The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
decree.
Arrests in Baltimore, especially drug arrests, have already dropped 45 percent since 2015; they will drop further under the new prohibitions. The per capita homicide rate in Baltimore in the first five months of 2017 was at the highest level in the city’s history. In March 2017, a gang member retaliating for an earlier drive-by shooting threw two Molotov cocktails into a house, burning two teenagers to death and injuring two children and four other residents. Law-abiding residents of Baltimore’s high-crime neighborhoods have been begging the police to restore order; under the strictures of the consent decree, their pleas will just have to wait.
A public backlash against the Black Lives Matter narrative helped fuel the improbable ascent of Donald Trump to the White House. In an inauspicious omen for the Hillary Clinton campaign, a Gallup poll taken in October 2016 found that support for the police—among minorities and whites alike—had surged to a high not seen since 1967, after falling to a twenty-two-year low in 2015. Alarm over the targeting of police officers contributed to that change in attitude: gun murders of officers rose 53 percent in 2016. Hillary Clinton, in an early Democratic presidential debate, had said it was “reality” that cops see black lives as cheap, and she continued to accuse the police of systemic racism throughout the campaign. Trump, by contrast, denounced the “false narrative” about the police and promised to restore law and order to American cities. He decried the growing loss of black life, and was promptly labeled a racist for doing so. During the campaign, President Obama dismissed Trump’s warning about the rising urban death rate. Apparently, black lives don’t matter so much when they are taken by a criminal.
The most important thing that a president can do now to restore law and order is to change the narrative about policing. The Justice Department should publicly recognize that policing today is data-driven: officers are deployed to where crime is highest. Under the new administration, the department is already subjecting the consent-decree process to a much-needed review. It should also declare that the federal government will no longer deem police bigoted for responding to community demands for order.
The campaign against the cops is a battle in a larger culture war, in which one camp seeks to redefine the American experience as the continual oppression of an ever-growing number of victim groups. Social norms, the legitimacy of authority, the rule of law—all are denigrated as the machinery of oppression, and the police are tarred as the most conspicuous embodiment of American injustice. In this climate, it was hardly surprising that The War on Cops would draw heat for subjecting the charges against the police to rational analysis, with some critics pronouncing the author a “fascist” and a “white supremacist.” The attacks on the book have not refuted its factual argument, nor have the critics acknowledged the extra challenges that cops now confront as they strive to bring safety to all Americans, regardless of race.
The Policing Revolution, Crime, and the Anti-Law-Enforcement Movement
As the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close, crime is shooting up in cities across the United States. Homicides in the country’s 50 largest cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015, the greatest surge in fatal violence in a quarter-century, reports the Washington Post. Milwaukee was experiencing its deadliest year in a decade. Homicides in Baltimore were at their highest per capita rate ever by mid-November—50 killings per 100,000 residents. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis alderman Joe Vaccaro at a City Hall hearing in May 2015. President Obama himself conceded that “gun violence and homicides have spiked—and in some cases they’ve spiked significantly.”
The crime surge was especially troubling in that it reversed a two-decade-long decline, during which American cities vanquished a 1960s-era notion that had made urban life miserable for so many. Breaking the law, the thinking went, was but a symptom of social failure and governmental neglect, or even an understandable expression of protest. Until poverty and racism were eliminated, routine behaviors such as walking down a street, strolling through a park, or operating a store would necessarily remain fraught with fear and the possibility of violence. Under the influence of this “root causes” conceit, acres of city space were ceded to thieves and thugs, to hustlers and graffiti “artists.” Disorder and decay became the urban norm.
A combination of forces eventually reversed this state of affairs. Starting in the late 1970s, legislators demanded that convicted criminals serve more of their sentences; habitual felons were finally locked up for lengthy prison stays. And police leaders challenged the “root causes” concept with a countervailing idea: the police could actually prevent crime and, in so doing, would make civilized urban life possible again. This sea change in policing philosophy originated in New York in 1994 under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney who had campaigned on the promise to free the city from its growing squalor and anarchy. Giuliani’s first police commissioner, William J. Bratton, was a champion of Broken Windows policing, which holds that allowing a neighborhood to become overrun by graffiti, litter, public drunkenness, and other forms of disorder breeds more crime by signaling that social control in the area has collapsed. Bratton had already shown the effectiveness of Broken Windows enforcement in New York’s subways as transit police chief in the early 1990s; now he would have an entire city upon which to test the concept.
Bratton’s deputy commissioners began rigorously analyzing crime data on a daily basis and ruthlessly holding precinct commanders accountable for the safety of their precincts. And they asked officers to stop and question individuals engaged in suspicious behavior—whether hanging out on a known drug corner at 1 AM or casing a jewelry store on a commercial strip plagued by burglaries.
Crime in New York City dropped 12 percent in Bratton’s first year in office and 16 percent the next year, while crime rates in the rest of the country were virtually flat. The New York crime rout became national news, spurring other police departments to adopt similar data-intensive, proactive tactics. Over the next two decades, crime would fall 50 percent nationwide, revitalizing cities across the country. The biggest beneficiaries of that crime decline were the law-abiding residents of minority neighborhoods. Senior citizens could go out to shop without fear of getting mugged. Businesses moved in to formerly desolate areas. Children no longer had to sleep in bathtubs to avoid getting hit by stray bullets. And tens of thousands of individuals were spared premature death by homicide.
Now, that triumph over chaos and lawlessness is in jeopardy. Fueling the rise in crime in places like Baltimore and Milwaukee is a multipronged attack on law enforcement. Since late summer 2014, a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter has convulsed the nation. Triggered by a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. That belief has spawned riots, “die-ins,” and the assassination of police officers. The movement’s targets include Broken Windows policing and the practice of stopping and questioning suspicious individuals, both of which are said to harass blacks.
At the same time, a long-standing academic discourse about “mass incarceration” went mainstream. According to this theory, the American penal system practices “systematic imprisonment of whole groups.” The nation’s prison rate is allegedly a product of discrimination, and drug laws are purportedly a means of re-enslaving black Americans. President Obama repeatedly charged that the criminal-justice system treats blacks differently from whites.
In New York City, a trilogy of lawsuits challenged the NYPD’s stop, question, and frisk tactics as racist; a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs by ignoring the incidence of crime in minority neighborhoods. A previously obscure politician, Bill de Blasio, ascended to City Hall two decades after Mayor Giuliani by campaigning against the NYPD and pledging to drop the city’s appeal of the stop, question, and frisk decision.
As 2015 progressed, few law-enforcement practices escaped attack for allegedly imposing unjust burdens on blacks. But it was the virulent anti-cop rhetoric that was most consequential. Officers working in inner cities routinely found themselves surrounded