Heather Mac Donald - The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

Versions of these chapters originally appeared in the following publications: City Journal, chap. 1, 2, 57, 1522; The Marshall Project, chap. 13; National Review, chap. 3, 8; New York Daily News, chap. 16; InsideSources, chap. 12; Wall Street Journal, chap. 911, 16; Weekly Standard, chap. 4, 14.

Support for this book was generously provided by the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, and Randy P. Kendrick.

2016 by Heather Mac Donald

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First American edition published in 2016 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Mac Donald, Heather, author.

Title: The war on cops: how the new attack on law and order makes everyone less safe / by Heather Mac Donald.

Description: New York: Encounter Books, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002500 (print) | LCCN 2016010780 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594038761 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: PoliceUnited States. | Police-community relationsUnited States. | Crime preventionUnited States.

Classification: LCC HV8139 .M34 2016 (print) | LCC HV8139 (ebook) | DDC 363.20973dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002500

Interior page design and page composition by: BooksByBruce.com

CONTENTS

As the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close, crime is shooting up in cities across the United States. Homicides in the countrys 50 largest cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015, the greatest surge in fatal violence in a quarter-century, reports the Washington Post. Milwaukee was experiencing its deadliest year in a decade. Homicides in Baltimore were at their highest per capita rate ever by mid-November50 killings per 100,000 residents. Crime is the worst Ive ever seen it, said St. Louis alderman Joe Vaccaro at a City Hall hearing in May 2015. President Obama himself conceded that gun violence and homicides have spikedand in some cases theyve spiked significantly.

The crime surge was especially troubling in that it reversed a two-decade-long decline, during which American cities vanquished a 1960s-era notion that had made urban life miserable for so many. Breaking the law, the thinking went, was but a symptom of social failure and governmental neglect, or even an understandable expression of protest. Until poverty and racism were eliminated, routine behaviors such as walking down a street, strolling through a park, or operating a store would necessarily remain fraught with fear and the possibility of violence. Under the influence of this root causes conceit, acres of city space were ceded to thieves and thugs, to hustlers and graffiti artists. Disorder and decay became the urban norm.

A combination of forces eventually reversed this state of affairs. Starting in the late 1970s, legislators demanded that convicted criminals serve more of their sentences; habitual felons were finally locked up for lengthy prison stays. And police leaders challenged the root causes concept with a countervailing idea: the police could actually prevent crime and, in so doing, would make civilized urban life possible again. This sea change in policing philosophy originated in New York in 1994 under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney who had campaigned on the promise to free the city from its growing squalor and anarchy. Giulianis first police commissioner, William J. Bratton, was a champion of Broken Windows policing, which holds that allowing a neighborhood to become overrun by graffiti, litter, public drunkenness, and other forms of disorder breeds more crime by signaling that social control in the area has collapsed. Bratton had already shown the effectiveness of Broken Windows enforcement in New Yorks subways as transit police chief in the early 1990s; now he would have an entire city upon which to test the concept.

Brattons deputy commissioners began rigorously analyzing crime data on a daily basis and ruthlessly holding precinct commanders accountable for the safety of their precincts. And they asked officers to stop and question individuals engaged in suspicious behaviorwhether hanging out on a known drug corner at 1 AM or casing a jewelry store on a commercial strip plagued by burglaries.

Crime in New York City dropped 12 percent in Brattons first year in office and 16 percent the next year, while crime rates in the rest of the country were virtually flat. The New York crime rout became national news, spurring other police departments to adopt similar data-intensive, proactive tactics. Over the next two decades, crime would fall 50 percent nationwide, revitalizing cities across the country. The biggest beneficiaries of that crime decline were the law-abiding residents of minority neighborhoods. Senior citizens could go out to shop without fear of getting mugged. Businesses moved in to formerly desolate areas. Children no longer had to sleep in bathtubs to avoid getting hit by stray bullets. And tens of thousands of individuals were spared premature death by homicide.

Now, that triumph over chaos and lawlessness is in jeopardy. Fueling the rise in crime in places like Baltimore and Milwaukee is a multipronged attack on law enforcement. Since late summer 2014, a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter has convulsed the nation. Triggered by a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. That belief has spawned riots, die-ins, and the assassination of police officers. The movements targets include Broken Windows policing and the practice of stopping and questioning suspicious individuals, both of which are said to harass blacks.

At the same time, a long-standing academic discourse about mass incarceration went mainstream. According to this theory, the American penal system practices systematic imprisonment of whole groups. The nations prison rate is allegedly a product of discrimination, and drug laws are purportedly a means of re-enslaving black Americans. President Obama repeatedly charged that the criminal-justice system treats blacks differently from whites.

In New York City, a trilogy of lawsuits challenged the NYPDs stop, question, and frisk tactics as racist; a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs by ignoring the incidence of crime in minority neighborhoods. A previously obscure politician, Bill de Blasio, ascended to City Hall two decades after Mayor Giuliani by campaigning against the NYPD and pledging to drop the citys appeal of the stop, question, and frisk decision.

As 2015 progressed, few law-enforcement practices escaped attack for allegedly imposing unjust burdens on blacks. But it was the virulent anti-cop rhetoric that was most consequential. Officers working in inner cities routinely found themselves surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they tried to make an arrest or conduct an investigation. Cops feared becoming the latest YouTube pariah when a viral cell-phone video showed them using force against a suspect who had been resisting arrest.