Effective policing calls for the establishment and projection of the rule of law, and nothing less.
Effective policing calls for the establishment and projection of the rule of law, and nothing less.
I n his much-hyped visit to New York City this past week to meet with new mayor Eric Adams just after the funerals of two police officers murdered in Harlem, President Biden vowed to go after the guns. As if the guns were spontaneously shooting themselves — the same way the Left told us that the crowd at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., was attacked “by an SUV,” as if it had not been driven by a violent career criminal, Darrell Brooks.
Biden’s mantra is guns. He’d be better off acquainting himself with a different g-word: gangs. The surge in urban crime, very much including violent crime, has long been driven by gangs.
Biden doesn’t want to talk about gangs for the same reason “progressive prosecutors,” whose rise to big-city power is underwritten by hard-left funding streams, don’t want to prosecute them — they overflow with young African-American males. Other ethnic groups, too, of course, but gangs and what passes for their “culture” influence the black community like no other, to the point that progressives long ago gave up confronting them, then gave up ignoring them, and finally settled on mainstreaming them.
Consistent with that approach, Biden and his party, which controls the Big Apple and other major cities across the nation with an iron political fist, pretend that the real peril is not gangs but guns — unless, of course, the “gang” in question is a police department.
Gun ownership, at least legal gun ownership, trends lower in New York City than the national average. Moreover, there have always been plenty of guns in the city, including throughout the generation in which crime was driven down to record lows — from 1991, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s election ushered in intelligence-driven policing and “broken windows” policies, until these strategies were gradually reversed under Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat.
In 1990, there were over 2,200 murders in New York City; by 2017, there were under 300. The difference was not guns. It was policing, which included the unapologetically proactive investigation of gangs.
Contrary to Biden’s shopworn gun bromides, crime would not be reduced materially by cutting off weapons shipments into New York. This is a hobbyhorse of Washington progressives, both because federal jurisdiction over gun crimes hinges on their movement in interstate commerce, and because bloviating about guns is more palatable than addressing who exactly is using guns illegally, a third rail in Democratic Party politics.
Let’s put aside that most gun commerce is lawful, in furtherance of the fundamental right of self-defense vouchsafed by the Second Amendment. It is a remorseless fact that there are already enough firearms in circulation to facilitate violent crime for decades. And that’s without counting the Democrats’ latest fixation, “ghost guns,” a term now applied to virtually any gun without a serial number (thereby undermining registration laws and tracing), but which commonly refers to guns produced in do-it-yourself fashion, via assembly kits or evolving 3-D printing technology.
There are always guns, whether crime is rising or falling. Today, crime is rising because Democrats and their radical-left allies — such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and way too much of academe — hew to a delusional, racialist narrative that young black men are being hunted down by America’s police departments. Their theory is laughably juvenile. Alas, the laughably juvenile can take hold when a society cedes the institutions of learning and opinion to revolutionaries who gradually supplant reason with demagogy about an intersectional “us” forever victimized by “them” — the white power structure.
Having suppressed dissenting speech and rationality, the demagogues inculcated their “disparate impact” theory into the law, the curriculum, the popular culture, and the political sacred cows that may not be questioned on pain of that modern ostracism, cancellation. Disparate-impact theory holds that if members of a specific group — indeed, a very specific group, young black men — are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated at rates significantly higher than their percentage of the population, it can only be because of systemic racism. From that kooky premise, it follows that the police, not the lawbreakers, need reforming.
It is ludicrous scholarly abstraction divorced from practical reality — you may remember practical reality as the place politicians who represent flesh-and-blood people are supposed to inhabit.
Overwhelmingly, police do not witness crime. Crime is instead reported to police, generally by victims and witnesses, who identify or otherwise describe their assailants. Our knowledge of who commits crime is not based on racist police planting incriminating evidence and coercing confessions. We know who commits it because of accounts from the communities that are preyed upon. And crime being essentially local, those crime-ravaged communities are disproportionately African American. That is another fact never to be mentioned: The Left chooses to champion the rights of criminals, while the plight of the communities is exploited to demand ever more redistribution of wealth, which is duly funneled to political insiders. That is what the radical Left’s “defund the police” scam is about.
Young black men — including the likes of Lashawn McNeil, who murdered NYPD officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora last month, and Ishmaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, who murdered officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in a brutal assassination-style shooting in 2014 after openly bragging that he would be “putting wings on pigs today” — are subjected to higher prosecution rates because, as a class, they offend at abnormally high rates. That fact is so irrefutable that demagogues are left to make its mention a cancellation offense.
Now, it should go without saying — but we must say it — that even an irrefutable fact about group behavior does not condemn any individual black man a priori. It is a bedrock American constitutional principle that guilt is personal. Unlike the Left, we do not presume individual guilt based on race or class membership; and no one should be subject to police scrutiny absent individualized suspicion.
At the same time, though, neither are individuals immune from suspicion because of their group attachments — which is what progressives insist on, either in a nod to their disparate-impact alchemy or in atonement for past societal sins of discrimination. Crime cannot be reduced by refraining from arrests and prosecutions, or by releasing recidivists who should be in custody. Inevitably, common sense says (if it is allowed to speak), such derelictions lead to crime that goes unpunished — and a lot more of it, destroying communities and lives.
Our wizened Washington wizard can drone on all he likes, but Biden will not reduce crime by blowing more of your billions on bloated bureaucracies. Nor by grandstanding on guns and preening about federal-state “partnerships.” Fleetingly on Thursday, the president veered off script into an implicit concession that violent crime involves triggers being pulled by actual human beings. He thus vowed to get not just the guns but the “shooters.” That’s great . . . except for the inconvenience that what makes them shooters is that they’ve already shot somebody.
Effective policing calls for the establishment and projection of the rule of law. Police have to be proactive. They have to do what they did beginning in the ’90s — back when the weathervane known as Senate Judiciary chairman Joe Biden posed as a tough-on-gang-crime Democrat. That is, police commanders have to peruse the intelligence generated by visible patrols and arrests, in order to deploy cops to the places where crime is starting to rear its head. You don’t want to react to crime spikes, you want to show the flag so that they don’t become spikes. Police also need plainclothes officers to infiltrate the neighborhoods where gangs are active and to make arrests for street crimes, even minor ones. That’s how you get the guns that are in the wrong hands off the streets before the criminal becomes a shooter. That’s how you show the gangbangers there is a dear price to be paid — arrest, prosecution, incarceration — for illegally possessing guns.
The idea is to reestablish a law-abiding culture. That means the political class has to back the police, not vilify them. It has to trumpet the fact that police departments are more racially and ethnically integrated, more a mirror of their communities, than they have ever before been. It has to stop slandering them as the pointy end of a systemically racist spear.
I am not holding my breath. President Biden is blathering about guns and money because, to truly take on crime, Democrats would have to abandon their radical allies and the race obsessions that drive their politics.
There are some signs of course correction in this regard, though they are few and far between. Mayor Adams appears to be one of them, though I fear his bite will not match his bark. But this is going to take a long time. Remember, by the time states and municipalities got a grip on crime in the ’90s, it had been raging for nearly 30 years. Democrats had to be dragged along kicking and screaming. That only happened when, believe it or not, things had gotten far worse than they are now. Yes, last year’s 485 murders in New York City marked an alarming rise from the 2017 low of 292; but it was still nearly five times less than the 1991 crest. From the late ’60s until then, it was routine for the city to exceed 1,500 murders per annum (often by hundreds), and murders didn’t creep back under that level until 1995.
Three things we can say with confidence, though. Police cannot be effective unless the political class has their back. Effective policing would place the spotlight on gangs, not guns. And you can have the rule of law or you can have disparate-impact theory, but you can’t have both.