The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
the same dilemma of how to induce their compliance. Hapless Ferguson officials used the taboo term “personal responsibility” to try to explain to their Washington investigators why some people face an escalating series of fines for repeated failures to attend their court hearings. DOJ attorneys were scandalized yet again. But this explanation is not unique to “racist” Ferguson. The black mayor of a neighboring town defended similar fees and enforcement methods under his own government. “Everyone is saying, ‘Oh, no, that’s cities just taking advantage of the poor,’” he told the New York Times. “When did the poor get the right to commit crimes?”
For the last 20 years, America’s elites have talked feverishly about police racism in order to avoid talking about black crime. The Justice Department’s second Ferguson report is just the latest example of that furious attempt to change the subject.
On March 11, 2015—only hours before two police officers were shot at protests in Ferguson, either targeted directly or the unintended casualties of a gang dispute—a six-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed by a stray bullet in a St. Louis park. There have been no protests against his killer; Al Sharpton has not shown up to demand a federal investigation. Marcus is just one of the 6,000 black homicide victims a year (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined) who receive virtually no attention because their killers are other black civilians.
Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 die from shootings at more than six times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined, thanks to a ten times higher rate of homicide committed by black teens. Until the black family is reconstituted, the best protection that the law-abiding residents of urban neighborhoods have is the police. They are the government agency most committed to the proposition that “black lives matter.” The relentless effort to demonize the police for enforcing the law can only leave poor communities more vulnerable to anarchy.
One of the most effective remedies against urban anarchy over the past two decades is under attack. Proactive policing—also called Broken Windows policing—calls for the enforcement of low-level misdemeanor laws regulating public order. Manhattan Institute fellow George Kelling and Harvard professor James Q. Wilson first articulated the Broken Windows theory in 1982 as a means of quelling public fear of crime and restoring order to fraying communities. William Bratton embraced the thinking in his first tour as commissioner of the New York Police Department in the 1990s, with great benefit to public safety. Subsequently, police commanders across the country also adopted it. But in the summer of 2014, longtime critics of the NYPD seized on the death of Eric Garner while in police custody to call for an end to proactive policing.
Officers approached the 43-year-old Garner on July 17 in a high-crime area near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and accused him of illegally selling untaxed cigarettes—the kind of misdemeanor that Broken Windows policing aims to curb. Garner had already been arrested more than 30 times, mostly for selling loose cigarettes but also for marijuana possession and other offenses. As captured in a cell-phone video, the 350-pound man loudly objected to the charge and broke free when an officer tried to handcuff him. The officer then put his arm around Garner’s neck and pulled him to the ground. Garner repeatedly stated that he couldn’t breathe, and then went eerily stiff and quiet. After a seemingly interminable time on the ground without assistance, Garner was finally put on a stretcher to be taken to an emergency room. He died of cardiac arrest before arriving at the hospital. Garner suffered from severe asthma and diabetes, among other ailments, which contributed to his heart attack.
Anger over Garner’s death is understandable. No one should die for selling untaxed cigarettes or even for resisting arrest, though the officers certainly did not intend to kill Garner, and a takedown may be justified when a suspect resists. Protests initially centered on the officer’s seeming use of a choke-hold, which is banned by NYPD policy. But critics of the NYPD expanded the campaign against the police to include misdemeanor enforcement itself. This is pure opportunism. There is no connection between the theory and practice of quality-of-life enforcement, on the one hand, and Garner’s death, on the other. It was Garner’s resistance to arrest that triggered the events leading to his death, however disproportionate that outcome, not the policing of illegal cigarette sales. Suspects resist arrest for all sorts of crimes. The only way to prevent the remote possibility of death following an attempted arrest, beyond eliminating the use of choke-holds (if that is indeed what caused Garner’s heart attack), is to make no arrests at all, even for felonies.
Having eviscerated the legitimate practice of pedestrian stops, the anti-cop brigades set their sights on Broken Windows policing. Leading the charge is Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College sociologist. Members of the New York City Council and a preposterously named protest group called “New Yorkers Against Bratton” are close on his heels. Naturally, Vitale plays the race card, following other anti–Broken Windows academics (such as Bernard Harcourt, now at Columbia Law School). According to Vitale, the NYPD disproportionately and unjustifiably targets minority neighborhoods for misdemeanor enforcement, resulting in the “over-policing” of “communities of color.”
Vitale should spend more time in poor neighborhoods. No stronger proponents of public-order policing exist than law-abiding residents of high-crime areas. Go to any police-and-community meeting in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Harlem, and you will hear pleas such as the following: Teens are congregating on my stoop; can you please arrest them? SUVs are driving down the street at night with their stereos blaring; can’t you do something? People have been barbecuing on the pedestrian islands of Broadway; that’s illegal! The targets of these complaints may be black and Hispanic, but the people making the complaints, themselves black and Hispanic, don’t care. They just want orderly streets.
In May 2014, a public meeting in East Harlem discussed at length how the police could break up an entrenched cluster of vagrants and shelter residents on Lexington Avenue and 125th Street; the unsightly gathering was a daily source of street fights and drug dealing. A representative from the office of Melissa Mark-Viverito, the city council speaker, complained that the benches on Lexington, though designed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to be uncomfortable for long-term sitting or lying down, were not uncomfortable enough to discourage the squalid encampment. (Even the most left-wing politician can change her tune when disorder is in her own backyard.) In another complaint that defies the critics of Broken Windows policing, an emissary from Strive, a left-leaning job-placement program, asked the commander of the 25th Precinct to evict a female squatter who was selling drugs from her illegally occupied apartment. “Drugs are still the driving force of everything in our community,” he said. All these complaints embody a truth ignored by criminologists and street-level agitators: the fierce yearning of the law-abiding poor to enjoy the same civility and order in their neighborhoods as the residents of Park Avenue take for granted in their own.
Vitale charges that the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes is enforced almost exclusively in communities of color. No surprise: that’s where the trade overwhelmingly occurs. I am regularly solicited for loosies on 125th Street; I have never been approached for such a sale south of 96th Street. Vitale claims that “in many courts around the boroughs,” a random spot-check performed by the Police Reform Organizing Project, a group he advises, found that 100 percent of those appearing for minor violations were people of color. Such a statistic only shows that the police are going where the crime and disorder are. All crime commission, whether felony or misdemeanor, is racially disproportionate.
The cop-critics also dispute the efficacy of quality-of-life policing. “There just isn’t any evidence that arresting squeegee men and aggressive panhandlers in midtown Manhattan helps reduce robberies and shootings in the outer boroughs,” Vitale says. That argument is a straw man: no proponent of misdemeanor enforcement has ever attempted to prove such a geographically attenuated causal link. But Michael Jacobson of the City University of New York and James Austin of the JFA Institute, both liberal-to-left organizations, have shown that New York City’s misdemeanor enforcement led to a drop in felony arrests and felony incarcerations by getting potential