AP FACT CHECK: Trump on stop-and-frisk

WASHINGTON – A claim from the presidential debate and how it stacks up with the facts:

TRUMP: “Stop-and-frisk had a tremendous impact on the safety of New York City. Tremendous beyond belief.”

THE FACTS: Trump is correct that the murder rate has plummeted in New York in the last two decades. But the same could be said for many other large American cities during the same period, and there’s certainly no way to credit stop-and-frisk for the decline.

Stop-and-frisk was a popular tactic for much of the last 15 years in New York. But even as it’s fallen out of favour under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, the murder rate remains a long way off from where it was in the 1990s, when it topped 2,000 a year. City police department statistics show there were 352 murders and non-negligent homicides in 2015, compared with 673 in 2000 and 539 in 2005.

EDITOR’S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures