You may not have noticed amidst all the hubbub about Christine Quinn, new frontronner Bill de Blasio, and the erstwhile Carlos Danger, but there’s a Republican mayoral primary fight going on right now, too. And, you may or may not be surprised to learn, the current surge of potential stop-and-frisk reforms hasn’t affected the candidates’ opinions on the police tactic one bit.
In a televised debate last night, former Giuliani deputy Joe Lhota, supermarket mogul John A. Catsimatidis, and some guy who wandered in off the street George T. McDonald all voiced their undying support for stop-and-frisk.
“I would say to him, ‘Well, what did you do to provoke it?’” Castimadis said when asked how he’d react if his son was stopped. “I would say to him, ‘Were you dressed funny? Were you walking funny? Did you look funny?’” Given that John Castimadis, Jr. is the not-black-or-hispanic son of a billionaire, everyone enjoyed this bit of zany hypothetical fun.
Lhota nodded at the recent federal court decision against the practice when asked how he’d react if his daughter was stopped. “If they did not follow the rules of the Supreme Court, I would actually say that we have a situation here,” he said. “But the reality is 90 percent of all of the millions of stops that have happened in the City of New York have happened in compliance with the constitutional rights that have been put forward by the Supreme Court.”
McDonald, according to the Times, “seemed just to want viewers to remember he was in the debate hall.”
