Last week, the Libertarian Party of Indiana posted a meme on its official Facebook page equating stop-and-frisk to the Nazi policy of harassing Jews during the Holocaust. Last night, the national Libertarian Party endorsed the former’s assertion.
Stop-and-frisk has been at the center of ongoing debates for the last few years, most recently during the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The policy’s purpose, according to Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, was to deter criminals from carrying guns in order to curb gun-related crimes. Dennis Smith, a professor at New York University, has also mentioned that stop-and-frisk was effective in other major cities, including Los Angeles and Philadelphia. However, a federal court in Manhattan determined that New York City’s specific stop and frisk policies violated the Constitution. The court stopped short of claiming that the policy was unconstitutional as a whole.
By posting the meme, the Libertarian Party casually endorsed a moral equivalency between a policy intent on deterring crime to save lives and the Nazis’ policy of harassment and eventual genocide of the Jewish people. The meme ignores the fact that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an instance where Polish Jews resisted deportation to Treblinka, one of the major Nazi death camps. On April 19, 1943, 750 Jewish resistance fighters started a month-long assault on German soldiers until the rebellion was crushed and the ghetto was demolished.
The Libertarian Party was asked for clarification if it really believes that stop-and-frisk is the same as the Nazis’ attempts to prevent a minority group from resisting against imminent genocide. There has been no response so far.
UPDATE:
The Libertarian Party issued the following reply via Facebook:
We don’t control state affiliate Facebook pages, but there is a parallel in that stop-and-frisk is a violation of due process and uses profiling.
Memes are often oversimplified images designed to convey a thought, so I can see why this one would be off-putting. The factors leading up to the Holocaust are very complex.
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