Stop-and-frisk a ‘perfect’ police tool: former NYPD official

Stop-and-frisk was “very valuable” in driving down crime — and would likely help stem the gang violence that now plagues some neighborhoods, a former high-ranking NYPD official told The Post on Sunday.

Retired Deputy Commissioner of Training Wilbur Chapman said he had officers and plainclothes cops employ the tactic when he was the commanding officer of precincts in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and Jamaica, Queens.

“We used it in high-crime areas and areas where there was narcotics distribution,” he said. “It was very valuable, and the community was fully behind us using it.”

Chapman said stop-and-frisk would also be “a perfect tool to use in fighting gangs.”

A retired NYPD detective who formerly patrolled Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights in Brooklyn also praised the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk.

“It allowed the hardworking people to just simply be able to walk to the corner or let their kids play without being afraid,” the ex-cop said.

Gristedes supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis was a Republican mayoral candidate when then-Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled against stop-and-frisk in 2013. He defended it at the time as “an example of proactive police work that stops crime and keeps guns off the streets.”

On Sunday, he said he remained “a strong supporter of stop-and-frisk” as a way to instill fear in criminals so they “leave the guns at home.”

“Stop-and-frisk helps the poorer neighborhoods. The bullets don’t go flying on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue,” said Catsimatidis, a Sunday-morning talk show host on AM 970.

Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD cop who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that without the practice, “the sad truth is that guns that might otherwise be seized remain in the stream of criminal commerce.”

“Beyond a doubt,” he said, “individuals will be grievously wounded or killed by these weapons that might otherwise have been stripped from those bent on using them.”

Additional reporting by Bruce Golding

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