Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Free Speech, Freedom, History, Immigration, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, Progressives, Regulation, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: A Dependable Scholar, Facts and Statistics, Heather MacDonald
Democrats are undoubtedly studying late into the night, to find a way to disrupt President Trump’s naming of a candidate for the Supreme Court to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. They are considering a new impeachment trial or two, whether this brings back the Russian horde is not known. One supposes that Russians rate higher on the really terrifying terrorists than those from other countries. After all the Russians are known for suddenly poisoning people right on the street.
They supposedly are considering just walking out, boycotting as it were, to delay the inevitable. Speaker Pelosi apparently has a couple of impeachments up her sleeves, she clearly feels that most everything Trump has done is grounds for impeachment, and considers it an excellent way to get the nomination of anyone over and done with. Almost anything will do because what they want is delay, so that it becomes too late to advance a candidate before the election.
They speak in generalities, and of course what the Supreme Court is all about is insisting that matters of law follow the Constitution. And of course at that point what is it that they really meant when they wrote the Constitution? I assume that by this time you are as sick of all the nonsense as I am and want them to just get on with the business of the government. The Constitution is quite clear. When there is a vacancy, the President may nominate a successor, who is to be approved by the Senate. Simple and clear.
The difficult part is that Amy Comey Barrett, who seems to be the leading candidate, is a practicing Catholic. The great fear is that she might rule on Roe v. Wade, the abortion bill, passed and in effect, but could be brought before the Court again. This is an immeasurably contentious bill. Many women feel that nobody else has any right to tell them what they may or may not do with their bodies. Others see abortion as the murder of a real baby. When things are in such dramatic opposition, there is no comfortable middle ground. And of course religion has strong opinions.
In this day and age, when preventive measures are readily available, if one does not want to bear a child, it seems incumbent on them to use preventative measures. Responsibility is required. No one should have to bear a child conceived by rape, but just how you sort that out is difficult. There are a lot of couples who are unable to bear children and desperate to adopt.
There are many areas that are equally contentious matters. Look at the current furor about the police. At one end of the scale is Chicago, which seems to have some violent neighborhoods and a significant weekly death toll. Some seem to think that the police are so violent and corrupt that they must be eliminated, and others who know of too much drugs and street crime in their cities want more police protection.
Your best source for sorting things out is Heather MacDonald, a serious scholar who goes to the source and digs out the real statistics, as opposed to what is more sensational and reported on the news. You can find her at the Manhattan Institute, or City Journal, or her many valuable books : The War on Cops, The Burden of Bad Ideas, Are Cops Racist?, and The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s. All invaluable. Or just type her name into your search-bar.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Free Speech, Freedom, Immigration, Law, Media Bias, National Security, Politics, Progressives, Regulation, The United States | Tags: A Common Sense Question, Heather MacDonald, The Progressive Mindset
Heather MacDonald addresses “America the Horrible?” Progressives say the the United States is racist and misogynist. Why then do they want everyone in the world to come here? Nancy Pelosi just stumbled through a response to a question that said that asylum seekers were different, and immigrants brought wonderful gifts to the country. So why are they so eager to increase immigration if America is such a dreadful country?
American women live under a suffocating patriarchy. Rape culture flourishes in the United States. Toxic masculinity stunts the emotional and professional growth of American females. Sexual harassment and predation are ubiquitous in American workplaces. College campuses are maelstroms of sexual violence. Female students need safe spaces where they can escape abusive male power.
These propositions are self-evident to a large, interlocking establishment of government bureaucrats, progressive politicians, college administrators, faculty, “activists,” professionals, and journalists. Yet this same establishment is up in arms over a recent declaration by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions that female aliens caught trying to enter the country illegally will no longer be automatically considered for asylum by dint of claiming that they are victims of domestic abuse. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accuses the Trump administration of “staggering cruelty” in condemning “vulnerable innocent women to a lifetime of violence and even death.” The American Bar Association charged that Sessions would “further victimize those most in need of protection.” The executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Benjamin Johnson, denounced “this shameful chapter in our country’s history,” and promised a lawsuit.
Sessions was right to return asylum law to its original intent: offering protection to individuals persecuted by their government for membership in a socially distinct group. Domestic violence is a private crime, not a public one, and does not reflect general persecution of the sort that international law has codified as appropriate for asylum petitions. Asylum petitions have mushroomed 1,700 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to the New York Times, driven in significant part by domestic-abuse claims, often underwritten by extensive coaching and encouragement by hard-left advocates.
But why should social-justice warriors want to subject these potential asylees to the horrors of America? In coming to the U.S., if you believe the dominant feminist narrative, the female aliens would simply be exchanging their local violent patriarchy for a new one. Indeed, it should be a mystery to these committed progressives why any Third World resident would seek to enter the United States. Not only is rape culture pervasive in the U.S., but the very lifeblood of America is the destruction of “black bodies,” in the words of media star Ta-Nehesi Coates. Surely, a Third World person of color would be better off staying in his home country, where he is free from genocidal whiteness and the murderous legacy of Western civilization and Enlightenment values.
Do read the whole thing. Heather MacDonald is a reliable author and always has something important to say. She can usually be found at city-journal.org, where she is a fellow.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Education, Free Speech, Freedom, History, Immigration, Intelligence, Politics, Progressives, Regulation, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Heather MacDonald, The Diversity Officers, What's Wong With Our Colleges?
I always pay attention to Heather MacDonald. She is an outstanding scholar who really digs into her subject. She is an expert on policing because she hangs out in police stations, talks to policemen and city council members and carefully studies the statistics.
She often writes or speaks about diversity, which is one of my hot buttons. I checked the archives to see how many times I had written about the subject, and was astonished to discover that I’d done so 13 times, the first in 2012. (Just enter “Diversity” in the sidebar over Bob Hope’s head)
You have probably noticed that “Diversity” seems to be a subject at the forefront of the news and conversation. It refers only to race, in spite of the clear fact that race relations, intermarriage, achievement of Blacks and Hispanics is probably better than it has ever been. Although “Diversity” refers only to race, it includes only Blacks and Hispanics. Native Americans are sometimes included when it seems appropriate, but the fact that most tribes captured slaves is never, never mentioned.
It is enough of a subject, however, that claiming Native American ancestry is occasionally helpful in seeking employment. Comanche and Cherokee are favored, Nez Perce or Clackamas not so much. Folks from India are very tech-savvy and besides, Indian food is delicious. Those of Chinese heritage have a different problem, their test scores are so high that if the Ivy League admitted all who qualify, there wouldn’t be places for the rest of us. Whether they are just smarter than we are or whether it’s because they have “tiger moms,” I don’t know.
The idea that “Diversity” is only about race and skin color is not just wrong, but abhorrent. We are all individuals with different attributes, abilities and interests. Theoretically education is supposed to help us develop those. The current theory seems to be that you will be better educated if you have the correct number of people of color in your class.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Crime, Domestic Policy, Education, Free Markets, Freedom, Law, Police, Politics, The United States | Tags: American Universities, Delusion and Confusion, Heather MacDonald
Heather MacDonald is an American political commentator, essayist, attorney and journalist. Wikipedia describes her as a “secular conservative” whatever that is. I guess that must be what I am as well. She is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor to New York’s City Journal, and someone worth paying a lot of attention to. Her latest book is “The War on Cops” which is worth your time. She hangs around precincts a lot and knows whereof she speaks.
Naturally and unfortunately, the Left rejects whatever she says. Bill McGurn wrote a piece called “The Silencing of Heather MacDonald” for The Wall Street Journal. You can find frequent essays of hers at City Journal.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, History, Law, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Police, Politics, Progressives, Regulation, Socialism, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Heather MacDonald, Policing in America, The War on Cops
I ran across a shocking map yesterday, a map of murders in the United States in 2014. Fifty-four percent of U.S. counties had no murders in 2014—none, zero. Two percent of counties have fifty-one percent of the murders.
The map comes to us from the Crime Prevention Research Center. 2014 is the most recent year where county-level breakdown is available. The United States can be divided up, they say. into three types of places: places where there are no murders, places where there are a few murders and places where there are a lot of murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders.
Murders used to be even more concentrated. From 1977 to 2000, on average 73% of counties had zero murders. They suggest that possibly this is related to the opioid epidemic’s spread to more rural areas. You can reach your own conclusions about the areas where murders are concentrated.
Other headlines: from CBS News — “Chicago saw more 2016 murders than New York City and Los Angeles combined.” It was one of the most violent years in Chicago history with 762 homicides, and 1,100 more shooting incidents in 2016 than in 2015. New York had 334 homicides in 2016 and Los Angeles 294. Chicago has not only seen a spike in violence, but a spike in attacks on police as well. Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson said that anger at police has left criminals “emboldened” to commit violent crimes. It’s clearer to criminals that they have little to fear from the criminal justice system.
From The Daily Caller: “Baltimore is Begging Feds to Step In To Restore Law and Order.” Baltimore’s mayor asked the FBI to send in reinforcements to help the city to get it’s murders under control. “The city already has 101 murders for the year, a number not seen for almost 20 years” the mayor said.
On top of an over 30 percent increase in murders, the city is also experiencing a shortage in police officers. The city is operating with the lowest number of officers in about a decade — 2,500 police officers. Usually, the department has 2,900 officers.
From National Review: Heather MacDonald in an article at City Journal “dismantles Hillary Clinton’s debate claims that the criminal justice system is infected with racism and that stop-and-frisk (which Trump has called for reviving) is unconstitutional and ineffective.” Andy McCarthy goes on to explain that the statistical overrepresentation of blacks in the prison population…is caused by patterns of offending. “Federal sentences (and sentences in most states) are computed under race-neutral guidelines that factor in both offense conduct and criminal history. The more crimes one commits, the heavier the sentence for any one crime. This is a recidivism thing, not a race thing.”
Across the pond, “knife crime has soared since Theresa May kerbed police use of stop and search, a tactic that activists condemn as “racist” but which senior officers insist saves black lives. “
The year ending December 2016 saw 32,448 criminal offences involving a blade or other sharp weapon take place in Britain, a rise of 14 per cent from the previous year and the biggest knife crime total since 2011.
With five young men having been stabbed to death in London already this year, police warn that these are the first signs of a knife crime epidemic in major UK cities.
Lots to ponder in these articles. Which cities are being run by Democrats? Is the race situation better or worse as a result of former president Barack Obama’s policies? What about the “Black Lives Matter” movement? Heather MacDonald suggests that what has been called “the Ferguson Effect” is real and has caused police officers across the country to pull back a little, which has resulted in a rise in crime. She reminds us that most police officers went into policing to protect the people from crime and violence, and care about the people they serve. Her newest book The War on Cops is one of the most important books of the last year.
She was the target of silencing tactics two days in a row last week. The more serious incident took place at Claremont McKenna College at Claremont, California. A Facebook post from the “students of color at the Claremont Colleges
announced grandiosely that “as a community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak.” A Facebook event titled “Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald” and hosted by “Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists” encouraged students to protest the event because Mac Donald “condemns [the] Black Lives Matter movement,” “supports racist police officers,” and “supports increasing fascist ‘law and order.’”
Poor dumb kids. As Heather said “My supposed fascism consists in trying to give voice to the thousands of law-abiding minority residents of high-crime areas who support the police and are desperate for more law-enforcement protection.” See Baltimore above. When the county statistics for 2016 become available, looks like the murder rate will climb once again. Spare a moment to honor the Policemen who have lost their lives this year trying to protect the American people. It should not be a thankless job.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Economy, Election 2016, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, Progressives | Tags: Black Lives Matter, Heather MacDonald, President Obama
Milwaukee has been quiet again after a curfew on teenagers, and after Governor Scott Walker alerted the National Guard. The real rioting broke out on Saturday night in Sherman Park after the fatal shooting of a young black man by a black policeman. The body cam showed that the young man had a gun, and he had an extensive record of investigations, but only one serious arrest. It is a textbook example of racial agitation. In an article at City Journal, Heather MacDonald reported on the “black social breakdown and anti-cop ideology that has put another American city to the torch.” MacDonald wrote:
The Black Lives Matter-inspired assassin who murdered five police officers in Dallas in July 2016 said that he wanted to kill white people, as well as white cops. The vitriol that officers working in urban areas now encounter on a daily basis is inflected with racism.
And if the war on cops escalates into more frequent attacks on whites and their perceived interests, the elite establishment will bear much of the blame. For the last two years, President Barack Obama has seized every opportunity to advise blacks that they are the victims of a racist criminal justice system. We should not be surprised when that belief, so constantly inflamed, erupts into violence. Even in his remarks at the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas cops, Obama had the gall to trot out his usual racial vendetta against the police, even though he was fully on notice that cops were being killed because of it:
At the service, ignoring the astronomically higher rates of black crime that fully explain racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Obama said:
When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment; when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently, so that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested, more likely to get longer sentences, more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime; when mothers and fathers raise their kids right and have “the talk” about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—“yes, sir,” “no, sir”—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door, still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy—when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.
Hillary has been just as ready to blame the police and by extension, “white” society because it as ‘reality” that police officers see black lives as “cheap.” That was in a January 2016 debate. That’s how you attempt to get blacks to the polls to vote.
Clinton said that “we cannot rest until we root out implicit bias and stop the killings of African-Americans.” Showing herself to be as statistically challenged as Obama, she continued: “Let’s admit it, there is clear evidence that African-Americans are disproportionately killed in police incidents compared to any other group.” (Blacks are actually killed at a lower rate than their crime rates would predict. And at least four studies this year have shown that police officers are less likely to shoot blacks than whites, whether armed or unarmed.)
The hacking of George Soros Memos reveals that Soros’ Open Society approved $650,000 to “invest in technical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.” Breitbart says:
George Soros’ Open Society Institute viewed the 2015 Baltimore unrest following the death of Freddie Gray as opening a “unique opportunity” to create “accountability” for the Baltimore police while aiding activists in reforming the city, according to hacked documents reviewed by Breitbart Jerusalem.
The hacked document states:
Leaders of #BlackLivesMatter and The Movement for Black Lives worked to influence candidate platforms during the 2016 primary season. This came alongside the recent acknowledgement by political strategists that African-American voters may be much more pivotal to the 2016 general election than previously forecasted.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, The United States, Unemployment | Tags: Heather MacDonald, Mayor Rahm Emaniel, President Barack Obama, The Shooting of Michael Brown
from City Journal
Chicago on the Brink
Heather MacDonald
Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the downtown business district; Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.
The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawal from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse, from the White House on down. In response, cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum. (An early and influential Ferguson-effect denier has now changed his mind: in a June 2016 study for the National Institute of Justice, Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–St. Louis concedes that the 2015 homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was “real and nearly unprecedented.” “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian.)
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that officers were going “fetal,” as shootings in the city skyrocketed. But 2016 has brought an even sharper reduction in proactive enforcement. Devastating failures in Chicago’s leadership after a horrific police shooting and an ill-considered pact between the American Civil Liberties Union and the police are driving that reduction. Residents of Chicago’s high-crime areas are paying the price.
……………………………………..(Do Read the whole thing)
The statistics are shocking. What we must pay attention to, however, are the incentives involved. When you tell residents of black neighborhoods that the reasons for many members of their families going to prison is not really because they committed a crime, but because the cops are racist, and the system is crooked, and tell them often enough, they’re apt to begin to believe it.
When neighborhoods come to believe that the cops are racist and don’t care about the black people they shoot, the police are inclined to back off a little more. When a cop is killed in the line of duty because the neighborhood believes they are racist, the police are more wary of stopping suspicious drivers or wading into s situation that looks like trouble.
That could all be perfectly innocent — just human nature. Policemen have families and want to go home at night. People in a neighborhood find it easier to believe the worst of cops than of their family members or next door neighbors. And so it escalates.
When the news on television blames the police, or the President of the United States suggests that he is going to pardon large numbers of federal prisoners because they are unjustly imprisoned by an unfair system — that seems pretty official, and likely true.
That hardly begins to touch on the incentives involved. When crime rates are high, fewer businesses are willing to locate in the neighborhood. With fewer businesses, there are fewer jobs, particularly for young men of an age to need their first working experience. If there are no jobs, there are drugs and gangs and petty theft and hatred of the police. Heather MacDonald enumerates the escalating steps, tragedy by tragedy, and on the other side the breakdown in order and control.
Accusations of endemic racism, economic injustice, housing segregation, mass incarceration, white privilege, disparate impact are problematic words that hurt more than they help. Heather MacDonald’ s calm and careful analysis is important, and all parties involved would do well to understand her analysis.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Freedom, History, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, The United States | Tags: American Policing, Heather MacDonald, Hillsdale College
This is a lecture given by Heather MacDonald in April of this year at Hillsdale College. Heather MacDonald is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, and a recognized authority on American crime and policing. She has the data and statistics to back up her contentions, which belie the claims of the Black Lives Matter crowd and their attacks on police and policing.
It’s a long lecture, so you will want to postpone it till you have time, but if you can manage it, her command of the facts will clarify this situation that is getting increasingly dangerous. Or you can just buy her new book, The War on Cops.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Communism, Crime, Domestic Policy, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, Regulation, Socialism, The United States | Tags: Black Lives Matter, Heather MacDonald, The Dallas Shooting
From City Journal “No Equivalence” by Bob McManus, July 8 2016.
Much remains to be learned about the why and the how of Thursday night’s massacre in Dallas, but there is scant mystery about the what: at least 11 police officers were calmly marked for execution for no other reason than that they were cops. When the firing was over, five lay dead and the remainder wounded—some gravely.
To the untrained eye, the attack appears to have been well-planned and carried out with precision. In this respect, it was fundamentally different than the events that brought hundreds of demonstrators to downtown Dallas Thursday—the police-custody deaths of black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and St. Paul, Minnesota, in a welter of chaos, confusion, and conflicting claims of guilt, innocence, and intent.
Baton Rouge and St. Paul, like so many of the similarly tragic police-custody deaths that preceded them, may have been the product of circumstance, or of incompetence, or maybe they were even crimes. Each must be examined in context and judged accordingly. But Dallas was cold-blooded murder—nothing more, nothing less. Attempts to assign equivalence to the horror of it—to suggest, as some are doing on social media, that Dallas is somehow just deserts for Baton Rouge or St. Paul or Baltimore or Ferguson, or even for Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island two long years ago—is morally repugnant.
Nor can this be blamed on guns. Guns are inanimate objects and don’t go around shooting people. It is the shooter who is the problem, not the gun. So far in 2016, 34 police officers have been murdered in the line of duty, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, most by gunfire and others by vehicular assault. Many more have been wounded.
When officers are killed in the line of duty, other officers on patrol become more cautious. It’s only natural, they have families and want to go home at night.
For the media, America is in the grip of an orgy of crime, and wanton murder. These wanton murderers are wearing blue uniforms and police badges. It makes for exciting bylines and good copy. But it’s not true.
White policemen shooting unarmed black men accounted for less than 4 percent of fatal police shooting. In three quarters of shooting incidents, cops were either under attack themselves or defending civilians, as the policemen in Dallas were doing — trying to protect civilian demonstrators.
According to the Department of Justice, blacks represent 12.6 percent of the population, but committed 52.5 percent of the murders in America from 1980 to 2008. This is not to say that there are not bad cops and killings that call for investigation and jury trials. The worst neighborhoods in Chicago, where gangs run wild, have a higher murder rate than world murder capitals like Honduras. (116.7 per 100,000 compared to 90.4 per 100,000).
Barack Obama has encouraged racial animus from the beginning in an effort to secure the black vote for Democrats. It’s what he did as a community organizer. That he wanted to assure black votes is not arguable; that he wanted to stoke black fears of racist police is unknown, though that is what has happened.
Black Lives Matter was launched in 2013 with a Twitter hashtag after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin. It was founded by radical Left activists, and has gone on to stir up resentment against “the system” on college campuses across the country, responding to phony “hate” crimes, and increase demands for revolution and racial separation. Another outgrowth of communist/socialist agitation.
Heather MacDonald has been one of the most important voices in explaining American policing and the current attack on law and order. I would urge you to read her whole piece, from Imprimis.
Filed under: Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Election 2016, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, Progressivism | Tags: Black Lives Matter, Heather MacDonald, Violent Crime Statistics
If you inquire at Google about unarmed black men being shot by police, you will find that most newspapers in America seem to believe that it is an urgent crisis, young unarmed black men are being shot regularly by white policemen, and racism is sharply on the rise in the country. This piece from the Washington Post, dated August 8, 2015, is dramatic and typical, and remarkably biased.
Let’s examine a few facts. From a study from the American Enterprise Institute: (Do read the whole thing)
If you look beyond recent headlines about race in America, here is a surprising truth: Most black men in America are doing just fine. Most black men are not poor, most black men will not be incarcerated, most black men are gainfully employed, and most black men will marry.
Black men are CEOs of major corporations, Justices on the Supreme Court, Doctors, famous Movie Stars, Lawyers, Professors, Presidents, Inventors, and stars of every major sports team, they are Generals, authors, artists, and I’m pretty sure that most black women are doing just fine as well.
The Washington Post article linked above lists 17 ‘unarmed’ black men shot by police officers in 2015. Yet there were 990 people shot by police in 2015, in most cases armed and threatening. You have to read the numbers carefully, before coming to conclusions.
Here’s Heather MacDonald on the #Black Lives Matter movement, and what they miss about those police shootings, and the Washington Post data on fatal police shootings of civilians. Another article from MacDonald points out that there was a rise in violent crime beginning in the second half of 2014, up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St Louis, and 56% in Baltimore, and in most of America’s largest cities. Because of publicity about Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities, police officers were backing off from proactive policing in reaction to the hostility they were encountering in urban areas.
Officers had told me about being surrounded by angry, jeering crowds who cursed and threw water bottles and rocks at them when they tried to make an arrest. Suspects and bystanders stuck cell phones in officers’ faces and refused to comply with lawful orders. Officers were continuing to answer 911 calls with alacrity, but in that large area of discretionary policing—getting out of a squad car at 1 a.m., for example, to question someone who appears to have a gun or may be casing a target—many officers were deciding to simply drive on by rather than risk a volatile, potentially career-ending confrontation that they were under no obligation to instigate.
MacDonald called that “the Ferguson Effect,” and noted that applications to police academies were way down. Young men were not convinced that risking their lives daily to protect the American people was worth it if they were also going to face daily assaults and abuse from the people they were trying to protect.
In National Review, David French recalls the time when it was dangerous to walk outside at night, and black leaders called for a crackdown on crime. And he notes the dramatic change in New York City when Rudy Giuliani instituted a program of “broken windows policing” and the cops began to see their jobs as preventing crime rather than just solving crimes. The crime wave broke.
And he turns to an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic, which sees mass incarceration as consistent with America’s history of slavery and Jim Crow. Coates rejects messages that call for personal responsibility, pays no attention to black voices who cry for safety and justice in their own communities and focuses entirely on white supremacy, plunder and oppression.
To add to the problems of policing, we need to consider the “Butterfield Fallacy.” It is rooted in ideological prejudice. Fox Butterfield was a reporter for the New York Times “whose crime stories served as the archetype for his eponymous fallacy.”
“It has become a comforting story for five straight years, crime has been falling, led by a drop in murder,” Butterfield wrote in 1997. “So why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up?’ He repeated the trope in 2003: “The nation’s prison population grew 2.6 percent last year, the largest increase since 1999, according to a study by the Justice Department. The jump came despite a small decline in serious crime in 2002.” And in 2004: “The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday.”
The ‘fallacy’ consists of misidentifying as a paradox, that which is a simple cause-and-effect relationship. When you put more bad guys in prison, crime goes down. This illusion is back in full effect today.
Those on the Left disapprove of sending people to prison because they think it is racially discriminatory. Yet more crimes are committed by black men.
In the upcoming election, Democrats are worried that black Americans who came out so strongly to vote for the first black president, may well not turn out so enthusiastically for either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. It may be merely a coincidence that #Black Lives Matter and the activists who turned out to stir up violence and protest in Ferguson and Baltimore were turned out along with Occupy activists to rouse up racial protests on American campuses where many young people will be voting for the first time. And wherever there is an opportunity to rouse up racial animus, #Black Lives Matter is right there. If it is a coincidence, it’s an interesting one.
American Elephants 