Why the ‘War on Cops’ Matters

A stark spike in violent crime across the country has law enforcement and local government on edge.

Decades of successful anti-crime policies resulted in some of the lowest crime rates the nation has seen in well over a generation after twenty years of unbroken decline. Now, those gains seem poised to evaporate overnight.

“The BLM movement does not see fit to memorialize them, so it’s a demonstrable fraud that their agenda is to save black lives.”

A recent government report released by the Justice Department seems to confirm what many on the Right and in law enforcement have long suspected — the recent explosion in violent crime is tied directly to an increase in anti-law enforcement feeling in the United States.

Called the “Ferguson Effect,” the theory posits that the rise in crime is a result of anti-police rhetoric — from the likes of Black Lives Matter all the way up to the Obama administration — which grew in response to a number of high-profile incidents in which black individuals died at the hands or while in the custody of police officers.

The Ferguson Effect is the basic theme of Heather Mac Donald’s new book, “The War on Cops.” Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues that anti-police feeling is causing police officers to decrease their interactions with black neighborhoods, emboldening criminals and placing innocent members of those violence-ridden communities in further danger.

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LifeZette interviewed Mac Donald to discuss the ongoing war on cops, the Ferguson Effect, and what the combined effect means for the safety of Americans:

Question: The Justice Department announced today that they were issuing their implicit bias guidelines to federal agencies. What do you make of that?

Answer: A tragic waste of taxpayer resources. I’ve actually observed one of these federally approved and funded implicit bias trainings. And it’s just really an insult to officers. You know, to tell them well, not every black person is armed, they know that. Or, sometimes females can be armed, it was not as offensive as I expected, but it was also just simply a waste of time. Officers do need more training — they would love more training. A lot of officers. I talked to someone in Chicago who pays for his own training. This is absurd. But they want training. What they need is realistic scenario­-based trainings for shoot, don’t shoot scenarios.

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Q: Is there anything noticeably different about the current anti-police rhetoric compared to the widespread anti-police rhetoric of the 1960s?

A: What’s different [is that] the current war on cops is having much more severe and serious consequences in officers backing off of proactive policing and the crime increases that we’re seeing in cities across the country. [The anti-cop rhetoric] is also being expressed at the highest levels of the administration.

Q: Do you think the administration are true believers? Do you think they truly believe there is a problem with racist cops or do you think they’re using this issue to mobilize their constituents?

A: Oh, I think they’re true believers … President Obama, I think he’s really a participant in black racial victimology and really does believe that the criminal justice system is biased. You know — he’s just gone around saying it so many times that it treats similarly situated blacks and whites differently. I have no reason to think this is somehow just some ulterior agenda that he’s got.

Q: Many in the media still treat the “Ferguson Effect” as controversial and with a degree of skepticism. Do you think there’s a very clear link between anti­-police rhetoric and declining police morale?

A: Absolutely, and this is not the first time we’ve seen it. There’s a study out of the University of Washington in 2005 that looked at Cincinnati after the 2001 anti-­cop riot and used regression analysis and found that the cops backed off and violent felony crime went way up.

But I cannot talk to an actual police officer as opposed to a political guy you know who’s up there in the ranks who will not say (a.) that he’s surrounded by very, very hostile street environment at this point, that he’s worried about engaging at all in any kind of discretionary proactive policing. And that you know they’re getting the message that policing is racist if you do pedestrian stops or broken-windows policing — I don’t know what we expect cops to do with that kind of message.

It’s understandable that they back off and that’s the political message that they’re getting … [but] when you ask someone like Richard Rosenfeld who was [an] early and influential Ferguson effect denier now turning around in a report for the Justice Department saying that this is the most plausible explanation and the only one that fits the timing right I think it’s gonna get harder and harder to dispute it.

Q: Do you think it ever occurs to these liberal criminologists for the Black Lives Matter movement that their hatred of cops is costing more black lives?

A: They give no signs of realizing that. I have yet to hear any word from any BLM protests that the carnage that is going on right now in cities with high black populations — two weekends ago there was somebody shot in Chicago every 43 minutes. [At] 6:30 pm on Sunday that weekend there was a three-year-­old boy who is now paralyzed because of a drive­-by shooting. There were 10 children under the age of 10 killed in Baltimore in 2015 — we don’t know their names, [since] the BLM movement does not see fit to memorialize them, so it’s a demonstrable fraud that their agenda is to save black lives.

If they [were interested in saving black lives] they should look at the data and realize that until the black family is re-knit, the police are the second-best solution to being able to give people in high crime areas some safety from that violence.

Q: I know that you identify [family breakdown] as the main root cause of crime in the black community, but given just how polarized society is right now over issues of race, can you see any way that issue can be addressed?

A: Well, it’s tough. But you know this is a problem that is certainly not the problem of not being able to talk about the consequences of illegitimacy of black children — this is not a problem that began with the Black Lives Matter movement. In 1965 we see scourging of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote his present call for action to try and re-knit the black family. He said the black family breakdown was going to serve as a break on civil rights progress despite the landmark legislation that was being passed at that time and if the family breakdown continued any progress would be impeded. At that point when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was 23 percent — he thought that was a crisis. Today it’s 73 percent nationally.

I would say the other problem is not just the race angle. It’s also feminism, which is that strong women can do it all. And now we also have the gay marriage issue — I’ve experienced this firsthand as I knew I would. If you say in a public setting that children need their biological mother and father you’re accused of not honoring the diversity of all families and what is referred to by that is not just single parents but also same-­sex parents. To say children need their fathers you’re perceived as dissing lesbian couples, so social change is making it difficult for people to stand up there and [defend] the traditional two­-parent family, [to acknowledge] that fathers and mothers bring different skills and attributes on average to raise a children and that boys in particular need their fathers.

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Q: How much worse do you think the Ferguson Effect will get? Do you think the crime increase that began last year that appears to be continuing this year will level out soon, or do you think this is the beginning of a new era of high crime?

A: That’s a good question. I would say if Hillary Clinton is elected the rhetoric against cops from the White House will continue — that it’s not helpful. Trump has occasionally supported law enforcement. He obviously needs more education on the matter, but his instincts are certainly far, far better than Clinton’s. And there will be at some point another fatal shooting that the media jumps all over rightly or wrongly and that is a problem and it’s true to the cellphone video era, it does change policing. I am for body cameras because they will vindicate officers far far more often then they will inculcate them.

Maybe officers will simply adjust to this new level of hostility on the streets and go back to proactive policing. If they do we’ll get a handle on this, but if they don’t you’re going to have more people carrying illegal guns and using them.

Q: Finally, has this rhetoric effected in any way efforts to increase the number of minority cops or police departments efforts at minority outreach?

A: Well, police chiefs across the country say that recruiting has become almost impossible. The Pasadena police chief said it’s not an applicant pool — it’s an applicant trickle at this point. And it’s not just black officers but it’s white officers.

The other thing I would say, though, the idea that race makes a difference in policing — if it’s true it runs the opposite way than this assumes. The justice Department did a study in March 2015, that came out in March 2015, on the Philadelphia police department, found that black and Hispanic officers were much more likely to make what’s known as threat­ misperception errors, that is they mistook, when it came to black suspects, somebody carrying a cellphone thought they were carrying a gun and shot them. Much more likely to do that than white officers.

There was a study by Greg Ridgeway, the former acting director of the National Institute of Justice, that looked at the [New York Police Department] and found black officers were 3.3 times more likely to use their weapons in a shooting scene than white officers.