ArcaMax

"No," Trump fired back. "The argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and that are bad people that shouldn't have 'em."

No, the critical issue on which now-retired federal Judge Shira Scheindlin's decision turned was indeed racial profiling, no matter how little that concern may mean to Trump.

Contrary to popular notions, Scheindlin explicitly said that she was not banning stop-and-frisk, which generally has been upheld by the courts as long as it is conducted in a nondiscriminatory manner. A 1968 Supreme Court ruling, Terry v. Ohio, upheld the practice on those grounds.

Scheindlin nixed the use of stop-and-frisk as unconstitutional in the way it was applied by police in New York, not the practice itself.

That's important because the issue is bit more complicated than the all-or-nothing way that "stop and frisk" usually tends to be discussed.

Yet even Giuliani, a Trump supporter, seemed to acknowledge in a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending Trump's position, that stop-and-frisk had little to do with the city's dramatic crime drop during his watch.

The practice only escalated to a level that stirred a strong backlash, particularly from minority communities, under Bloomberg.

And contrary to Trump's assertion that the city's stop-and-frisk policy "worked incredibly well" in reducing New York's crime rate, forecasts of gloom and doom if the practice was scaled back have not materialized. So far, New York crime rates have continued their previously low levels.

Less arguable is the common-sense conclusion that stop-and-frisk left unleashed stirs more distrust and undermines cooperation between police and the communities they are supposed to protect -- which can hurt law enforcement more than it helps.

In Chicago, a similar stop-and-frisk policy was changed when the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois considered suing the city over the excessive use of the practice and racial profiling.

But after Chicago cops made stop-and-frisk stops at a far higher rate than New York City cops mounted at the height of their stop-and-frisk policy, according to the Illinois ACLU, police-community trust is not easy to rebuild. Stop-and-frisk is not an all-purpose cure for high crime. We need something more nuanced than that. Alas, if there's one thing for which Trump is not known, it's nuance.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.