Читать книгу The War on Cops - Heather Mac Donald - Страница 11
ОглавлениеShortly 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 to be sent to fight crime disproportionately in black neighborhoods, where they will more likely encounter 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.
