July 19, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:19
3353 The War on Cops | Heather Mac Donald and Stefan Molyneux
Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Heather Mac Donald joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the war on police in America, the Ferguson effect, why officers have been backing off from proactive policing, and how criminals are becoming emboldened. Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.” For more from Heather Mac Donald please go to: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/heather-mac-donaldBuy The War on Cops: http://www.fdrurl.com/war-on-copsFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Very pleased to have on the show Heather McDonald.
She is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of a book I highly, highly recommend, The War on Cops, How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.
Heather, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you, Stefan.
I appreciate it.
Well, the title seems almost hyperbolic until, of course, the events of the last few weeks have emerged where cops are being regularly gunned down in what seems like random lightning strikes, attacks at the very fabric of law and order in America.
How close do you feel that this title is to what's happening and what's coming?
It's not only close to what's been happening in the last two weeks, it's perfectly accurate about what's been happening for the last two years.
These assassinations are just a more extreme version of the hatred that cops have been experienced on the streets on a daily basis in the inner city, thanks to the lies that have been put out there by the Black Lives Matter activists and amplified by the media.
An officer in Chicago told me when I was out there about six weeks ago to try and figure out what the heck was going on with this amazing crime spike they've got there, that the job is basically undoable now.
He said he's never seen so much hatred in his 20 years on the job.
There's a terrifying kind of arc that you talk about in the book, which is that there used to be kind of law and order.
And then in the 60s, a kind of leftist notion of the criminal as victim and of this sort of, I guess you could say, semi-communistic environmental determinism.
You know, you grow up poor, you don't have free will, you're going to be a bad person.
And so you apply resources to this and everyone's going to get better.
And that, of course, created a crime wave throughout the 60s and the 70s and into the 80s.
And then, as you point out, under Rudy Giuliani and other American mayors, but in particular New York City, there was a changing approach to law enforcement that they'd start with the little stuff, right, the broken windows fallacy.
And then that actually reduced criminality considerably, like enormously, for 20 or so years.
And then it sort of began to bounce back after the Michael Brown incident in 2010.
Is that a fair approach to trying to figure out the big pendulum of what's happening?
Absolutely, Stefan.
Until 1994, when Rudolph Giuliani revolutionized policing in New York City, it was assumed by the criminology profession and even by police chiefs and the FBI that there was nothing that policing could do to actually lower crime.
Crime was assumed to be a function of Poverty and income inequality and racism and then until we had really even more social programs and more redistribution of wealth than we already had, police could just react after the fact and respond to those 911 calls after somebody had already been robbed or shot.
And what happened in New York City was the assumption that, no, if you're smart and data-driven, hold commanders accountable and ask cops to be proactive, that is, get out of their cars and question somebody, Hanging out on a known drug corner at 1 a.m., hitching up his waistband as if he has a gun, and enforcing low-level public order offenses, the cops can actually prevent crime and lower it.
And that's what happened in New York City between, well, we had 2,245 homicides in 1990, an amazing number.
In 2014, we had 333.
That's a drop of 85%.
Unprecedented and completely unforeseen.
And that Policing revolution, data-driven, accountable and proactive, spread nationwide and gave this nation a 20-year crime drop of 50% from the 1990s.
And that is now completely under assault and is reversing itself in what I've called the Ferguson effect, which is the combined effect of de-policing and the resulting emboldening of criminals.
Well, this is the frustrating thing, and it's part of the tragedy of the leftist approach to things, at least in my opinion, Heather, which is that they say we would really like there to be fewer guns in society.
And one of the things, of course, that the stop and frisk did was it made criminals afraid to be carrying their guns.
And so it reduced sort of public manifestation of firearms.
You'd think the left would really be keen on that.
But no, apparently that's really bad.
And I think that the fact that the stuff in Frisk, as you point out, in New York has dropped like 90-95% because of perception from the media of police racism, plus, of course, the lawsuits that you mentioned.
Well, when criminals feel more free and secure to carry guns, it seems that you're going to get a lot more shootings.
Well, there's no better form of gun control than proactive policing, because you're absolutely right, Stefan, what happened when cops were still engaged in that is people, the criminals, the gangbangers, the kids that are engaged in these mindless drive-by shootings that are taking the lives of infants in inner cities across the country, They stopped carrying a gun on their person and went to a community gun.
Now, that's not ideal.
Ideally, these criminals have no gun whatsoever, but it's better that they all are sharing a gun under a mailbox than walking around packing heat, because when they're dissed, And feel like somebody has disrespected them on the street.
It's better that they have to go and get their gun rather than be able to start shooting spontaneously without any type of self-control.
And now, what I'm hearing from officers in places like New York, as well as Chicago, which has also had about a 90% drop in stops and shootings.
Some weekends, somebody shot every 43 minutes there.
People who would once have been borderline, the cops tell me, that is, they probably weren't carrying guns because of the possibility of getting stopped, are now all walking around with illegal weapons.
Well, yeah, and as of course you point out in the book, which we'll get to in a sec, ideally these kids, particularly the boys, should be growing up with fathers, and very few of them are.
There's this constant drumbeat within society that's so frustrating.
I know more so, I'm sure, even for you than for me, which is if there's any disproportionate police activity with regards to ethnicity or race, it can only and forever be the result of racism.
And this Without taking into account criminal activity is a completely pointless metric.
If for some reason people in Chinatown just suddenly started setting fires, well then the firemen would be going to Chinatown because that's where the fires are.
They wouldn't be unfairly targeting Chinatown with hoses.
They'd be going to where the fires are and we would all expect that to happen.
And so this constant drumbeat, as you point out in the book, that people focus on White cop racism in particular to avoid talking about one of the central issues and I think what is really driving this quote disparate effect is black crime which is out of proportion wildly to other ethnicities.
That's absolutely right, Stefan.
Nobody complains that Asians do not show up in police statistics.
They don't show up in stops.
They don't show up in arrests.
They're virtually absent from the nation's prisons.
Why is that?
They're people of color.
You know, if this myth of police racism was accurate, they should be stopped as well.
They're not stopped because their crime rates are negligible, virtually zero.
By comparison, blacks commit homicide in this country at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.
If you take Hispanics out of that comparison, you get a homicide disparity between blacks and whites of about 11 to 12 times.
New York City is a completely representative city.
The following disparities are true every In New York City, Blacks are 23% of the population, but they commit between 75 and 80% of all shootings.
If you add Hispanic shootings to Black shootings, you account for 98% of all drive-by illegal shootings in New York City.
Whites, by contrast, are 34% of the city's population, but they commit less than 2% of all shootings.
Now, how do we know this?
We get this data not from the so-called racist police, but from the victims of and witnesses to those shootings.
When you're looking at 98% of all shootings being committed by a black or a brown face, it means that virtually every time The cops are called out on a gun run, meaning somebody has been shot.
They're being called into minority neighborhoods and having been given a suspect description of somebody black or brown.
That's going to determine who they stop in an effort to prevent a retaliatory shooting.
Well, this is the thing, which is that the crime victimization survey, which is, of course, the relatively informal survey asking people, have you been a victim of crime or what was the race of the perpetrator?
The crime victimization survey matches the arrest records almost perfectly, in which case, Clearly the victims are racist as well and are saying a black guy stabbed me when it was in fact a white guy or more improbably an Asian guy.
And when you get that kind of alignment, when the victimization surveys match the police arrest records to say that there's racism going on is so bewildering to anybody who's got any focus on the actual empirical data.
I know.
It's just astounding.
And one can also add to that, Stefan, the victims are themselves overwhelmingly minority.
It's true.
Blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics.
They die by homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics.
And they're also overwhelmingly the shooting victims.
This Ferguson effect that I mentioned of officers backing off of policing under the Black Lives Matter narrative and the resulting crime increase, Baltimore was one of the early stellar examples of it.
In July of last year, excuse me, in May, There were 45 people killed in Baltimore, which is a large number for a city of that size.
43 of those victims were black.
That's overwhelming the case.
In Chicago this year, there have been 2,090 people shot as of July 9.
Probably about 80-90% of all of those victims have been black.
The rest are mostly Hispanic with some whites thrown in there.
Now, if you listen to the Black Lives Matter movement, you'd hear 2,090 people shot.
They must have all been shot by the cops.
It turns out in Chicago this year, the cops have shot nine people, virtually all of them armed and resisting arrest.
That's 0.4% of all shootings in Chicago.
Cops are not the problem, they're the solution.
Well, let's talk about that because One of the great tragedies, and there are so many tragedies in this hellish dish that's being served up by the media these days, one of the great tragedies is the degree to which the quality of life in people in poor neighborhoods, and particularly blacks in poor neighborhoods, the degree to which their quality of life declines.
Because all we ever hear about is black resentment of police.
Now, given that blacks have a disproportionately large population class of criminals, well, of course, criminals dislike police.
I understand that, the sort of natural antithesis, natural enemies.
But the blacks who want law and order, the blacks who call the police, the blacks who want the police around helping them, they're the ones whose voices we never seem to hear, and they, to me, seem like the true victims in these situations.
Well, Stefan, you, in the first part of your remarks there, you made an observation that is utterly, seemingly unreachable by the media that some of the people that they quote constantly who express this hostility to the cops, and the cops have been beating them up, are criminals.
You know, the complaints that are filed against the cops are overwhelmingly filed by people who were lawfully arrested and want to retaliate.
So let's demystify a lot of the sources that I think that's what I've tried to do in this book,
is give voice to those law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who beg For more police.
People like Mrs.
Sweeper, a cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx, who told me, please, Jesus, send more police.
The only time she feels safe to go down to her building lobby to pick up her mail is when the cops are there, because it's otherwise colonized by trespassing youth, smoking weed, and dealing drugs.
Right.
And let's...
The root causes, of course, is something that we all as a civilized society need to examine.
I think waving the magic wand of white racism is only obscuring some of the root causes.
And I've talked about those in this show as well.
But the one that you return to again and again in the book, and I think quite rightly so...
is fatherlessness.
That there is no amount of increased policing, increased government spending is ever going to make up for the fact that these young men are growing up without fathers, and not just personally, but across the entire culture.
When you've got three quarters of black youths growing up in single mother households, it's not just that they don't have fathers, but their friends do.
There's an entire, it's like a neutron bomb has just gone off and taken out the males in the entire society and relegated them to like the worst possible role models in many cases that you could imagine.
That's absolutely right.
And you're, you're so right, Stefan to focus on the systemic issue.
And it's, and there's another aspect to that.
It's, it's that the expectation of marriage civilizes boys.
If you know, that the only way you can get a chance to impregnate a female is by marrying her, you need, as you're growing up, to develop certain bourgeois habits of respectability and presentability.
And that script of expecting that you're going to be asked to propose marriage and be a breadwinner It affects the choices that boys make and structures their lives.
On the other hand, when you have a culture where it is now simply assumed That there is serial promiscuity and that boys are going to be allowed and without any pressure brought on them to impregnate and sleep with a whole series of females without ever any expectation of marriage.
That removes from those boys an important civilizing expectation.
And now what we see in the inner city, even if all of a sudden There would be some sort of revolution where people say, oh, I guess I better marry the mother of my child.
The question would be, which mother would that be?
There's something that is known now as serial fertility, where you have mothers with children by several different fathers And fathers with children by several different mothers.
So you can imagine the kind of Venn diagram to try and figure out these family relations.
It becomes almost impossible to work this out.
Well, and I just want to point out for people that, as you point out in the book, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a very powerful and prescient analysis of what he considered the welfare state was going to do to future black family breakdown.
In 1965, black illegitimacy was one-third what it is now.
And certainly we would argue that if racism is a factor, it would be stronger in 1960 than it would be in the current year.
So I just really wanted to point that out.
Now, I know we're short on time, but Heather, what is it that you would like to say to the media?
How is it that they're dropping the ball?
What could they do to help bring the facts that can really help solve these problems to the attention of the general public?
Well, Stefan, I think there's two things that the media inevitably miss.
One is the enormous support for proactive policing in the inner city.
Give voice to those people.
And then...
You know, we've been having this conversation about phantom police racism for the last 20 years in order not to talk, as you point out, about a far more uncomfortable truth, which is black crime.
Every police chief in this country should bite the bullet and stand up and make the media pay attention to what the crime rates are in his city that explain why, as Obama said appallingly, After Dallas massacres, he said, well, he complained about the fact that blacks are twice as likely to be arrested as whites, leaving out crime rates.
You cannot understand or talk about policing today without taking into account crime rates.
But those have been kept completely off stage because nobody wants to acknowledge that problem.
That's what we need to start bringing into public discourse today, I think.
And it is to me a kind of racism because if we say blame whites for problems within the black community, we're saying, well, only whites are the moral agents when it comes to black communities.
And that downgrades the capacity or potential for blacks to solve their own community problems.
But as long as we're obscuring the data and hiding the true source of the issues, nobody can solve anything.
And that's the most frustrating part.
So thanks so much for your time.
We're going to put a link to your book.
Below, you've got some great interviews online, which we will link to as well.
And I really appreciate the book.
I know it's not the first time you've written about it.
Hopefully it will be one of the last.
The book is The War on Cops, How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.
