The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
don’t “matter” to the police. “What do we want? Dead cops,” chanted participants in a New York anti-cop protest. Two public defenders from the Bronx participated in a rap video extolling cop-killings. Few people in positions of authority objected to this dangerous hatred. The desire to show allegiance with allegedly oppressed blacks was too great. The thrill of righteousness was palpable among the media as they lovingly chronicled every protest and among politicians and thought leaders who expressed solidarity with the cause. At another march across the Brooklyn Bridge, a group of people tried to throw trash cans onto the heads of officers on the level below them; police attempts to arrest the assailants were fought off by other marchers.
The elite’s desperation to participate in what they hopefully viewed as their own modern-day civil rights crusade was patent in the sanctification of Michael Brown, the would-be cop-killer. He was turned into a civil rights martyr. His violence toward Wilson, and toward the convenience-store owner he had strong-armed, was wiped from the record. Protesters at anti-cop rallies across the country chanted “hands up, don’t shoot,” allegedly Brown’s final words before Wilson shot him. Never mind that the source of that alleged final utterance, Brown’s companion Dorian Johnson, was a proven liar. There is no reason to believe his claim regarding Brown’s final words.
Protesters’ willingness to overlook anti-cop homicidal intent surfaced again in St. Louis in November. A teen criminal who had shot at the police was killed by an officer in self-defense; he, too, joined the roster of heroic black victims of police racism. This sanctification of black aspiring cop-killers would prove prophetic. It’s profoundly irresponsible to stoke hatred of the police, especially when the fuel used for doing so is a set of lies. Hatred of the police among blacks stems in part from police brutality during this country’s shameful era of Jim Crow laws and widespread discrimination. But it is naïve not to recognize that criminal members of the black underclass despise the police because law enforcement interferes with their way of life. The elites are oblivious both to the extent of lawlessness in the black inner city and to its effect on attitudes toward the cops. Any expression of contempt for the police, in their view, must be a sincere expression of aggrievement.
Cop-killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who assassinated NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on December 20, 2014, exemplified everything the elites have refused to recognize as the antipolice crusade marches on: he was a gun-toting criminal who was an eager consumer of the current frenzy of cop-hatred. (Not that he paid close enough attention to the actual details of alleged police malfeasance to spell Eric Garner’s name correctly.) His homicidal postings on Instagram—“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They Take 1 of Ours . . . Let’s Take 2 of Theirs”—were indistinguishable from the hatred bouncing around the Internet and the protests that few bothered to condemn. That vitriol continued after the assassination. Social media filled up with gloating at the officers’ deaths and praise for Brinsley: “That nigga that shot the cops is a legend,” read a typical message. A student leader and a representative of the African and Afro-American Studies department at Brandeis University tweeted that she had “no sympathy for the NYPD officers who were murdered today.”
The only good that could have come out of this wrenching attack on civilization would have been the delegitimation of the lie-based protest movement. That did not happen. The New York Times, instead, denounced as “inflammatory” the statement from the head of the officers’ union that there was “blood on the hands [that] starts on the steps of City Hall”—while the Times itself has promoted the inflammatory idea that police officers routinely kill blacks without cause. The elites’ investment in black victimology was too great to hope for an injection of truth into the dangerously counterfactual discourse about race, crime, and policing.
The false narrative about race and policing was well rehearsed and ready to be deployed in April 2015 when Baltimore erupted in riots after a black man died of injuries sustained in police custody. The apologetics began almost as soon as the fires were lit on April 27, heralding a night of violence and looting that would leave dozens of police officers injured and 19 buildings torched, including a $16 million senior center providing affordable housing and drugstores providing crucial medications for elderly customers. Society “refuses to help [young blacks] in a serious fashion. . . . We’re only there when they riot,” Michael Eric Dyson declared on MSNBC. Mika Brzezinski observed on Morning Joe: “This was an extremely, desperately poor city. This was bound to happen.” We were seeing an “uprising of young people against the police,” the result of a “combination of anger and disparity,” said Wes Moore, a professional talking head. Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore police officer and member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, blamed the drug laws.
In other words, the looters and arsonists were pushed to the breaking point by racism, poverty, and police brutality, the last exemplified by the death of Freddie Gray. A 25-year-old drug dealer with a lengthy arrest record, Gray had taken off running after making eye contact with an officer on bike patrol in a high-crime area on April 12; police reportedly claimed that he was involved in illegal activity. After a chase, he surrendered and was cuffed, searched, and arrested for possession of an illegal knife. According to the Baltimore prosecutor, he asked for an asthma inhaler but was not given one; he was not secured by a seatbelt while being transported in the police van, and though the officer driving the van repeatedly checked up on Gray, the officer did not provide requested medical assistance. It was during this time, according to the prosecutor, that he suffered his ultimately fatal spine injury.
Protests began on April 18, the day before Gray died in the hospital, turning violent a week later and especially on April 27. As the media narrative framed it, the rioters’ means may have been regrettable but they were engaged in a profound cri de coeur against the social injustice in which we all play a part.
Bunk. What happened in Baltimore was simply a larger and better-covered version of the flash mobs that have beset American cities in recent years, with black youths gathering via social media to steal from stores and assault whites. In May 2012, for example, students from Mervo High School in Northeast Baltimore crammed into a 7-Eleven store that was offering free Slurpees as a promotion. The teens grabbed all the merchandise they could get their hands on—$6,000 worth in total—and fled from the store. The manager tried to close the door to prevent the thieves from escaping and was viciously beaten. On St. Patrick’s Day that same year, a flash mob converged on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The Baltimore Sun reported that by the time the rampage ended, “one youth had been stabbed, a tourist had been robbed, beaten and stripped of his clothes, and others had been forced to take refuge inside a hotel lobby to escape an angry mob.” In April 2014, a bicyclist in Baltimore was attacked by a group of black teens who knocked him off his bike and pummeled him.
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., among other cities, have all grappled with similar violence. None of it deserves a righteous political gloss. Nor does the violence in Baltimore, which began with an invitation sent out over social media to convene at a local mall and “purge” it.
Perhaps if the media had not shrunk from reporting on the flash-mob phenomenon and the related “knockout game”—in which black teenagers try to knock out unsuspecting bystanders with a single sucker punch—we might have made a modicum of progress in addressing, or at least acknowledging, the real cause of black violence: the breakdown of the family. A widely circulated video from the mayhem shows a furious mother whacking her hoodie-encased son to prevent him from joining the mob. This tiger mom may well have the capacity to rein in her would-be vandal son. But the odds are against her. Try as they might, single mothers are generally overmatched in raising males. Boys need their fathers. But over 72 percent of black children are born to single-mother households today, three times the black illegitimacy rate when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his prescient analysis of black family breakdown in 1965.
Baltimore councilman Brandon Scott came closest to the truth in a city news conference when he angrily called on adults to “get out there and stand