Carlos Lozada writes for the Washington Post:
TO PROTECT AND SERVE: How to Fix America’s Police
By Norm Stamper. Nation Books. 309 pp. $27.99
THE WAR ON COPS: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe
By Heather Mac Donald. Encounter Books. 242 pp. $23.99
Mac Donald, by contrast, sees little wrong in the actions of America’s police, and the tragedy in Dallas, in which five officers were fatally shot by a man who “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” lends urgency to her voice. The fact that there have been fewer attacks on officers during the Obama years than under the past four presidents is only partially relevant, since Mac Donald sees the “war on cops” as a battle over reputation, policy and ideology as much as anything else. She decries the notion that African Americans are treated any worse by law enforcement as a “dangerous lie” and explains away any disparities as a matter of smart policing and grim arithmetic: Since black Americans commit a disproportionate share of murders and other violent crimes, she argues, the police must focus on their neighborhoods. “The public discourse around policing,” Mac Donald writes, “has focused exclusively on alleged police racism to the neglect of a far more serious and pervasive problem: black crime.”
…In “The War on Cops” — so subtle with a badge in crosshairs on the book cover — Mac Donald is almost grudging in her admission of any misdeeds by American police. “To be sure, any fatal police shooting of an innocent person is a horrifying tragedy, and police training must work incessantly to prevent such an outcome.” And later, she adds, “of course, police departments must constantly reinforce the message of courtesy and respect for the public.”
To be sure. Of course! But Mac Donald invariably takes the police’s self-assessment at face value, regarding any external requirements as onerous, unjust and ideologically motivated. The book is replete with attacks on journalists, activists and anyone else who questions police behavior toward African Americans. She calls out “the elites’ investment in black victimology,” the news media’s “thrill of righteousness” as it “lovingly chronicled” every protest against police violence, and the “codependency between reporters and rioters.” (Her attack on The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of police shootings get its very own chapter.) Her opponents aren’t just wrong, they all must be liars with a left-wing agenda.
Mac Donald is best known for her promotion of the “Ferguson effect” — the notion that police officers are pulling back from vigorous law enforcement because they fear being branded as racists and that U.S. crime is rising as a result. Though crime is increasing following a decades-long decline, rates remain historically low. In the book, she acknowledges that the argument is “hotly contested,” but she stands by it. (FBI chief James Comey has given some support to the idea of a Ferguson effect, while Attorney General Loretta Lynch has dismissed it entirely.)
The book’s message is harsh: There is nothing wrong with black America that is not the fault of black Americans. If black drivers endure more traffic stops, it’s because they must speed more. If there are disproportionate numbers of black Americans in prison, that’s just an accurate reflection of perpetrators of crime. And Mac Donald criticizes The Post’s database of police shootings for categorizing as “unarmed” those victims who, in her mind, behaved violently enough to have it coming. She ridicules as liberal “exculpation” any notion that crime is linked to poverty or discrimination.
“America does not have an incarceration problem; it has a crime problem,” she writes. “And the only answer to that crime problem is to rebuild the family — above all, the black family.”
