistan”, a label which the Republican nominee has frequently used for much of what he calls “the inner city”. He also proclaimed of the inner city that “it’s so unsafe, where you walk down the street and you get shot, or your child gets shot.” While crime rates have slightly increased in the past year, violent crime is at roughly a quarter of the level that it was 20 years ago.
But while Trump is polling in single digits among black voters, he did not face any scrutiny over his troubled relationship with the African American community including his longstanding insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the US, and a history of housing discrimination lawsuits against Trump-owned real estate projects. Although Trump seemingly acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States on Friday at a peculiar press event held in a Washington hotel, he told an interviewer on Wednesday that he only abandoned the birther conspiracy theory because “I wanted to get on with the campaign. A lot of people were asking me questions”.
Instead, Hannity, who has appeared in a campaign ad for Trump, asked fawning questions of the Republican nominee and repeatedly praised him in the course of the hour-long interview. The Fox News host who has “never claimed to be a journalist” made matter of fact statements such as “Democrats still feel entitled to [the African American] vote” and characterising Clinton campaign advertisements as “despicable”.
Trump did appear with several African American surrogates, including Don King, the legendary boxing promoter who was convicted of stomping a man to death in 1966. King, who used the N-word at one Trump campaign event earlier on Wednesday and compared the Republican nominee to John the Baptist at another, was more restrained with Hannity. The boxing promoter merely called Trump “the spirit of America” and compared him to Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones.
Others who appeared on Trump’s behalf were former rival Ben Carson as well as Darrell Scott, a Cleveland pastor and longtime supporter.
Trump’s remarks met with skepticism among some in the African American community. Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, told the Guardian “the theme of his remarks seem to be that I know better than African American leaders what’s best for black Americans. And that kind of arrogance just doesn’t play very well.”
Carson noted that Trump’s birtherism made him persona non grata in the African American community as well. “I think for many African American that puts you beyond the pale, that Donald Trump came to national attention in American politics as a person who challenged whether the first black president was really an American,” said Carson.
Instead, the noted scholar simply thought Trump’s effort to reach out to the African American community was really an attempt “to get white support” and signal “I am not a racist”.
