“Those who make enemies of the police,” the saying goes, “had better make friends with the criminals.”
How’s that working out for urban America these days?
Not so hot, reports journalist and commentator Heather MacDonald in an article titled “Welcome to Post-Ferguson Policing” in the online version of the conservative magazine National Review. MacDonald is a fellow at the think tank Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a graduate of Stanford University law school, and author of the book Are Cops Racist? (No, is her conclusion).
Deadly Hesitation
She begins her article by recounting the notorious incident in Alabama recently where a detective was beaten unconscious during a traffic stop “because the officer did not want to be pilloried in the media as a racist for using force against a black man.” A sergeant on his department is quoted: Cops are “walking on eggshells because of how they’re scrutinized” these days.
“This reluctance to act,” MacDonald writes, “is affecting police departments across the country, as virtually every tool in an officer’s tool chest — from traffic stops to public-order maintenance — is vilified as racist.”
She then looses a shotgun spray of disturbing statistics showing the impact on crime and crime-fighting:
• Following anti-police riots and indictments of cops over a black man’s death in Baltimore, arrests dropped 60 percent in one month [last May], compared with the previous year.
• “In New York City,” she states, “criminal summonses, a powerful gauge of proactive enforcement, were down 24 percent through July....”
• “In the LAPD’s Central Division, home to the chaotic, squalid Skid Row, arrests are down 13 percent, while violent crime is up 57 percent... [W]hen officers stay engaged, they often confront hostile, unruly crowds and resistance from suspects.” Overall, the city’s violent crime has risen by 10 percent as of early August.
• “Milwaukee has seen a 118 percent rise in homicides; Minneapolis and St. Louis, close to 50 percent, and Baltimore 60 percent.” Other alarming spikes are reported in Dallas, Houston, and Chicago. “In 35 big US cities,” according to a survey by the Major City Chiefs Assn., “homicides are up 19 percent this year on average....”
• “Sixty-two percent of surveyed cities reported increases in non-fatal shootings as well.... [T]he country is seeing the biggest violent-crime spike in 20 years.”
MacDonald notes: “If the Black Lives Matter movement were correct that law enforcement is a scourge on the black community, [the] unraveling of proactive policing should be an enormous benefit to black well-being.”
But the truth is, “The overwhelming majority of shooting and homicide victims have been black, as are their assailants.... [W]hen the police back off, it is residents of poor inner-city neighborhoods who pay, too often with their lives....”
MacDonald concludes: “There are signs that law and order, and the moral support for such order, are slowly breaking down. Few leaders have the courage to speak honestly about the rising violence....”
Incidents in which crowds turn on officers attempting to enforce laws get scant attention in the media, she asserts. She cites a “mini-riot [that] broke out when police arrived at the scene of a drive-by shooting in Cincinnati.”
The drive-by assailants had shot a four-year-old girl in the head, but hostile bystanders shouted profanities against the cops, who were trying to prevent a retaliatory shooting by arresting people on outstanding warrants. “The press,” MacDonald alleges, “was assiduously silent about the anti-police chaos.”
Such incidents and the alarming statistical toll of “anarchy” in the streets, she predicts, “will probably multiply as the media continue to amplify the activists’ poisonous slander against the nation’s police forces.”
What Do You Think?
What do your experience and sense of today’s prevailing public atmosphere tell you about the viewpoints captured above? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
