Heather Mac Donald: There Is No Epidemic Of Racist Police Shootings

Heather Mac Donald, (seen in the below photo), the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of The Diversity Delusion and the War On Cops offers a piece tin National Review debunking the idea of an epidemic of racist police shootings.   

The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no longer have to fear when their children “walk[] the streets of America” — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/

You can also read my Crime Beat column Q&A with Heather Mac Donald via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/07/my-crime-beat-column-war-on-cops.html 

My Washington Times Piece, 'Sympathy For The Criminal'

The Washington Times published my piece on the left’s misguided sympathy for criminals.

My wife and I visited our daughter and her Air Force pilot husband in California recently, and we spent a day at the famous former federal prison on Alcatraz Island.

Located in San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz once held some of the most notorious criminals in American history. The Justice Department took over Alcatraz in 1934 as it wanted a prison that would house criminals too dangerous and disruptive to be kept at other prisons.

Foremost among the notorious prisoners was mobster Al Capone, who was transferred here when it was discovered that he was running his Chicago criminal organization from the penitentiary in Atlanta. His mob leadership role ended abruptly when Capone entered his Alcatraz cell.

According to John Kobler, author of “Capone,” Al Capone, the country’s most famous gangster at the time said, “It looks like Alcatraz has got me licked.”

Other notorious criminals held at Alcatraz were gangsters, Alvin “Creepy Karpis” Karpowicz, whom the FBI in the 1930s called “Public Enemy No. 1,” and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. Robert Stroud, a convicted murderer known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” was also a prisoner on “the Rock.”

The prison closed in 1963 and since then millions of tourists have visited the island.

Two of these tourists, a middle-age white couple, stood in front of me at one point and stated loudly for all to hear that the conditions at Alcatraz were inhumane. They also said that today’s prisons were still terrible and bemoaned the “mass incarceration” of black people. They went on to praise President Obama for his attempt at prison reform.

Tempted to refute their assertions, as there is no “mass” in American incarceration — criminals commit crimes individually, they are arrested and convicted individually, and they are sentenced individually — it was prudent to just let it pass. And a thought occurred: Why does the left seem to sympathize more with criminals than with crime victims?

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/7/misguided-sympathizers-incorrectly-assert-that-inc/ 

Note: The top photo is of Alcatraz and San Francisco. The middle photo is the federal mugshot of Al Capone at Alcatraz and the above photo is of President Obama at El Reno prison. 

Trump Can End The War On Cops

Heather Mac Donald, author of The War On Cops: How the New Attack On Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, offers a piece in the Wall Street Journal on how Trump can end the war on cops.

Donald Trump’s promise to restore law and order to America’s cities was one of the most powerful themes of his presidential campaign. His capacity to deliver will depend on changing destructive presidential rhetoric about law enforcement and replacing the federal policies that flowed from that rhetoric.

The rising violence in many urban areas is driven by what candidate Trump called a “false narrative” about policing. This narrative holds that law enforcement is pervaded by racism, and that we are experiencing an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men.

Multiple studies have shown that those claims are untrue. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. Yet President Obama has repeatedly accused the police and criminal-justice system of discrimination, lethal and otherwise. During the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July by an assassin who reportedly was inspired by Black Lives Matter, Mr. Obama announced that black parents were right to “fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be fatally shot by a cop.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-can-end-the-war-on-cops-1481931231

Note: I read Heather Mac Donald's excellent book and I plan on interviewing her after the New Year holiday. You can read the Q&A with her on this site.

The War On Cops: How The New Attack On Law And Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

Jeffrey G. Gahler offers a review of Heather Mac Donald's The War on Cops: How The New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe for the Washington Times.

In “The War on Cops,” Heather Mac Donald provides overwhelming and compelling data to discount the misguided, misplaced and too often malice-based attacks on the law enforcement profession taking place in our country every day. The proven and effective tactic of focusing police efforts on analytically identified high crime areas has improved the quality of life for countless honest, law-abiding citizens living in challenged neighborhoods throughout this country. More importantly, proactive and targeted enforcement have saved countless lives, many of whom are from urban areas and minority communities.

These same communities have seen the positive impact that purposed policing can offer. They have also seen the damage from false messaging and rhetoric. The assault on law enforcement has brought with it a reduced quality of life for those who desperately deserve a chance, and increased crime and unacceptable homicide rates to these same communities. The degradation of these communities is a direct byproduct of the war on cops. De-policing — a phenomenon of police not engaging or refusing to take proactive enforcement actions based on crime patterns and data — has led to a dramatic increase in violent crime and lives lost all over this country. You need to look no further than Baltimore or Chicago to see the impact of de-policing, which is well documented within these pages.

The attacks on law enforcement, attacks based on false information or outright lies crafted to discredit an entire profession, are undeserved. As outlined in the data provided by Ms. Mac Donald, the police profession is the one aspect of government that has had a meaningful impact in many of the communities in need. Over the past several decades, program upon program, dollar upon dollar, have been “invested” in struggling communities trying to make them better. While most have failed, it is our police who have not. It is our police who have held the line for the people the programs have failed.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/25/book-review-the-war-on-cops-how-the-new-attack-on-/