The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
Cops feared becoming the latest YouTube pariah when a viral cell-phone video showed them using force against a suspect who had been resisting arrest.
In response, the police began to disengage from proactive policing. Rather than getting out of their squad cars to question an individual who appeared to be hiding a gun, officers increasingly just drove on by, waiting for the next robbery or shooting to come over the police radio. Criminal summons and misdemeanor arrests for public-order offenses plummeted.
If the Black Lives Matter movement were correct, this falloff in discretionary policing should have been a boon to black lives. Instead, a bloodbath ensued, and its victims were virtually all black. When the cops back off, blacks pay the greatest price. That truth would have come as no surprise to the legions of inner-city residents who fervently support the police and whose voices are almost never heard in the media.
The Black Lives Matter narrative about racist law enforcement occurred in a vacuum; carefully excluded was any acknowledgment of inner-city crime and social breakdown. It was as if officers arbitrarily deployed more heavily in certain neighborhoods out of a sheer desire to oppress. In reality, the police were in those areas because—despite the record-breaking crime drop of the 1990s and 2000s—a culture of drive-by shootings and gang warfare persisted, largely due to the breakdown of the black family. That reality was assiduously kept offstage, leaving the focus exclusively on the alleged bias of the police.
This book challenges the premises of the growing crusade against law enforcement. In Part One, I rebut the founding myths of the Black Lives Matter movement—including the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. I document the hotly contested “Ferguson effect,” a trend that I first spotted nationally, wherein officers desist from discretionary policing and criminals thus become emboldened. In Part Two, I outline the development of the misguided legal push to force the NYPD to give up its stop, question, and frisk tactic. In Part Three, I analyze criminogenic environments in Chicago and Philadelphia and put to rest the excuse that crime—black crime especially—is the result of poverty and inequality. Finally, in Part Four, I expose the deceptions of the mass-incarceration conceit and show that the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison is actually the result of violence, not racism.
However much the recent crime increase threatens the vitality of America’s cities—and thousands of lives—it is not, in itself, the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimation of law and order itself. Riots are returning to the urban landscape. Police officers are regularly pelted with bricks and water bottles during the course of their duties. Black criminals who have been told that the police are racist are more likely to resist arrest, requiring the arresting officer to use force and risk an even more violent encounter. If the present lies about law enforcement continue, civilized urban life may once again break down.
Burning Cities and the Ferguson Effect
The August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, spawned a narrative as stubborn as it was false: Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson had allegedly shot the 18-year-old “gentle giant” in cold blood while the latter was pleading for his life, hands raised in surrender. After Brown’s death, rioters torched and looted Ferguson businesses. The facts were that Brown, a budding criminal who weighed nearly 300 pounds, had punched Wilson in the face, tried to grab Wilson’s gun, and charged at him, leading Wilson to fire in self-defense.
In the months that followed, the lie that Brown had died in a racially motivated police execution was amplified by the media, college presidents, and the left-wing political class. The newly formed Black Lives Matter movement promoted the notion that black American males were being hunted down and killed with impunity by renegade white police officers. Eric Garner, who had died after a forceful police takedown on Staten Island, New York, was added to the list of martyrs to racist police brutality.
Riots broke out in Ferguson for a second time in November 2014 when a grand jury declined to indict Wilson for Brown’s death. Black Lives Matter protests grew ever more virulent as a second myth took hold: that the American criminal-justice system is rigged against blacks. In December 2014, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley assassinated Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos of the New York Police Department in retaliation for the deaths of Garner and Brown. Police actions in minority neighborhoods became increasingly tense; suspects and bystanders routinely challenged officers’ lawful authority.
Slandered in the media and targeted on the streets, officers reverted to a model of purely reactive policing that had been out of vogue since the early 1990s. The inevitable result? Violent crime surged in city after city, as criminals began reasserting themselves—a phenomenon that I and others controversially described as the “Ferguson effect.” President Barack Obama’s FBI director, James Comey, confirmed the Ferguson effect in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School in October 2015. The rise in homicides and shootings in the nation’s 50 largest cities was likely due to the “chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year,” he said, a wind that “is surely changing behavior.” Sadly, the president himself contributed directly to that chill wind against the nation’s police forces.
On November 24, 2014, President Obama betrayed the nation. Even as he went on national television to respond to the grand-jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the looting and arson that had followed Brown’s shooting in August were being reprised, destroying businesses and livelihoods over the next several hours. Obama had one job and one job only in his address that day: to defend the workings of the criminal-justice system and the rule of law. Instead, he turned his talk into a primer on police racism and criminal-justice bias. In so doing, he perverted his role as the leader of all Americans and as the country’s most visible symbol of the primacy of the law.
Obama gestured wanly toward the need to respect the grand jury’s decision and to protest peacefully. “We are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make,” he said. But his tone of voice and body language unmistakably conveyed his disagreement, if not disgust, with that decision. “There are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction,” he said.
Understandable, so long as one ignores the evidence presented to the grand jury. The testimony of a half-dozen black observers at the scene had demolished the early incendiary reports that Wilson attacked Brown in cold blood and shot Brown in the back when his hands were up. Those early witnesses who had claimed gratuitous brutality on Wilson’s part contradicted themselves and were, in turn, contradicted by the physical evidence and by other witnesses, who corroborated Wilson’s testimony that Brown had attacked him and had tried to grab his gun. (Minutes before, the hefty Brown had thuggishly robbed a diminutive shopkeeper of a box of cigarillos; Wilson had received a report of that robbery and a description of Brown before stopping him.) Obama should have briefly reiterated the grounds for not indicting Wilson and applauded the decision as the product of a scrupulously thorough and fair process. He should have praised the jurors for their service and courage in following the evidence where it led them. And he should have concluded by noting that there is no fairer criminal-justice system in the world than the one we have in the United States.
Instead, Obama reprimanded local police officers in advance for an expected overreaction to the protests: “I also appeal to the law-enforcement officials in Ferguson and the region to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur. . . . They need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use