Constitutional scholar and former New Jersey state judge Andrew Napolitano, in an interview Wednesday with host Brian Thomas at KRC-Radio in Cincinnati, Ohio, decried as an authoritarian police state activity the now-discontinued New York City stop-and-frisk program that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump praised in the Monday presidential debate.
Napolitano describes this stop-and-frisk program, which was discontinued after being found unconstitutional in a court decision, as allowing police to both stop and frisk an individual based on nothing more than “a hunch” that the person may be doing something illegal, such as carrying drug contraband or a weapon. Napolitano further explains that, under the New York City program, factors such as the age, gender, and ethnicity of a person, instead of actual suspicious activity, were used to justify stop-and-frisk encounters.
Napolitano concludes his analysis of the issue with the following provocative comment regarding the program:
Who wants to live in a society where the police can stop anybody, literally touch anywhere on your body in public, literally remove anything from your pocket, decide what to keep, and decide when to let you go? I mean, that’s an authoritarian police state. That’s not the America under the Constitution.
Listen to Napolitano’s complete interview here:
For more information regarding how the New York City stop-and-frisk program operated, read my November 13, 2013 article “Whistle-blower Cop Describes Stop-and-Frisk, Corruption at NYPD.”
For an introduction to Trump’s support for the New York City stop-and-frisk program during and before his presidential campaign, read my September 5 article “Donald Trump: We Need More Stop-and-Frisk.”
