Heather Mac Donald links the U.S. homicide surge—peaking in 2023 with record Black victimization—to post-Floyd policing retreat, where officers avoid stops due to backlash, even as Chicago’s Labor Day weekend saw 66 shootings, including 11 children. She cites CDC data showing Black males aged 10–43 die at 13x the white rate, largely from intra-racial violence, yet progressive prosecutors drop minor offenses to avoid "disparate impact" claims, worsening safety in high-crime Black neighborhoods. Mac Donald argues mass incarceration reflects crime reality—not racism—while dismissing the First STEP Act as ineffective, and blames left-wing policies for ignoring Black cultural breakdowns, like California’s 4x higher truancy rates among Blacks. Though NYC’s Eric Adams signals a law-and-order pivot, she warns systemic "white supremacy self-righteousness" in institutions still stifles honest crime discussions. [Automatically generated summary]
So, in this increasingly dire moment for the country, I wanted to bring on Heather McDonald for the simple reason that she is, if she's not the best reporter in the country, she is one of the very best.
She's the winner of the Bradley Prize.
You can read her stuff at City Journal, the Wall Street Journal.
If in Fair World, she'd be the winner of every journalistic prize, but we don't live in Fair World, and basically the mainstream media won't even talk to her because she's too busy telling the truth, which they have no room for.
Heather, it's great to see you.
It's always a delight to talk to you.
Thank you so much, Drew, and congratulations on your budding media empire there.
It's quite impressive.
It is.
I rule over everything I survey.
So, you know, one of the main things you cover is the police and crime.
And I can't help but notice that after 20 years of some of the best crime statistics ever, we are plummeting into a new 1970s, 1980s version of high crime, especially the murder rates are shooting up.
What are you seeing on the crime statistics and why is it happening?
It's extraordinarily depressing, worrisome, and tragic.
We're seeing thousands more overwhelmingly black victims of homicide.
Last year was the largest percentage increase in homicide since recorded history in this country.
And why this is happening is the demonization of the police since at high volumes since the death of George Floyd.
That demonization has been going on for decades.
But the difference after the George Floyd death was that you had every elite establishment in the country embracing this phony narrative about systemic lethal police bias.
You had the president of the United States when he was running for election during 2020 and in his inaugural speech and every opportunity since then, repeating the lie that black parents are right to fear that their children will be killed by a cop every time they step outside.
And cops are incredibly demoralized.
There's been an exit from the profession.
People are taking early retirements.
It's impossible to replace them.
Who would want to start a job when the first day you start you are under the pall of the accusation of racism that you can never clear your name of?
And they've backed off of the essential proactive enforcement in high crime neighborhoods that is purely discretionary.
They don't have to do it, but it means things like getting out of your car at 2 a.m. when you see somebody hanging out on a known drug corner, hitching up his waistband as if he has a gun and asking that guy a few questions.
Cops are saying, why should I get out of my car?
I don't have to.
There's not been a 911 call yet.
There's not been a shooting yet.
I'm going to drive around, wait for the next robbery call to come over my radio because if I get out and this questioning turns confrontational and I am forced to escalate my use of force and that somebody's got a cell phone video, it goes viral.
I'm out of a job.
I could be facing criminal prosecution and cops are just saying it's not worth the effort.
Is there any truth to the emotional charge?
I would say that even if the police aren't doing anything wrong, the fact that so many black people commit crimes puts innocent black people in this position where they're getting harassed.
Is there any truth to that?
Is that an actual serious problem that has to be dealt with?
Or is it just the state of play?
Well, I would accept your articulation of it.
I think it's true.
I think there is a black crime tax.
It is undoubtedly the case that a law-abiding black male does stand a greater chance of at some point in his life getting stopped because he meets a suspect description.
One third of all black males have a felony conviction, not because the system is racist, but because the crime rate is that high in the black community.
And so, you know, if you're driving a car and you're obeying traffic laws, and we can talk later about what we know about actual speeding behavior between blacks and whites, which is not what the public thinks, but if you're otherwise law-abiding, there is a higher chance that you'll get pulled over because somebody has committed a crime that you fit a description of or on a street.
So that is a burden, but I would say the far greater burden is the fact that blacks die of homicide at 13 times the rate between the ages of 10 and 43 as whites between the ages of 10 and 43.
13 times the rate.
They're being killed at 13 times the rate, not by the police, not by whites, but by other blacks.
The police are trying to lower that homicide toll.
That data comes from 2015.
It's the CDC's own data.
It's gotten much worse since then.
2020 and 2021 has just seen open season on blacks by other blacks.
We're likely to see 10,000 blacks who were killed last year and probably the number will be higher this year.
That's more than all, much, much more, thousands more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though Blacks are only 13% of the population.
You know, it's heartbreaking.
I mean, we saw crime go down because of scientific policing, because of broken windows kind of policing where you don't tolerate small crimes because they lead to big crimes.
The left's argument was that there was mass incarceration.
And Malcolm Gladwell makes this argument that taking so many black males off the street hurts the neighborhood and actually feeds into crime because you lose fathers, you lose men from those neighborhoods.
Is there any other way of doing this?
Is there any truth to that?
Is there any sense that was Donald Trump wrong when he passed the whatever it was called, the First STEP Act, and let people out for lesser drug crimes?
I mean, was there any reform needed?
Well, what Trump was really wrong about was doing this in the name of racial justice and buying into the left's narrative that the criminal justice system is racist.
That was disastrous.
That was opportunistic on his part.
He wanted a way to bash Joe Biden.
There are many other ways to bash Joe Biden.
Joe Biden was right to sign the federal 1994 crime bill.
That bill acknowledged that incarceration is frankly, sadly, the only thing we know besides proactive policing that stops crime before it happens.
But incarceration reliably incapacitates criminals.
It would be great.
Incarceration is not an end in itself.
It would be great if we had programs that could reliably prevent crime or reform people once they have joined the gang lifestyle.
The one program we have is something called a family.
It's something called a father and a mother who are both committed to their biological child and are providing twice the emotional, financial, kin resources as a single mother who may be trying her best.
But frankly, the odds, as Obama recognized in 2008 when he was running for president the first time around, the odds are incredibly against that single mother in her ability to raise a law-abiding child and boy and girl.
The mass incarceration meme, Drew, is a result of one thing, disparate impact.
It's the fact that the criminal justice system does have a disparate impact on blacks.
Blacks make up about a third of the nation's prisoners, even though they're 13% of the population.
If that weren't the case, if whites were disproportionately in prison compared to their population numbers, nobody would be talking about mass incarceration.
The attitude would be, you know, put them in there and throw away the key.
Everything in our criminal justice system today is driven by the fact of disparate impact.
You cannot enforce the law without having a disparate impact on blacks.
Why?
Again, not because the system is racist, but because the black crime rate is so high.
In Chicago, a black Chicagoan is 80 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white Chicagoan.
In New York, a black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker.
In Los Angeles, a Black Los Angeles is 35 times more likely to commit homicide than a white Los Angeles.
Those are the facts.
And so the only way to avoid disparate impact of law enforcement on Blacks is to stop enforcing the law at all.
And that's what's going on.
That is what's going on.
That's why these progressive prosecutors are saying they're not going to enforce trespass.
They're not going to enforce resisting arrest.
They're not going to enforce loitering.
They're not going to enforce theft.
Why?
Because those all have a disparate impact on blacks.
And of course, what really has a disparate impact on blacks is unwinding police.
I mean, let me just, if I can, Drew, if I can just give you some reality here from Chicago to get viewers a sense of what's going on every day, because the media turns its eyes away.
It's astounding to me.
Over Labor Day weekend in Chicago, you had 66 people, at least 66 people shot.
11 children under the age of 17 were shot.
A four-year-old boy who was visiting from Alabama was having his hair braided in a house.
He was killed by shots fired at the house he was in while he was in a barber chair having his barbershop chair having his hair braided.
Over 4th of July weekend, you had a one-month-old girl who was shot, now critically wounded, in a mass shooting.
You know, the media only likes mass shootings if white people are committing them.
This was an instance where you had three males who got out of a black Jeep Cherokee and began shooting in several directions across a sidewalk.
They hit seven people.
They got back in there and their Jeep Cherokee and fled.
So that the one-year-old was shot in the head.
Hours before, a nine-year-old girl had been shot in the head in the back seat of a car.
And the day on the Thursday before the 4th of July weekend, you had a six-year-old girl and her mother who were shot, critical condition.
They were drive-by on the sidewalk.
A five-year-old girl was shot eight hours earlier.
This is going on every single weekend and day.
And the press doesn't cover it because it will not talk about black pathology.
It does not want to talk about black on black crime.
If these were white kids getting shot, there would be a national revolution.
The press thinks of itself as so anti-racist, it does not give a damn about these black victims because they're all taken by black criminals.
This is something I want to ask you.
And I know you can only give an opinion on this.
This is not a factual question, but it's been bothering me the last few weeks.
You're talking about this.
This is, you know, Black Lives Matter, leftist ideas about defunding the police, all of this is making this so much worse.
I mean, at an incredible rate.
Bill McGurn wrote an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal talking about the fact that the public schools, which are all run by leftists and teachers' unions, are leaving black children without any kind of math proficiency, without any kind of language proficiency.
And the left's answer is to take away standards and then to just make sure, force employers to hire them, even if they can't do the job.
Is there some strain of genuine racial hatred on the left?
Is there something inherent in leftism that is anti-black?
I mean, because nothing, you know, sure, are there bigots on the right?
Absolutely, but nothing the right does wreaks this kind of destruction and havoc among our fellow Americans who are black.
Nothing the right does does this.
I don't care if they burn wiki torches, whatever the hell they're called.
They still don't cause this kind of destruction in the black community.
Is the left doing this on purpose or is it just blindness?
I think it's mostly blindness.
I think the elites are terrified that the academic skills gap and the behavior skills gap is not going to close.
So you can say, why do they think that?
I mean, they certainly have 70 years of history at this point with government efforts that haven't managed to close those gaps.
So they are very assiduously making sure that the only allowable explanation for the ongoing academic skills gap and behavior and crime gap is racism.
What is taboo is to talk about culture and behavior and lack of personal responsibility.
They don't want to go there, and they certainly don't want to go to anything related to heritability.
But I think that they actually believe in these policies.
I don't think it's race hatred.
It may be race condescension, but I think that their minds are just so filled up with the idea of white supremacy that they think that government is the solution.
I would say, and I know that you're adopting kind of a favorite right-wing trope, which is that all of these problems come from bad government policy.
And I would never deny that these policies are making things much worse.
And they have had a deleterious effect on the black family.
But I, at this point, am kind of fed up with that narrative as well.
I think there's got to be change coming from within the black community as well.
There's got to be a total rejection of the anti-acting white syndrome.
There's got to be a commitment to academic achievement.
In California, the black truancy rate is four times that of whites.
Feeling Fed Up With Academic Victim Politics00:03:06
You can't learn.
You know, even if your school is very subpar, you can't learn unless you're in school.
And so I think there's a lot that can come from adopting bourgeois values that have disintegrated over the last several decades.
Do you feel in the 70s and 80s, in the 80s, finally, people became fed up with the high crime?
They brought in guys like Giuliani.
They approved of the kind of policing that he and his commissioners put in place and they spread across the country.
Do you feel that the culture has changed so much that people are willing to accept what's happening in cities like LA and San Francisco?
That's a great question.
And up to now, the answer is clearly yes.
So the only, you know, we don't have our crystal ball is will it change?
Will we eventually come to our senses?
But yes, it is just astounding that people are willing to walk over feces and send their kids through a field of hypodermic needles to get to school and accept the destruction of neighborhood quality of life.
Again, all driven by the fear of high standards and disparate impact, the determination to see everything through the lens of white racism.
And yes, we've had another three decades of colleges vomiting out, you know, completely brainwashed children who've been the brainwashing, as you know, more than anybody else, Drew, starts earlier and earlier these days.
But colleges are sort of the finishing school for this and the safetyist female mentality that are turning all their corporations left-wing along with CEO wives.
But yeah, we've had another three decades of academic victim politics.
And it's amazing to me.
Now, you can look, I'm not 100% fan of Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor in New York.
He's got a very, very bad past when it comes to policing, even though he was a police officer, but he spent his whole time on the New York police force bashing the Department for Phantom Racism.
I hope that he's truly turned over a new leaf.
But if one wants to look for signs of a turnaround in hope, and I'm hardly the first to notice this, I mean, he's got the New York Post as completely his cheerleader and was during the Democratic primary, as seeing him as a sign that New Yorkers are moving, inching back towards their Giuliani Bloomberg sanity.
So we'll see.
But whether we're ready to start demanding that government perform its one mandatory function, which is law and order and public safety, whether we're ready for that and to discard the white supremacy self-righteousness, I'm not sure.
Diversity Delusion00:00:17
Heather McDonald, truly one of the great reporters in the country, find her stuff at City Journal.