The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
armed shooting suspects. If the black crime rate were the same as the white crime rate, the victims of police shootings would most certainly also be equal among the races. Asians are minorities, which, according to the Times’ ideology, should make them the target of police brutality. But they barely show up in police-shooting data because their crime rates are so low.
For the period 2005–09, a significant portion of victims in the ProPublica study—62 percent—were resisting arrest or assaulting an officer, as Michael Brown did. The cop-hatred that activists and press organs like the Times do their best to foment significantly increases the chances of such aggressive and dangerous behavior.
The Times serves up a good example of anti-cop propaganda when it confidently states that “many police officers see black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human beings.” That would be news to the thousands of police officers who are the only people willing to put their lives on the line to protect innocent blacks from predation. Until editors and reporters from the Times start patrolling dark stairwells in housing projects and running toward gang gunfire, their superior concern for black men will lack credibility.
Without question, there are plenty of officers who treat civilians rudely and who desperately need retraining in professional courtesy. Officers have a duty to respect the public, even if having trash thrown at you from roofs or being cursed at and blocked in your pursuit of suspects does not conduce to a cheerful attitude on the streets. But the police are not on those streets out of malice. It is black crime—and the need of law-abiding black residents to be protected from it—that drives police presence and activity in black neighborhoods.
The Ferguson episode has starkly revealed several key, and sometimes contradictory, elements of the elite liberal mind-set. The elites are in deep denial about black underclass behavior. Ezra Klein, for example, was dumbfounded that Michael Brown would have refused to move from the middle of the street or cursed at or attacked an officer. (Klein has clearly not spent much time in central Brooklyn.) Liberal elites seem to believe that black crime is no higher than white crime, and therefore they assume that law-enforcement activity, if unbiased, would be equally distributed between white and black neighborhoods. At the same time, they have so lowered their expectations for black behavior that they accept criminality as normal. Stealing from a store clerk or assaulting an officer is now considered beneath mention. Black rioting is deemed understandable when, as in Ferguson, the police are “justifiably seen as an alien, occupying force that is synonymous with state-sponsored abuse,” in the words of the New York Times.
Plenty of blacks reject such condescension and excuse-making. A corporate executive in Atlanta observed to me after the riots: “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug.” The blight in Ferguson may well be “incurable,” the executive wrote me in an email, but at the very least, “we should mount a campaign to hire ALL of the White cops out of the city/county and see how THEM cow chips come to smell.” Such views almost never find their way into the mainstream media.
The Times’ most influential readers often know even less about policing and crime than its editorialists, and they use the paper as an authoritative source of information about such matters. This transmission belt of ignorance ineluctably spreads into policy as well as culture. We have entered an era of intense antipolice activism, led by the federal government in conjunction with agitators like Al Sharpton. The Justice Department has imposed a costly and unnecessary consent decree on the Ferguson Police Department and ratcheted up pressure on other departments to equalize their law-enforcement activity between black and white neighborhoods, regardless of crime disparities. President Obama has disseminated the dangerous lie that the criminal-justice system treats whites differently from blacks. The Ferguson authorities have rewarded the rioters by promising new programs and incentives to diversify the town’s allegedly too-white police force. Such anti-law-enforcement activism puts the public-safety triumph of the last two decades at risk. The unprecedented crime decline over that period was the product of data-driven, proactive policing and stricter incarceration practices, themselves under attack as well. Officers facing the risk of specious “racial profiling” charges are likely to back off from proactive policing—a reality that will be examined in later chapters.
The nation hurriedly turned away from the orgy of hatred, destruction, and entitlement that incinerated Ferguson, even as protesters, wedded to the myth of an innocent teenager’s unprovoked martyrdom, continued to indulge in sporadic violence across the country. But before the riots are shelved under the “too uncomfortable to confront” category, it is well to remember that such mass destruction threatens civilization itself by exposing the rule of law as powerless to check hate-driven anarchy. And the only people responsible for such an inferno are the perpetrators themselves.
* ProPublica, moreover, chose for its analysis a three-year period whose ratio of black to white deaths was twice as high as the historical norm, as noted by Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Eight months after the shooting of Michael Brown, the Justice Department released its official report on the incident, in March 2015. The report shredded the incendiary story that had fueled the riots in Ferguson, Missouri—that a teenaged “gentle giant” was gunned down by a trigger-happy cop who feared black people—and made it clear why the department would not be bringing civil rights charges against Officer Darren Wilson. Among those who were clearly not happy with this outcome was Eric Holder, the attorney general.
Holder had already commissioned a second report on the allegedly racist Ferguson police force to counter his own agency’s expected demolition of the martyr narrative. But for good measure, a few days before the Brown report was to be released, Holder provided the press with another mechanism for sidelining its findings. Holder wanted to lower the standard of proof in civil rights cases, he told Politico. The subtext of this announcement: the decision not to pursue civil rights charges against Wilson was forced on the Justice Department by an overly stringent evidentiary standard; under a more realistic standard, Wilson would have been prosecuted.
Voilà! The media had their angle. “The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that its investigation did not support federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson,” the New York Times acknowledged morosely in an editorial, before immediately turning to the good news: “Still, the department found overwhelming evidence of entrenched racism in Ferguson’s police force.” The Times’ understatement of the findings on the Brown shooting was echoed in the Huffington Post, which said that the Justice Department had decided “not to file federal charges against Wilson for fatally shooting Brown last July.”
The investigation “did not support” the charges? The DOJ decided “not to file charges”? This phrasing massively misrepresents the content of the report on the shooting. It was not a question of evidence “not supporting” high-threshold civil rights charges; it was a question of evidence eviscerating virtually every aspect of the pro-Brown, anti-Wilson narrative. Under no imaginable standard of proof could Wilson be found guilty of civil rights violations—or, for that matter, murder. As the report states: “Multiple credible witnesses corroborate virtually every material aspect of Wilson’s account and are consistent with the physical evidence.” Those “material aspects” include Wilson’s testimony that Brown punched and grabbed him while Wilson was in his SUV, that Brown tried to seize his gun, and that Brown charged at Wilson after Wilson had exited his car.
Wilson had first seen Brown walking in the middle of Canfield Drive with another young man. Wilson saw boxes of cigarillos in Brown’s hands and suspected that Brown was the thief who was reported to have robbed a convenience store and roughed up its owner a few minutes