Is There a War on Cops?
2017-05-28 · Guest: Heather Mac Donald (Author of The War on Cops) · 5:50
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.