The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
our future,” Scott declared. True enough. But primary responsibility lies with children’s own two parents. Pace Michael Eric Dyson, “we” have spent trillions of dollars since the 1960s trying to help black youth. A social worker and a government check are no substitute for a father and a mother, however.
The same day that the teenage mob looted the 7-Eleven in 2012, eight people were shot in Baltimore in just 24 hours, a toll typical of Baltimore’s astronomical crime rate. Magnitudes more black men are killed by other black men in Baltimore and other American cities than by the police, yet those killings are ignored because they don’t fit into the favored narrative of a white, racist America lethally oppressing blacks. Police misconduct is deplorable and must be eradicated wherever it exists. But until the black crime rate comes down, police presence is going to be higher in black neighborhoods, increasing the chances that when police tactics go awry, they will have a black victim.
Baltimore’s response to the rioting was shamefully hesitant. The police stood by during the start of the arson, even as looters severed a fire hose brought in to try to save a burning CVS store. Apparently, the ludicrous meme that the press promulgated after the August 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri—that the violence was provoked by a military-style police presence, rather than by the rioters themselves—had taken hold and inhibited police agencies from fulfilling their core duty to protect life and property. It is not clear whether the police diffidence was ordered by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake or by Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.* But any future outbreak of mob violence should be greeted with the force that it deserves.
* A Police Executive Research Forum report issued in November 2015 confirmed that officers had been told both before and during the violence to take a “soft approach,” including not making arrests and not wearing helmets, but the report does not clarify the ultimate source of the order.
What if they held a race riot and the news media stayed away? At the very least, we would be spared the nauseating spectacle of sycophantic reporters fawning on opportunistic thieves, as happened yet again during the outbreak of antipolice violence in Baltimore in April 2015. We wouldn’t see talking heads blaming the mayhem on “desperate poverty” or on “disparity,” or characterizing it as an “uprising” born of understandable anger. More important, the vandals would lose a bounty as valuable as their purloined booty: notoriety and legitimacy.
The riots held in the name of Freddie Gray, the drug dealer who died of a spinal injury in police custody, followed a drearily familiar script. Upon the first outbreak of violence, a crush of reporters flock to the scene with barely suppressed cries of glee. Surrounded by sound trucks and camera crews, outfitted with cell phones and microphones, they breathlessly narrate each skirmish between police and looters for the viewing public, thrusting their microphones into the faces of spectators and thugs alike to get a “street” interpretation of the mayhem. The studio anchors melodramatically caution the reporters to “stay safe,” even though the press at times may outnumber looters as well as the police. Meanwhile, the thieves get to indulge in the pleasures of anarchic annihilation while enjoying the desideratum of every reality-TV cast: a wide and devoted audience.
The performative quality of the live, televised race riot has created a new genre: riot porn, in which every act of thuggery is lasciviously filmed and parsed in real time for the benefit of at-home viewers. “Did you see that?” CNN reporter Miguel Marquez asked studio anchor Wolf Blitzer when vandals slashed a fire hose as businesses burned on April 27. “Wolf, if you just saw that, they just, while we were talking there, they just cut the hose with a knife . . . there are others who are thwarting the authorities at every turn.” (Marquez is given to philosophizing on social justice as he walks alongside protesters during antipolice demonstrations.)
Wolf confirmed that he had, in fact, seen the close-up footage: “I just saw that guy, yeah, I just saw that guy cut the hose as well, [a guy] with a gas mask.” Naturally, the TV audience also got to see the vicious sabotage. The street scene at these televised riots can be eerily static. People mill around listlessly like extras on a movie set. Within that sea of idleness, more energetic thugs, perched on the roofs of police cruisers, stomp out the cars’ windshields or throw garbage cans through the rear windows. The smartphone camera has only magnified the specular nature of the anarchy, as passersby memorialize their own presence at the festival of lawlessness.
As in the race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, CNN topped all other television channels for relentless oversaturation, keeping a phalanx of reporters in West Baltimore around the clock to meditate portentously on the meaning of the riots long after the looting was finally suppressed. Among national print outlets, the New York Times had the most frenzied output, with four or five stories a day on policing and racism, topics that the Times had already been obsessively pursuing for the last nine months. Both organizations diminished their coverage of Baltimore only marginally in the days and weeks after the fires were extinguished.
Thanks in large measure to the media deluge, the ideological yield from this urban tantrum was considerable. Inevitably, academics and pundits conferred political legitimacy on the riots, deeming them, in the words of the online publication Vox, “a serious attempt at forcing change.” Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, apologized for calling the rioters “thugs.” President Obama and Hillary Clinton both affirmed the dangerous myth that the criminal-justice system is racist. Speaking at Lehman College in the Bronx a week after the Baltimore riots, President Obama opined that young black men experience “being treated differently by law enforcement—in stops and in arrests, and in charges and incarcerations. The statistics are clear, up and down the criminal-justice system. There’s no dispute.” Hillary Clinton played the same theme at Columbia University several days after the riots: “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America. There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts.”
This claim of disparate treatment is simply untrue. For decades, liberal criminologists have tried to corroborate the Left’s cherished belief that the criminal-justice system responds to similarly situated whites and blacks unequally. The effort always comes up short. “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” concluded Michael Tonry, a criminologist, in his book Malign Neglect (1995). A Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas, conducted in 1994, found that blacks had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites, and were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Blacks were more likely to be sentenced to prison following a conviction, but that result reflected their past crimes and the gravity of their current offense (a subject examined in Chapter 19).
The rioting in Baltimore also gave fresh impetus to the liberal narrative about cities: that their viability depends on government spending. “There are consequences to indifference,” Obama said at Lehman College. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opined that the riots “have served at least one useful purpose: drawing attention to the grotesque inequalities that poison the lives of too many Americans.” Krugman blamed stingy federal outlays for the “grotesque inequalities.”
The idea that the federal and local governments have been “indifferent” to urban decay is ludicrous. Taxpayers have coughed up $22 trillion on more than 80 means-tested welfare programs (not including Social Security, Medicare, or grants for economic development) since the War on Poverty was launched in 1964, according to the Heritage Foundation. In the 1990s,