Zadekpedia2017-05-28 · Guest: Heather Mac Donald (Author of The War on Cops) · 5:50
Filed under: Crime, police and punishment
The War on Cops and the Ferguson Effect
Bob Zadek interviews Heather Mac Donald about her book The War on Cops, exploring the “Ferguson Effect” and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on law enforcement. They discuss the disconnect between media narratives of systemic police racism and crime statistics in inner-city communities.
Topics: Law Enforcement, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson Effect, Crime Statistics, Media Narratives, Manhattan Institute
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Heather Mac Donald
Introduction [00:25]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Thanks so much for listening. I’m sure glad to be joining you this Sunday morning.
Is there a war on cops? Is there a war conducted by cops on, for the most part, the inner-city black community? This is a debate which is live, real, it blankets the media, and it is a debate which is heavy on emotion and light on substance and light on facts. To help us understand this issue, to provide facts instead of emotion—or if you will, ideas instead of attitude—I’m happy to welcome to the show this morning Heather Mac Donald.
Heather has written The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Heather has been following this issue from long before it hit the media in 2014, August 9th, 2014, when the horrible events—or perhaps not so horrible—in Ferguson, Missouri occurred. Heather has written about this subject for four years before Ferguson. Her book, Are Cops Racist?, was written in 2010. Who better to help us understand this issue than Heather Mac Donald? Heather, welcome to the show this morning.
Heather Mac Donald: Oh, thanks so much for having me on, Bob. I appreciate it.
The Ideological War on Law Enforcement [02:03]
Bob Zadek: Now, is there a war on cops today, and if so, who are the enemy combatants and what is the goal of this war?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, it’s an ideological and rhetorical war overwhelmingly, Bob. It is the product of the Black Lives Matter narrative that says that policing is lethally racist, that it is shot through with systemic bias, and that we’re living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black males. That narrative is both false and dangerous.
It is leading to an almost unprecedented level of hostility that cops are encountering in high-crime areas. A Chicago cop last June said to me he’d never experienced so much hatred in his 19 years on the job. He said it’s basically an undoable job now. When cops get out of their cars to make a pedestrian stop, questioning somebody hanging out on a known drug corner at 1:00 AM who’s hitching up his waistband as if he has a gun, they often find themselves surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds, cursing at them, throwing things at them.
As a result, cops are backing off of those types of discretionary law enforcement activities that is what’s really important in lowering crime. They’re not getting out of their cars to make those discretionary stops. They’re not engaging in the low-level public order policing that is demanded by law-abiding residents of high-crime areas. And as a result, crime in inner-city areas has been spiking up.
Media Narratives and the Ferguson Effect [04:00]
Bob Zadek: Now, in your book, your book is heavily supported by objective, factual data. The war on cops, if it does in fact exist as you maintain, seems to be supported by a series—maybe a large series, but it is anecdotal—these events which are, when I watch them on the media, painful to watch, of these portions of videos, these snippets of real-life events showing cops do, if you look only at the video and not what happened before, not what happened after, and not the circumstances, the videos themselves are quite compelling. Does the Black Lives Matter movement and the hostility towards cops, could it have existed without the media doing what it does, which is focus on salacious, headline-grabbing, “if it bleeds, it leads” kind of reporting?
Heather Mac Donald: No, you’re absolutely right, Bob. The belief that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men is entirely a media creation. Last July, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus stood up in Congress and said, “Well, as we all know, the vast majority of police shootings involve unarmed black men.” That is a complete lie. It’s not even close to being true.
In 2015, according to a database that The Washington Post has been keeping, there were 990 people shot and killed by the police. The vast majority of those were white and Hispanic. They were also armed with a weapon and attacking the officer. Only 4% of those 990 shootings involved an unarmed black male. Now, 4% is not “the vast majority.”
Furthermore, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer. But you will never hear that from the media. You will never hear that from the Obama administration. They only focus on the extremely rare instances where a police officer makes a mistake or uses excessive force against a black person. They ignore the much more common instances of black-on-black crime and the much more common instances of officers being attacked by black suspects.
Show prep notes
Bob’s own preparation for this episode.
(424) BOB-SHOW // (424) 262-7469
Notes: 30 minutes with Heather from 8am.
“Mac Donald’s newest book, The War on Cops (2016), warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk.”
Planning Call: Friday 3:00pm PT, (cell)
Live Show: (212) 876-5005
Show Notes:
Headline: Is there a War on Cops?
Whatever your opinion is of the Black Lives Matter movement, law enforcement, or the root causes of violent crime, you can’t claim to be informed without reading Heather Mac Donald’s latest book, *The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.* The stories and statistics brought to light by the Manhattan Institute Fellow go against much of what liberal elites and civil libertarians alike wish to believe. The prevailing narrative goes like this: inner-city violence and dysfunction result from a combination of unnecessary laws, a racially-biased legal system, and police that routinely violate the rights of the citizens they’re supposed to protect. Against this narrative, Mac Donald brings evidence of a surge in violent crime – primarily victimizing African Americans – following the rising tide of anti-police sentiment among major media and politicians. Mac Donald channels former FBI Director James Comey in claiming that the fear of false accusation has caused police departments to dial back the “proactive policing” that has been credited with reducing past violent crime waves. Her speeches on college campuses have been shut down by the usual suspects (student mobs inflamed by the “threat” of a free exchange of ideas) leaving the strongest counter-counter-narratives to Mac Donald’s counter-narrative unexpressed. Mac Donald joins the show to defend the police from unsupported charges of racial bias, while Bob takes your calls [(424) BOB-SHOW] and tests some of *The War on Cops* claims against a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s civil liberty guarantees.
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Links
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The War on Cops (2016)
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City-Journal.org // Mac Donald
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The Manhattan Institute
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Heather Mac Donald | National Review
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Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) | Twitter
Related Shows (Subscribe to the Podcast):
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*The Rise of the Warrior Cop*: Encore Interview with Radley Balko, August 30, 2014
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Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City, June 15, 2014
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Making Peace with the Speech Police – Dispatch from Mizzou, December 11, 2015
[BIO]
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Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute
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Contributing editor of City Journal
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Expertise: higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations.
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Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion.
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She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.
Books
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The Burden of Bad Ideas (2001), essays detailing the effects of the 1960s counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions.
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The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan than Today’s (2007), coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country’s porous borders.
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Are Cops Racist? (2010) investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby’s harmful effects on black Americans.
A non-practicing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York. She has received numerous awards for her writing.
FIND HER WORK AT:
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City-Journal.org // Mac Donald
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Manhattan Institute
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Heather Mac Donald | National Review
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Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) | Twitter
On this Day in History (5/28)
1754 - Lieutenant Colonel George Washington begins the Seven Years’ War
On this day in 1754, a 22-year-old lieutenant colonel of the Virginia militia named George Washington successfully defeats a party of French and Indian scouts in southwest Pennsylvania as Virginia attempts to lay claim to the territory for its own settlers. The action snowballed into a world war and began the military career of the first American commander in chief.
The Ohio Valley had long been a contested territory among French Canadians, various Indian groups and the British colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia. When the French began to establish fortifications along the river and refused Virginia’s written demand that they depart, Virginia’s governor, Robert Dinwiddie, dispatched Washington to complete and defend a Virginian fort at the forks of the Ohio.
Upon their arrival, Washington discovered that a scouting party led by the French ensign, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville was nearby. Fearing that Jumonville was planning an attack, Washington struck first, successfully ambushing the small party. In one of history’s murkier moments, Jumonville was murdered by Washington’s Indian ally, Tanaghrisson, while the monolingual Washington struggled to interrogate the French-speaking Canadian.
Jumonville’s murder in captivity incited a strong French response, and Washington was unable to defend his makeshift “Fort Necessity” from French forces led by Jumonville’s half-brother. Washington surrendered on July 4 and signed a French confession to Jumonville’s assassination, which he could not read.
Benjamin Franklin had drafted his Albany Plan for Union earlier that month, in the hope that united colonies could better orchestrate their own defense and governance. Colonists voted down the proposal everywhere it was presented. After Washington displayed his incompetence on the Ohio, the British decided it was time to save their colonies from themselves and dispatched two regiments of Redcoats under General Edward Braddock to America. Braddock too suffered a humiliating defeat at the forks of the Ohio; it took the British and their colonists seven years of world war to redeem themselves. The Seven Years’ War would go on to strip the French of their American empire and test the bonds of the British empire in America.
Book Summary: [Amazon]
Praise from Ray Kelly (NYPD Chief), Rudy Guiliani, Thomas Sowell, and Sheriff David Clarke.
Set against the backdrop of the largest year-over-year (2015) increase in violent crime (17%) in more than 50 years. Homicides rose 50% in Chicago in 2016.
The narrative: Racist police officers are gunning down innocent black men.
Counter-narrative: Proactive policing has been saving black lives, and the new narrative is leading to more violence, not less.
Introduction:
“In response, the police began to disengage from proactive policing. Rather than getting out of their squad cars to question an individual who appeared to be hiding a gun, officers increasingly just drove on by, waiting for the next robbery or shooting to come over the police radio. Criminal summons and misdemeanor arrests for public-order offenses plummeted. If the Black Lives Matter movement were correct, this falloff in discretionary policing should have been a boon to black lives. Instead, a bloodbath ensued, and its victims were virtually all black. When the cops back off, blacks pay the greatest price.” (p. 3)
Chapter 1 - Obama’s Ferguson Sellout
By making the Mike Brown conviction political, Obama sent a message that he basically supported the narrative, unsupported by evidence of the case. Misinformation only intensifies hatred towards police officers:
Obama left no doubt that he believed the narrative of the mainstream media and race activists about Ferguson. (p. 8)
Chapter 2 - Ferguson’s Unasked Questions
Several planks of the narrative fail to hold up under scrutiny, such as the ideas that make up of the city council or police department is biased against African Americans or that enforcement of certain laws, like insurance requirements, and bans on tinted windows and blasting car music, are inherently racist.
Chapter 3 - Finding Meaning in Ferguson
Mac Donald dives deep into the Mike Brown story, revealing what the media never really talked about, even after the Grand Jury findings put the evidence into the public domain:
“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.” (p. 17)
Chapter 4 - Justice is Blind
The “hands up don’t shoot” narrative was so strong in Ferguson, that many people could not testify in the case, yet witness accounts still corroborated Officer Darren Wilson’s account: