On his Friday program, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough railed against opponents of “stop-and-frisk,” used by police to curb gun violence.
“Stop-and-frisk” has become a campaign issue in the New York City mayoral race and is thought to be what propelled Democratic mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio into front-runner status. But the morning after 13 people were shot in a South Side Chicago mass shooting, Scarborough said it was time to rethink anti-“stop-and-frisk” policies.
“Let me just throw this out there right now, people in those neighborhoods in Chicago, a lot of them, a lot of law-abiding citizens, would say, ‘do you know if there’s a version of stop-and-frisk you can import from New York to our neighborhood?’” Scarborough said. “While there’s a lot of white liberals in the suburbs that love like wringing their hands and being self-righteous and trying to score brownie points with liberal friends at cocktail parties, there’s a lot of people inside these neighborhoods who are the ones who are suffering.”
Scarborough also batted down a claim from his co-host Mika Brzezinski that studies reveal “stop-and-frisk” isn’t a bona fide crime prevention policy.
“How are you studying while people are dying every night in inner cities?” Scarborough said. “I do hope that it makes everybody, at their criminal studies seminars across the northeast in universities, feel better about themselves.”