Читать книгу The War on Cops - Heather Mac Donald - Страница 6

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

Days after The War on Cops was first published in June 2016, five police officers in Dallas were assassinated by a killer inspired by Black Lives Matter ideology. Less than two weeks later, another three cops in Baton Rouge were murdered out of the same anti-cop hatred. This violence had no effect on the rhetoric coming out of the White House. At the memorial service for the slain Dallas officers, President Barack Obama returned to his familiar theme that policing was lethally biased against blacks. Black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a cop whenever he “walks out the door,” the president said.

Chicago presented a test case for the president’s claim. The city was in the midst of an epidemic of drive-by shootings, with one person shot every two hours. By the end of 2016, over 4,300 people would be shot, almost all of them black. Two dozen children under the age of twelve would be struck, including a three-year-old boy who is now paralyzed for life, and a ten-year-old boy whose pancreas, intestines, kidney, and spleen were torn apart. None of those child victims was shot by the police. In fact, the Chicago police shot only 0.5 percent of the shooting victims in the city in 2015, and virtually all of the twenty-one people shot by the police were armed and dangerous. Yet Chicago members of Black Lives Matter still chant: “CPD, KKK, how many children did you kill today?”

As 2016 wore on, the anti-cop movement and its high-placed political and media enablers remained impervious to all facts that contradicted their “policing is racist” narrative. They were also indifferent to the mounting loss of black lives. Officers in minority neighborhoods were backing off of proactive policing, under the constant refrain that such policing was racist. As a consequence, violence accelerated. I have called this combination of depolicing and rising crime the Ferguson Effect, after the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Chicago again exemplified the new reality on the streets. “I haven’t seen this kind of hatred towards the police in my nineteen years on the force,” a Chicago cop told me. “It’s basically an undoable job now.” Pedestrian stops and drug arrests in the Windy City dropped over 80 percent in 2016, homicides rose nearly 60 percent, and violence reached a level not seen in at least two decades. Carjackings, robberies, and shootings on the expressways are now spreading from the high-crime periphery into the city center.

Activists and criminologists have denied that violent crime is rising in many American cities and have scoffed at the idea that any such increase could be connected with depolicing. The data that have come out since The War on Cops was published last year, however, have only confirmed the Ferguson Effect. The FBI’s final tally for reported homicides nationally in 2015 showed close to a 12 percent increase, the largest one-year homicide spike in almost half a century. Homicides rose by double digits across all size categories of cities, except for those under ten thousand in population, where homicides rose 7 percent. Cities with large black populations had the greatest homicide increases: 54 percent in Washington, D.C., 72 percent in Milwaukee, and 90 percent in Cleveland. An additional nine hundred black males were murdered in 2015 compared with 2014, bringing the black homicide toll in 2015 to over seven thousand—which is two thousand more than the number of white and Hispanic homicide victims combined.

Preliminary estimates show a 14 percent homicide increase in 2016 in the thirty largest U.S. cities and an 8 percent increase nationwide. The vast majority of officers polled by the Pew Research Center in summer 2016 said that officers in their department had become less likely to stop and question suspicious individuals and were less willing to use lawful force. Just how much less willing was demonstrated in Chicago in October 2016, when a black suspect beat a female police officer unconscious by banging her head repeatedly into the pavement and ripping out handfuls of her hair. She had refrained from using her gun for fear of being called a racist, she later said.

While the deadly violence was growing in 2016, four studies came out from the academy and from independent research groups rebutting the Black Lives Matter narrative. There was no bias against blacks in police shootings, the studies found; if anything, blacks were less likely to be shot than whites. Yet the Obama administration continued its pursuit of phantom police racism into its final week, when the Justice Department put the Baltimore police under federal control. That federal takeover was set in motion by the death of drug dealer Freddie Gray in 2015 following an arrest. In mid-2016, a black Maryland judge acquitted three of the six officers involved in the Freddie Gray incident of all criminal charges against them, leading the state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, to drop the remaining three prosecutions. The Obama Justice Department, however, still maintained that Baltimore policing was discriminatory, thanks to the DOJ’s usual practice of ignoring the fact that the vast majority of criminal victimization occurs in minority neighborhoods. The Washington attorneys deemed public-order enforcement in the city to be racially oppressive, and proceeded to virtually ban it in the Baltimore consent decree.

Arrests in Baltimore, especially drug arrests, have already dropped 45 percent since 2015; they will drop further under the new prohibitions. The per capita homicide rate in Baltimore in the first five months of 2017 was at the highest level in the city’s history. In March 2017, a gang member retaliating for an earlier drive-by shooting threw two Molotov cocktails into a house, burning two teenagers to death and injuring two children and four other residents. Law-abiding residents of Baltimore’s high-crime neighborhoods have been begging the police to restore order; under the strictures of the consent decree, their pleas will just have to wait.

A public backlash against the Black Lives Matter narrative helped fuel the improbable ascent of Donald Trump to the White House. In an inauspicious omen for the Hillary Clinton campaign, a Gallup poll taken in October 2016 found that support for the police—among minorities and whites alike—had surged to a high not seen since 1967, after falling to a twenty-two-year low in 2015. Alarm over the targeting of police officers contributed to that change in attitude: gun murders of officers rose 53 percent in 2016. Hillary Clinton, in an early Democratic presidential debate, had said it was “reality” that cops see black lives as cheap, and she continued to accuse the police of systemic racism throughout the campaign. Trump, by contrast, denounced the “false narrative” about the police and promised to restore law and order to American cities. He decried the growing loss of black life, and was promptly labeled a racist for doing so. During the campaign, President Obama dismissed Trump’s warning about the rising urban death rate. Apparently, black lives don’t matter so much when they are taken by a criminal.

The most important thing that a president can do now to restore law and order is to change the narrative about policing. The Justice Department should publicly recognize that policing today is data-driven: officers are deployed to where crime is highest. Under the new administration, the department is already subjecting the consent-decree process to a much-needed review. It should also declare that the federal government will no longer deem police bigoted for responding to community demands for order.

The campaign against the cops is a battle in a larger culture war, in which one camp seeks to redefine the American experience as the continual oppression of an ever-growing number of victim groups. Social norms, the legitimacy of authority, the rule of law—all are denigrated as the machinery of oppression, and the police are tarred as the most conspicuous embodiment of American injustice. In this climate, it was hardly surprising that The War on Cops would draw heat for subjecting the charges against the police to rational analysis, with some critics pronouncing the author a “fascist” and a “white supremacist.” The attacks on the book have not refuted its factual argument, nor have the critics acknowledged the extra challenges that cops now confront as they strive to bring safety to all Americans, regardless of race.