CHICAGO — The day after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed resuming "stop-and-frisk" policies in police departments around the country, he made a clarification: He was only talking about Chicago.
"Chicago is out of control," Trump told the hosts of "Fox & Friends" Thursday morning. "I was really referring to Chicago with stop-and-frisk. They asked me about Chicago."
(Trump and the hosts begin to talk about Chicago at the clip's 5:55 mark.)
Noting the more than 3,000 people shot around the city this year, Trump offered more searches of pedestrians as a potential solution.
Stop-and-frisk is a controversial approach to policing in which officers detain pedestrians and search them. Once popular in New York, it was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge as it was applied by police there and has been blamed for escalating tensions between police and minorities.
Chicago police once used stop-and-frisk regularly. The American Civil Liberties Union found that blacks made up 72 percent of all stops even though are only about a third of the city's population.
In 2015, the ACLU and the Chicago Police Department reached an agreement requiring an outside review of the practice. The agreement resulted in more paperwork for officers and ended up limiting the use of stop-and-frisk. Since then, some officers have blamed the new policy for surging crime, citing an "ACLU effect."
"I think Chicago needs stop-and-frisk," Trump said Thursday.
"Now people can criticize me for that, or people can say whatever they want, but they ask me about Chicago, and I think stop-and-frisk with good strong law-and-order," Trump said.
"You have to do something," he added. "It can't continue the way it's going."
Trump pointed to New York City, where he credited aggressive policing and searches for transforming "an unsafe city to a safe city."
But New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio rebuffed Trump on CNN's "New Day" Thursday, saying the candidate "has had no experience with policing, no experience with public safety."
"He should really be careful because if we reinstituted stop-and-frisk all over this country, you'd see a lot more tension between police and communities," said DeBlasio, a Democrat supporting Hillary Clinton's bid for president.
DeBlasio was elected mayor in 2013 after running on a platform of ending stop-and-frisk tactics in the city. After the policy was reversed, New York's violent crime rate did not rise — instead, it continued on its decadeslong decline.
Crime in Chicago, Trump added Thursday, is "worse than some of the places we're hearing about like Afghanistan, you know, the war-torn nations. It's more dangerous."
A spokesman for the Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
But earlier this year, a commander of one of the city's 22 police districts offered his opinion:
"We aren’t in the business of harassing citizens as police officers," said Fabian Saldana, acting commander of the Shakespeare District during an April public meeting in Humboldt Park. "We can’t do it. We have to respect people's constitutional rights. If they are on the sidewalk and not doing anything, we cannot just roll up on ‘em and say, 'What are you guys doing?'"
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