Donald Trump is campaigning for the presidency as the “law and order” candidate. He has suggested that African-American-led movements for criminal-justice reform are waging “a war on police” that must be stopped.
In 1989, Trump took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, intended to encourage New York State to impose the death penalty on five young black teenagers accused of raping a woman in Central Park. All five were later exonerated, but not before losing years of their lives in prison. When the city settled with the men for $40 million in 2014, Trump decried the agreement as “a disgrace,” because, even if the men were wrongfully imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, they still did “not exactly have the pasts of angels.”
Three days ago, Trump said that the Chicago police could end the city’s crime problem in a week by employing “tough police tactics,” because, “They’re right now not tough.”
Chicago has paid out half a billion dollars in police-brutality settlements since 2004.
On Friday, Trump debuted a new campaign ad on Instagram, which attacks Hillary Clinton for supporting Draconian policies on crime and incarceration, because there is no truth in this life save the certainty of death.
