So, Ben Shapiro said in yesterday’s podcast episode that this new book by Heather MacDonald was the book of the year so far.
You can listen to his podcast to hear him interview the author.
Here’s a good review / summary that I found on the Washington Post:
Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993. The reason is what Heather Mac Donald first identified nationally as the “Ferguson effect”: Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals are becoming emboldened.
This book expands on Mac Donald’s groundbreaking and controversial reporting on the Ferguson effect and the criminal-justice system. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: that racist cops are the greatest threat to young black males. On the contrary, it is criminals and gangbangers who are responsible for the high black homicide death rate.
The War on Cops exposes the truth about officer use of force and explodes the conceit of “mass incarceration.” A rigorous analysis of data shows that crime, not race, drives police actions and prison rates. The growth of proactive policing in the 1990s, along with lengthened sentences for violent crime, saved thousands of minority lives. In fact, Mac Donald argues, no government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than today’s data-driven, accountable police department.
Mac Donald gives voice to the many residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want proactive policing. She warns that race-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. This book is a call for a more honest and informed debate about policing, crime, and race.
She lays out the stakes of this debate in this interview with Frontpage Magazine:
MT: What were your thoughts upon hearing of last week’s Dallas shooting in progress, when police were dying and being wounded even as they tried to protect the demonstrators who had gathered there to protest their supposed racial bias?
HM: I was overcome by acute fear for this country. The elite establishment has been playing with fire in stoking the Black Lives Matter hatred of the police, and that fire may now be raging out of control.
MT: With the rise of Black Lives Matter and a news media and government administration that are fomenting anti-cop sentiment, is it too alarmist to suggest that we are headed toward a breakdown of civil society if nothing is done?
HM: It is not only not alarmist to warn of a breakdown of civil society, it is imperative to issue such a warning. Officers working in inner-city areas face animus and resistance to their lawful authority on a daily basis. Law and order, and respect for the law, are disintegrating. A Chicago police officer told me last month that he has never experienced such hatred in his twenty years on the job. The Dallas assassinations, like the assassinations of two New York City police officers in December 2014, are just a more extreme, horrific version of the animus that officers encounter regularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
I found this 47-minute lecture that she did at the conservative Hilldsale College, in Michigan:
I do think it’s important to be aware of what the Democrats who push anti-police hate speech and policies are going to cause. It will start with a refusal by the police to enforce the law, especially in poor black neighborhoods. The first victims of law enforcement pulling out will be the very people who need the police the most. Expect to see a surge in gang activity as people look to gangs for security instead of the police.
WINTERY KNIGHT 