The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
is of particular interest in light of the federal government’s investigation of New York City’s sprawling Rikers Island jail complex. In August 2014, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York issued a report denouncing the “deep-seated culture of violence” among Rikers corrections officers toward adolescent inmates. He accused guards of handcuffing juvenile inmates to gurneys and beating them. Rikers had been bedeviled by such claims of officer abuse of inmates for years, but the resulting problem for the “abusive white cops” meme is that the Rikers officer force is about two-thirds black. (New York’s population is 23 percent black, but no one has complained about the racial imbalance among Rikers guards.)
Also in August, the Detroit Police Department emerged from 11 years of federal oversight for alleged abuse of civilians, including a pattern of unjustified shootings. The Detroit force, too, is about two-thirds black. In 2012, after a two-year investigation for a pattern of civil rights violations, the U.S. Justice Department imposed on the New Orleans Police Department an exceptionally expansive consent decree—a nominally consensual agreement overseen by a court—to try to rein in the alleged unconstitutional behavior of its officers, the majority of whom are black.
Now perhaps these civil rights allegations against these majority black forces are trumped up. But if so, perhaps similar allegations against majority white forces are, too. Or maybe the race of officers has little to do with whether they can police fairly.
As the grand jury was deliberating over whether to charge Darren Wilson with murder for shooting Michael Brown, cops were being shot at in and around Ferguson. Authorities hastily discounted any connection with the ongoing protests. Death threats against police officers multiplied. Even after the grand jury found insufficient grounds to indict Officer Wilson, the media kept flogging a story that was driven by facile, and ultimately dangerous, preconceptions.
Shortly after President Obama’s speech on the grand-jury decision, the New York Times officially pronounced on the “meaning of the Ferguson riots.” A more perfect example of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down” would be hard to find. The Times’ editorial encapsulated the elite narrative around the shooting of Michael Brown and the mayhem that twice followed it.
The Times could not bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling entrepreneurs and their employees in Ferguson, Missouri. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, was not the actual arsonists and looters; it was Robert McCulloch, the county prosecutor who presented the shooting of Brown by Officer Darren Wilson to a St. Louis County grand jury. After hearing three months of testimony, the grand jury decided not to bring criminal charges against Wilson. The Times recited a now-familiar litany of McCulloch’s alleged improprieties, turning the virtues of this grand jury—such as its methodical thoroughness—into flaws. If the jurors had indicted Wilson, none of the riot apologists would have complained about the length of the process or the range of evidence presented.
To be sure, most grand-jury proceedings are pro forma and brief because the evidence of the defendant’s guilt is so overwhelming. Here, however, McCulloch faced a dilemma. His own review of the case would have shown the unlikelihood of a conviction. Physical evidence discredited the initial inflammatory claims about Wilson attacking Brown and shooting him in the back, and Missouri law accords wide deference to police officers who use deadly force against a dangerous suspect. Not initiating any formal criminal inquiry against Wilson was politically untenable, however, especially since the eyewitness accounts that corroborated Wilson’s version of events would have remained unknown. (Not surprisingly, the six black witnesses who supported Wilson’s story did not go to the press or social media, unlike the witnesses who spread the early lies about Wilson’s behavior.) So McCulloch used the grand-jury proceeding as a way to get the entire dossier about the case into the public domain by bringing a broad range of evidence before the grand jury and then releasing it to the public after the proceeding ended—a legal arrangement.
In its editorial, the Times is silent about that evidence. Blood and DNA traces demonstrated that Brown had initiated the altercation by attacking Wilson while the officer was inside his car. Brown then tried to grab Wilson’s gun—presumably, to shoot him. Such an assault on a law-enforcement officer is nearly as corrosive to the rule of law and a stable society as rioting. But to the mainstream media, it is apparently simply normal behavior not worth mentioning when a black teenager attacks a cop, just as it was apparently normal and beneath notice that Brown had strong-armed a box of cigarillos from a shopkeeper moments before Wilson accosted him for walking in the middle of the street. Amazingly, anyone who brought up that earlier, videotaped felony was accused of besmirching Brown’s character, even though the robbery was highly relevant to the encounter that followed (and showed that Brown did not have much character to besmirch in the first place, something his sealed juvenile records would likely have confirmed).
Even if we ignore the exculpatory evidence, it is absurd to blame the riots, as the Times does, on McCulloch’s management of the grand jury or the way he announced the verdict. There would have been rioting if the grand-jury proceeding had lasted only a day so long as it failed to indict Wilson for murder. It is unlikely that the rioters even listened to, much less carefully parsed, McCulloch’s post-verdict press conference, which the Times finds biased. No evidence suggests that the grand jury’s decision not to indict resulted from unprofessional behavior on McCulloch’s part or from prejudice that somehow infected the proceedings.
The Times then goes into blazing hyperbole about the reign of terror inflicted “daily” on blacks by the police in Ferguson and nationally. The Times coyly cites “news accounts”—i.e., its own—claiming that the police in Ferguson “systematically target poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops—partly to generate fines.” The Times has no evidence of such systematic targeting, proof of which would require determining the rate at which blacks and whites violate traffic and other laws and then comparing those rates with their stop rates. Studies elsewhere have shown that blacks speed at higher rates than whites. Blacks likely also have lower rates of car registration and vehicle upkeep, for economic reasons. Moreover, if authorities are using traffic fines to generate revenue, they would presumably “target” the people most likely to be able to pay those fines, not the poorest residents of an area.
Even more fantastically, the Times claims that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” A “common feature”? This is pure hysteria, likely penned by Times columnist Charles Blow. The public could perhaps be forgiven for believing that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life,” given the media frenzy that follows every such police killing, rare as they are, compared with the silence that greets the daily homicides committed by blacks against other blacks.
The Washington Post found press documentation of 258 black victims of fatal police shootings in 2015, most of whom were seriously attacking the officer. In 2014, the most recent year for which such data are available, there were 6,095 black homicide victims in the United States, which means that the police could eliminate all of their own fatal shootings without having a significant impact on the black homicide death rate. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks—who are responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas.
The Times trotted out the misleading statistic published by ProPublica in October 2014 that young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than are young white males—a calculation that overlooks the fact that young black men commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of young white and Hispanic males combined.* That astronomically higher homicide-commission rate means that police officers are going