HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (CN) — Donald Trump's revisionist history of stop-and-frisk in New York City, on full display at Monday night's presidential debate, could have been written by the law enforcement unions that endorsed him.
In Trump's telling, "America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani created a program called stop-and-frisk in the 1990s, which almost singlehandedly brought crime to historic lows until one liberal judge ended the only tool saving Gotham from the forces of darkness.
Giuliani himself echoed this self-aggrandizing narrative on Fox News following the debate.
According to Trump, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been on the cusp of overturning this dangerous ruling, until his feckless successor Bill DeBlasio gave up the good fight and swung back open the gates of disorder.
It's a good yarn, and his surrogates all wove variations of it in spin alley. So good, in fact, that even the Democrats have struggled to untangle all of the lies packed into it.
The Democratic National Committee's new president Donna Brazile came closest.
"Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional largely because people, innocent people, simply because of the way they looked, were stopped," Brazile told reporters "They were stopped because of just being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and someone decided that they had to have been part of a dragnet."
Here, Brazile got the basic facts right, but she was wrong on the law.
The NYPD has stopped millions of mostly black and Latino men through its stop-and-frisk program, reaching a height of 685,724 searches in 2011.
Police always justified these stops as a hunt for guns and drugs, but the NYPD's data showed that they only found firearms in 0.15 percent of cases and contraband in roughly 2 percent.
Amid controversy over the program, the NYPD has become more search-shy over the last five years, and statistics dropped to 24,000 street stops last year. Crime also took a nosedive over that period, despite Trump's claims to contrary.
But there's still one gaping hole in Brazile's summary: stop-and-frisk was never eliminated.
The NYPD still can stop people on the streets, and did so more than 65 times a day last year, under the 1968 Supreme Court precedent of Terry v. Ohio.
Contrary to popular legend, Giuliani did not invent searching young black and Latino men on U.S. streets, but he did help ramp up this practice to historic levels. And a federal judge has now decided that court intervention is necessary to make sure police are conducting street stops legally.
This may seem like a legalistic quibble, but the point is important because Trump is defending not the existence of the program, but the rampant, unconstitutional targeting of people of color.
Brazile's imprecision made her praise an action that the court never took.
"So I think it was the right move for the court and the judge to decide that it was unconstitutional," she said.
Hillary Clinton made a similar mistake on debate night, but she landed blows on her greater point bruising Trump over what she described as his "long record of engaging in racist behavior," starting with the Department of Justice's civil-rights lawsuit against him for discriminating against black tenants in 1973.