In 1990, 2,245 people were murdered in New York City, the most ever. In Los Angeles, the high-water mark for homicide came in 1992, when 1,092 people were killed. In the years since, those grim numbers fell steadily in both cities, reflecting a national drop in violent crime. In 2014, New York saw 333 murders; in Los Angeles, the number was 260. In those two cities alone, thousands of people are alive today who would not be if not for the advances in policing methods that came into practice in the early 1990s. This is to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of additional people who would have been robbed, assaulted, or otherwise victimized if crime rates had remained constant at their appalling early-1990s numbers. No writer has expended more energy in chronicling how those remarkable gains were achieved than Heather Mac Donald. And no writer is more dismayed at seeing those gains being undone.
In The War on Cops, Mac Donald examines the multi-front attack on the police and the justice system now being waged in a misguided campaign to lower incarceration rates and decriminalize socially destructive behavior. Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, examines each of these fronts: street-level demonstrations by Black Lives Matter activists; political efforts at the local, state, and federal levels; judicial mischief in the courts; dishonest use of data in the media and among academics; and even distortions and prevarications on crime from President Obama himself. It was President Obama, Mac Donald reminds us, who in addressing the NAACP in July 2015 propagated the destructive lie that the disproportionate number of minorities in prison could be attributed to bias in the criminal-justice system. “The bottom line,” said the president, “is that in too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law.” Actual evidence of this bias, says Mac Donald, is the holy grail among academics working in criminology. But, like the Holy Grail of the Middle Ages, such evidence has not been found.
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