Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Beginning in the 1960s, New York’s murder rate rose steadily, peaking at 2,245 deaths in 1990. By 2012 the number had dropped to 419, a forty-year low. Former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly credited stop and frisk and other kinds of proactive policing as a major reason for the decline. Again, the biggest beneficiaries of this trend were blacks, who comprised 60 percent of murder victims in the Big Apple in 2012. “No police department in the country has come close to achieving what the NYPD has,” wrote Heather Mac Donald. “New York’s crime drop has been twice as deep and has lasted twice as long as the national average since the early 1990s. Today, 10,000 minority males are alive who would have been killed by now had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early-1990s levels.”31 To the extent that soft-on-crime rulings like this result in less effective policing, blacks will suffer most.