With the race for the Presidential Election heating up, it is undoubtedly important to be well aware of the policies that each candidate will propose and the ideals that they hold before one would choose to vote for either one of them.
We all know that Donald Trump has said some pretty ridiculous things, and proposed some fairly heinous ideas over the course of his campaign. His newest proposal? To bring back the “Stop and Frisk” policy that was deemed unconstitutional in 2013. Essentially, this allowed the members of the New York City Police Department to stop anyone appearing “suspicious” and search them without a warrant or without probable cause. While perhaps the intentions of this policy were to stop shootings and other illegal activities before they could begin, what really happened was a form of legalized racial profiling and discrimination.
Democratic representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland is even quoted as saying that policies such as the stop and frisk policy “erode trust between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.”
Now, where I seem to get confused is why, considering the climate of INCREDIBLY poor relations between police and minorities, particularly African Americans, it would be a good idea to ameliorate the nature of the relationship instead of working to improve it?
Instead of focusing on the racially motivated issue of law enforcement murdering innocent black people, Trump is instead about to essentially legalize the kind of racial profiling and bias that leads to these murders. This effectively will make it even more difficult to prosecute these crimes than it already is. And it clearly is already near-impossible.
He claims he wants to “take the guns away from the bad guys” and work to reduce black on black crime. He says “To the African American community, I say: vote for Donald J. Trump. I will fix it- And I say honestly, what do you have to lose? It’s not gonna get any worse. It’s terrible. The crime. The bad education, the no jobs.”
Come on now, Donald. You’re not going to fix anything. He can say this, yes. He can say this because he wants (and desperately needs) the black vote to beat Clinton. But just after he says this, he will say that he thinks police need more latitude to do their jobs and need more backing from political figures.
The disconnect is disturbing.
How can we afford, as a nation, to create more division between black communities and police? How can we, in any kind of good conscience, retreat so far backward as to go from a liberal and history-making BLACK president to a white racist buffoon of a man who will effectively undo any kind of social progress the nation has made in the last eight years?
The answer is that we cannot.
And I must say this:
If you are on the fence about who you are voting for come November: If you are unsure of whether or not to vote for Hillary or Donald, please consider this: if you are undecided, and you have ANYONE in your life who is a minority, who is Black, Hispanic, Muslim, how can you vote for someone who will make it easier for them to be murdered at the hands of their own government?
No, Donald Trump will not fix anything, except perhaps the insecurities of cowardly white men who have never, and will never, understand anything outside of their own small-mindedness. Needless to say, the stop-and-frisk must be stopped.
Needless to say, #ImWithHer.
