Trump Says Cops Need to Engage in Racial Profiling to Carry Out Counter-Terrorism Duties
Donald Trump on Monday said police officers across U.S. can’t effectively carry out their counter-terrorism duties unless they’re allowed to engage in racial profiling.
“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox and Friends” after he was asked for his idea on how cops should investigate and respond to terror plots, like the explosion that rocked Chelsea Saturday evening. “They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling. And they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”
“We don’t want to do any profiling — if somebody looks like he has a massive bomb on his back, we won’t go up to that person and say I’m sorry because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world we’re not allowed to profile,” he added. “Give me a break.”
Trump, throughout his campaign, has pushed for the use of racial profiling — particularly in Muslim communities — as a policing tactic departments should use to combat terrorism, consistently disregarding the fact that such practices have not only been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court but have been deemed ineffective by multiple studies.
Trump, on Monday, went on to claim that Israeli officials practice profiling and that the U.S. should look to its Middle Eastern ally, which is constantly under attack, as a model.
“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in … They will take that person in. They will check it out.”
At a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Fla., later Monday Trump didn’t mention his fondness for profiling, but delved into his proposal to institute “extreme vetting” measures for anyone immigrating to the U.S.
“Immigration security is national security,” Trump said. “And we can’t have vetting if we don’t look at ideology.”
All of his claims were quickly rejected by several civil rights groups and lawmakers, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Let us (be) vigilant but not afraid,” she said. “We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion.”
Gov. Cuomo later warned against the very same idea.
Donald Trump on Monday said police officers across U.S. can’t effectively carry out their counter-terrorism duties unless they’re allowed to engage in racial profiling.
“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox and Friends” after he was asked for his idea on how cops should investigate and respond to terror plots, like the explosion that rocked Chelsea Saturday evening. “They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling. And they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”
“We don’t want to do any profiling — if somebody looks like he has a massive bomb on his back, we won’t go up to that person and say I’m sorry because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world we’re not allowed to profile,” he added. “Give me a break.”
Donald Trump brags about breaking Chelsea bombing news
Trump, throughout his campaign, has pushed for the use of racial profiling — particularly in Muslim communities — as a policing tactic departments should use to combat terrorism, consistently disregarding the fact that such practices have not only been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court but have been deemed ineffective by multiple studies.
Trump, on Monday, went on to claim that Israeli officials practice profiling and that the U.S. should look to its Middle Eastern ally, which is constantly under attack, as a model.
“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in … They will take that person in. They will check it out.”
At a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Fla., later Monday Trump didn’t mention his fondness for profiling, but delved into his proposal to institute “extreme vetting” measures for anyone immigrating to the U.S.
Trump’s profile in ignorance
“Immigration security is national security,” Trump said. “And we can’t have vetting if we don’t look at ideology.”
All of his claims were quickly rejected by several civil rights groups and lawmakers, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Let us (be) vigilant but not afraid,” she said. “We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion.”
Gov. Cuomo later warned against the very same idea.
Jimmy Fallon defends questions to Donald Trump on ‘Tonight Show’
“We cannot lose who we are in effort to protect this country. We are a nation of immigrants,” he told MSNBC.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), whose district includes the Chelsea neighborhood that was rocked by the Saturday night blast, compared Trump’s ideas to what the “Gestapo” secret police were tasked with doing in Nazi Germany.
“The idea that police are handcuffed because of PC is ridiculous. You can’t arrest somebody unless you have some reason to suspect them, you can’t bug someone’s home, unless you get a warrant,” he told the Daily News. “The idea of going to a situation like police states in Europe or China … I don’t think you want to go there. We want to be safe and keep our liberties.”
“We don’t want to become a police state, we don’t want our police to be like the Gestapo, and we’re doing a great job of keeping people safe while protecting our liberties,” he added.
“Israel isn’t a police state either, they have rules about warrants and bugging people without reason,” Nadler said.
The New York Civil Liberties Union said Trump was “talking out of both sides of his mouth” and suggested he didn’t even know how to correctly refer to various police tactics.
“Suspicion based policing is the opposite of racial profiling, which is unconstitutional. Based on the latest reports, it was suspicion based policing, not randomly rounding up thousands of innocent people who happen to be Muslim, that resulted in the arrest of the suspect in the Chelsea bombing,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said.
In fact, since the NYPD disbanded a controversial unit that had been dedicated to surveilling the Muslim communities in April 2014, the department has thwarted at least 20 terrorist attacks.
The Demographics Unit, which was created in 2003 and later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit following uproar over disclosure of its activities, was closed in April of that year after it was revealed that the unit had overseen infiltrating Muslim communities, eavesdropping on conversations and had built detailed files on people’s eating, praying and shopping habits.
And on Sunday, shortly before being sworn in as the new NYPD commissioner, James O’Neill maintained that his department had nevertheless “over the last two years … foiled 20 plots in New York City.”
“That was done by a very professional highly trained law enforcement agencies,” he said.
Despite that fact, Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, suggested Trump’s calls should be heeded and repeated his own suggestion that U.S. law enforcement must target the Muslim community with extra surveillance.
“There should be much more surveillance of mosques,” King told The News. “It’s political correctness that we don’t do it.”
King declined to address Trump comments directly but called the actions of the disbanded NYPD Demographics unit “the way it should be done.”
“What the NYPD did for years for years was the right thing to do,” he said.
“President Obama and Hillary Clinton, when they say we need more outreach to the Muslim community, that’s a politically correct statement. There’s no harassment at all towards the Muslim community that’s all just propaganda,” King added. “As a general policy we should be surveilling the Muslim community, absolutely. That’s where the threat is coming from, and it’s totally constitutional.”
“The same thing was done in the Italian and Irish communities,” he said, referring to targeted policing of the Westies Gang and Italian mafia in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
(h/t New York Daily News)
Reality
Donald Trump is putting forth a proposal that would be a clear violation the 1st, 4th, and 14th amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as existing laws.
Racial profiling is the practice of targeting individuals for police or security detention based on their race or ethnicity in the belief that certain minority groups are more likely to engage in unlawful behavior.
Racial profiling is patently illegal, violating the U.S. Constitution’s core promises of equal protection under the law to all and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Just as importantly, racial profiling is ineffective. It alienates communities from law enforcement, hinders community policing efforts, and causes law enforcement to lose credibility and trust among the people they are sworn to protect and serve.
Science has also proven, across multiple peer-reviewed studies, that racial profiling is no more effective than a random screening.
However, should America decide to go trough with a President Trump’s suggestion, we should be racially profiling white Christian males because you are more than 7 times as likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than by Muslim terrorists.
UNC Professor Charles Kurzman and Duke Professor David Schanzer explained last June in the New York Times, Islam-inspired terror attacks “accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.” Meanwhile, “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”
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