The War on Cops Quotes

“Go to any police-and-community meeting in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Harlem, and you will hear pleas such as the following: Teens are congregating on my stoop; can you please arrest them? SUVs are driving down the street at night with their stereos blaring; can’t you do something? People have been barbecuing on the pedestrian islands of Broadway; that’s illegal! The targets of these complaints may be black and Hispanic, but the people making the complaints, themselves black and Hispanic, don’t care. They just want orderly streets.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The Times serves up a good example of anti-cop propaganda when it confidently states that “many police officers see black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human beings.” That would be news to the thousands of police officers who are the only people willing to put their lives on the line to protect innocent blacks from predation. Until editors and reporters from the Times start patrolling dark stairwells in housing projects and running toward gang gunfire, their superior concern for black men will lack credibility.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“New York City is typical: blacks are only 23 percent of the population but commit over 75 percent of all shootings in the city, as reported by the victims of and witnesses to those shootings; whites commit under 2 percent of all shootings, according to victims and witnesses, though they are 33 percent of the city’s population. Blacks commit 70 percent of all robberies; whites, 4 percent. The black-white crime disparity in New York would be even greater without New York’s large Hispanic population. Black and Hispanic shootings together account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The Washington Post found press documentation of 258 black victims of fatal police shootings in 2015, most of whom were seriously attacking the officer. In 2014, the most recent year for which such data are available, there were 6,095 black homicide victims in the United States, which means that the police could eliminate all of their own fatal shootings without having a significant impact on the black homicide death rate. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks—who are responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The public could perhaps be forgiven for believing that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life,” given the media frenzy that follows every such police killing, rare as they are, compared with the silence that greets the daily homicides committed by blacks against other blacks.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“In Los Angeles, for example, blacks commit 42 percent of all robberies and 34 percent of all felonies, though they are 10 percent of the city’s population. Whites commit 5 percent of all robberies and 13 percent of all felonies, though they are 29.4 percent of the city’s population.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Using victims’ crime reports, cops focused on violent hot spots; since black Americans are disproportionately the victims of crime, just as blacks are disproportionately its perpetrators, effective policing was heaviest in minority neighborhoods. The cops were there because they do believe that black lives matter.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 die from shootings at more than six times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined, thanks to a ten times higher rate of homicide committed by black teens. Until the black family is reconstituted, the best protection that the law-abiding residents of urban neighborhoods have is the police. They are the government agency most committed to the proposition that “black lives matter.” The relentless effort to demonize the police for enforcing the law can only leave poor communities more vulnerable to anarchy. 5”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The investigation “did not support” the charges? The DOJ decided “not to file charges”? This phrasing massively misrepresents the content of the report on the shooting. It was not a question of evidence “not supporting” high-threshold civil rights charges; it was a question of evidence eviscerating virtually every aspect of the pro-Brown, anti-Wilson narrative. Under no imaginable standard of proof could Wilson be found guilty of civil rights violations—or, for that matter, murder. As the report states: “Multiple credible witnesses corroborate virtually every material aspect of Wilson’s account and are consistent with the physical evidence.” Those “material aspects” include Wilson’s testimony that Brown punched and grabbed him while Wilson was in his SUV, that Brown tried to seize his gun, and that Brown charged at Wilson after Wilson had exited his car.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Even if we accept the Post’s typology of “unarmed” victims at face value, the per capita rate of officers being feloniously killed is 45 times higher than the rate at which unarmed black males are killed by cops. And an officer’s chance of getting killed by a black assailant is 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black getting killed by a cop.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers now is not “over-policing,” and certainly not brutal policing. The NYPD has one of the lowest rates of officer shootings and killings in the country; it is recognized internationally for its professionalism and training standards. Deaths such as Eric Garner’s are an aberration, which the department does everything it can to avoid. The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers today is de-policing. After years of ungrounded criticism from the press and activists, after highly publicized litigation and the passage of ill-considered laws—such as the one making officers financially liable for alleged “racial profiling”—NYPD officers have radically scaled back their discretionary activity. Pedestrian stops have dropped 80 percent citywide and almost 100 percent in some areas. The department is grappling with how to induce officers to use their lawful authority again to stop crime before it happens. Garner’s death was a heartbreaking tragedy, but the unjustified backlash against misdemeanor enforcement is likely to result in more tragedy for New Yorkers.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Anger over Garner’s death is understandable. No one should die for selling untaxed cigarettes or even for resisting arrest, though the officers certainly did not intend to kill Garner, and a takedown may be justified when a suspect resists. Protests initially centered on the officer’s seeming use of a choke-hold, which is banned by NYPD policy. But critics of the NYPD expanded the campaign against the police to include misdemeanor enforcement itself. This is pure opportunism. There is no connection between the theory and practice of quality-of-life enforcement, on the one hand, and Garner’s death, on the other. It was Garner’s resistance to arrest that triggered the events leading to his death, however disproportionate that outcome, not the policing of illegal cigarette sales. Suspects resist arrest for all sorts of crimes. The only way to prevent the remote possibility of death following an attempted arrest, beyond eliminating the use of choke-holds (if that is indeed what caused Garner’s heart attack), is to make no arrests at all, even for felonies.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“This kind of misinformation about the criminal-justice system and the police can only increase hatred of the police. That hatred, in turn, will heighten the chances of more Michael Browns attacking officers and getting shot themselves. Police officers in the tensest areas may hold off from assertive policing. Such de-policing will leave thousands of law-abiding minority residents who fervently support the police ever more vulnerable to thugs. Obama couldn’t have stopped the violence in Ferguson with his address to the nation. But in casting his lot with those who speciously impugn our criminal-justice system, he increased the likelihood of more such violence in the future.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“A straight line can be drawn between family breakdown and youth violence. In Chicago’s poor black neighborhoods, criminal activity among the young has reached epidemic proportions. It’s a problem that no one, including the Chicago Police Department, seems able to solve. About 80 percent of black children in Chicago are born to single mothers. They grow up in a world where marriage is virtually unheard of and where no one expects a man to stick around and help raise a child.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The 36 unarmed black male victims of police shootings in 2015 measured against the total black male population (nearly 19 million in mid-2014, Per the Census Bureau) amounts to a per capita rate of 0.0000018 unarmed fatalities by police. In comparison, 52 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed while engaged in such duties as traffic stops and warrant service in 2015, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. The FBI counted close to 628,000 full-time law enforcement officers in 2014. Assuming that the number of officers did not markedly increase in 2015, the per capita rate of officers being feloniously killed is 0.000081. The Memorial Fund does not have data on the race of cop-killers in 2015, but applying the historical percentages would yield 21 cops killed by blacks in 2015. An officer’s chance of getting killed by a black assailant is 0.000033.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The Riot Show! What if they held a race riot and the news media stayed away? At the very least, we would be spared the nauseating spectacle of sycophantic reporters fawning on opportunistic thieves, as happened yet again during the outbreak of antipolice violence in Baltimore in April 2015. We wouldn’t see talking heads blaming the mayhem on “desperate poverty” or on “disparity,” or characterizing it as an “uprising” born of understandable anger. More important, the vandals would lose a bounty as valuable as their purloined booty: notoriety and legitimacy.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Vitale also argues that New York’s crime drop is no different from elsewhere: “There is very little support for the idea that Broken Windows policing in and of itself is responsible for the crime drop. The crime drop is a national and international phenomenon, and it’s been happening in cities that never had Broken Windows policing,” he says. More straw men. No one has ever claimed that Broken Windows efforts were uniquely responsible for the crime drop. But they were part of a related set of strategies that catapulted New York far ahead of the competition. New”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Having eviscerated the legitimate practice of pedestrian stops, the anti-cop brigades set their sights on Broken Windows policing. Leading the charge is Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College sociologist. Members of the New York City Council and a preposterously named protest group called “New Yorkers Against Bratton” are close on his heels. Naturally, Vitale plays the race card, following other anti–Broken Windows academics (such as Bernard Harcourt, now at Columbia Law School). According to Vitale, the NYPD disproportionately and unjustifiably targets minority neighborhoods for misdemeanor enforcement, resulting in the “over-policing” of “communities of color.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Officers approached the 43-year-old Garner on July 17 in a high-crime area near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and accused him of illegally selling untaxed cigarettes—the kind of misdemeanor that Broken Windows policing aims to curb. Garner had already been arrested more than 30 times, mostly for selling loose cigarettes but also for marijuana possession and other offenses. As captured in a cell-phone video, the 350-pound man loudly objected to the charge and broke free when an officer tried to handcuff him. The officer then put his arm around Garner’s neck and pulled him to the ground. Garner repeatedly stated that he couldn’t breathe, and then went eerily stiff and quiet. After a seemingly interminable time on the ground without assistance, Garner was finally put on a stretcher to be taken to an emergency room. He died of cardiac arrest before arriving at the hospital. Garner suffered from severe asthma and diabetes, among other ailments, which contributed to his heart attack.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Subsequently, police commanders across the country also adopted it. But in the summer of 2014, longtime critics of the NYPD seized on the death of Eric Garner while in police custody to call for an end to proactive policing.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“One of the most effective remedies against urban anarchy over the past two decades is under attack. Proactive policing—also called Broken Windows policing—calls for the enforcement of low-level misdemeanor laws regulating public order. Manhattan Institute fellow George Kelling and Harvard professor James Q. Wilson first articulated the Broken Windows theory in 1982 as a means of quelling public fear of crime and restoring order to fraying communities. William Bratton embraced the thinking in his first tour as commissioner of the New York Police Department in the 1990s, with great benefit to public safety.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The report is more persuasive in describing the department’s shoddy record-keeping and the lax oversight of beat cops. The failure to supervise officers’ use of force results in excessive resort to Tasers. Equally problematic is Ferguson’s practice of issuing a quasi-warrant known as a “wanted” without the requisite probable cause to believe that the target has committed a crime. (Many other departments abuse “wanteds,” too.) The municipal court, like the police department, is error-prone in its records and notice systems. Had the Justice Department blasted Ferguson’s management and training failures and left it at that, it would have been on solid footing. But the imperative to racialize the problems was overwhelming, especially given Holder’s previous statements against Ferguson and the subsequent discrediting of the Brown story. So the department trots out the usual statistical analyses with which to bootstrap a charge of “intentional discrimination” against blacks. And these statistical analyses are irredeemably deficient.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“As for the now-iconic “Hands up, don’t shoot” claim, the DOJ report is withering: “There are no credible witness accounts that state that Brown was clearly attempting to surrender when Wilson shot him. As detailed throughout this report, those witnesses who say so have given accounts that could not be relied upon in a prosecution because they are irreconcilable with the physical evidence, inconsistent with the credible accounts of other eyewitnesses, inconsistent with the witness’s own prior statements, or in some instances, because the witnesses have acknowledged that their initial accounts were untrue.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Holder had already commissioned a second report on the allegedly racist Ferguson police force to counter his own agency’s expected demolition of the martyr narrative. But for good measure, a few days before the Brown report was to be released, Holder provided the press with another mechanism for sidelining its findings. Holder wanted to lower the standard of proof in civil rights cases, he told Politico. The subtext of this announcement: the decision not to pursue civil rights charges against Wilson was forced on the Justice Department by an overly stringent evidentiary standard; under a more realistic standard, Wilson would have been prosecuted. Voilà! The media had their angle. “The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that its investigation did not support federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson,” the New York Times acknowledged morosely in an editorial, before immediately turning to the good news: “Still, the department found overwhelming evidence of entrenched racism in Ferguson’s police force.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“However much the recent crime increase threatens the vitality of America’s cities—and thousands of lives—it is not, in itself, the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimation of law and order itself. Riots are returning to the urban landscape. Police officers are regularly pelted with bricks and water bottles during the course of their duties. Black criminals who have been told that the police are racist are more likely to resist arrest, requiring the arresting officer to use force and risk an even more violent encounter. If the present lies about law enforcement continue, civilized urban life may once again break down.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“This book challenges the premises of the growing crusade against law enforcement. In Part One, I rebut the founding myths of the Black Lives Matter movement—including the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. I document the hotly contested “Ferguson effect,” a trend that I first spotted nationally, wherein officers desist from discretionary policing and criminals thus become emboldened. In Part Two, I outline the development of the misguided legal push to force the NYPD to give up its stop, question, and frisk tactic. In Part Three, I analyze criminogenic environments in Chicago and Philadelphia and put to rest the excuse that crime—black crime especially—is the result of poverty and inequality. Finally, in Part Four, I expose the deceptions of the mass-incarceration conceit and show that the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison is actually the result of violence, not racism.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“The Justice attorneys use population data as the benchmark for police activity, rather than rates of lawbreaking.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Data-driven policing and the incarceration buildup that Goffman and her mentors so decry resulted nationally in the steepest crime drop in modern history (especially in New York), saving countless inner-city lives, both clean and dirty.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Police cannot focus on their resources where crime victims most need them without disproportionate enforcement activity in minority neighborhoods, but it is crime, not race, that determines such police deployment.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

“Lowered crime is a precondition to economic revival, not its consequence.”
― Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe