Читать книгу The War on Cops - Heather Mac Donald - Страница 10

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Ferguson’s Unasked Questions

Press reports on the Ferguson “unrest,” as the media prefer to call such violence, quickly began to reveal an operative formula: select some aspect of the city’s political or civic culture; declare it racist by virtue of its association with Ferguson; disregard alternative explanations for the phenomenon; blame it for the riots. Bonus move: generalize to other cities with similar “problems.” By this process, the media could easily reach predetermined conclusions.

For example: Ferguson’s population is two-thirds black, but five of its six city council members are white, as is its mayor. Conclusion: this racial composition must be the product of racism. Never mind that blacks barely turn out to vote and that they field practically no candidates. Never mind that the mayor ran for a second term unopposed. Is there a record of Ferguson’s supposed white power structure suppressing the black vote? None has been alleged. Did the rioters even know who their mayor and city council representatives were? The press didn’t bother to ask. It only saw an example of what was imagined to be a disturbingly widespread problem. In a front-page story complete with a sophisticated scatter-graph visual aid, the New York Times summed up the problem: “Mostly Black Cities, Mostly White City Halls.”

Another example: Ferguson issues fines for traffic violations, and 20 percent of its municipal budget comes from such receipts. If people with outstanding fines or summonses don’t appear in court, a warrant for their arrest is issued. Conclusion: this is a racist system. The city is deliberately financing its operations on the backs of the black poor. The only reason that blacks are subject to fines and warrants, according to the media, is that they are being hounded by a racist police force. “A mostly white police force has targeted blacks for a disproportionate number of stops and searches,” declared Time (September 1). What was the evidence for such “targeting”? Time provided none. Might blacks be getting traffic fines for the same reason that whites get traffic fines—because they broke the law? The possibility was not considered.

The most frequently summonsed traffic offense is driving without insurance, according to an “exposé” of Ferguson’s traffic-fine system by the New York Times. Perhaps the paper’s editors would be blasé about being hit by an uninsured driver, but most drivers would be grateful that the insurance requirement is being enforced. Might poor blacks have a higher rate of driving without insurance than other drivers? Not relevant to know, apparently.

The next highest categories of driving infraction are blasting loud music out your car and driving with tinted windows. If you attend police-and-community meetings in poor areas, you will regularly hear complaints about cars with deafening sound systems. Should the police ignore such complaints? Are they ignoring similar complaints in white areas because they want to give whites a pass? Do Ferguson’s white and black drivers blast loud music from their cars at the same rate? We never learn. Tinted windows pose a possibly lethal threat to the police during traffic stops, since they prevent officers from assessing the situation inside the car before approaching. Ignoring this infraction puts officers’ lives at risk. Should the police nevertheless do so? Such is the implication, if doing so would mean fewer fines for black motorists. The New York Times quotes a victim of the “racist” Ferguson traffic-enforcement system who was fined for driving without a license. Why was his license suspended? Was he driving drunk? Did he hit someone? We will never know. What is the crime rate in the black areas of Ferguson? That is also something that the mainstream press is not interested in finding out.

The most ubiquitous “Ferguson is racist” meme was that the city’s police force is too white. Four of Ferguson’s 53 officers are black. This imbalance, it was suggested, must be the result of racism and must itself cause racist enforcement activity. How many qualified black applicants have been rejected after applying to join the Ferguson police force? Not an interesting question, evidently.

The “too-white police force” meme, which the New York Times generalized into another front-page article (“Mostly White Forces in Mostly Black Towns,” September 10), complete with another impressive set of graphs, 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.