{"id":108297,"date":"2016-09-30T12:47:35","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T20:47:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=108297"},"modified":"2016-09-30T12:49:01","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T20:49:01","slug":"hillarys-debate-lies-with-her-comments-about-crime-policing-and-race-the-candidate-helps-push-a-false-and-dangerous-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=108297","title":{"rendered":"Hillary\u2019s Debate Lies – With her comments about crime, policing, and race, the candidate helps push a false\u2014and dangerous\u2014narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heather MacDonald writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with \u201csystemic racism.\u201d Race \u201cdetermines\u201d how people are \u201ctreated in the criminal justice system,\u201d she said. Blacks are \u201cmore likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated\u201d for \u201cdoing the same thing.\u201d Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides<\/a> in urban areas in nearly a half-century.<\/p>\n

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short<\/a>. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect<\/em>: \u201cRacial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,\u201d Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that \u201clarge racial differences in criminal offending,\u201d not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.<\/p>\n

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant\u2019s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware\u2019s prison population<\/a> presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission\u2019s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.<\/p>\n

Clinton also complained that \u201ctoo many young African-American and Latino men end . . . up in jail for non-violent offenses.\u201d In fact, the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are serving time<\/a> for violent felonies. The enforcement of low-level public order offenses in New York City during the mayoralties of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg actually lowered<\/em> New York State\u2019s prison population<\/a> by intervening in criminal behavior early, before it ripened into a serious felony. Even as misdemeanor arrests increased in the city, felony arrests and felony incarcerations dropped. The number of jail inmates and convicts under parole and probation supervision in New York City dropped as well. Hillary Clinton may think that low-level public-order enforcement (otherwise known as \u201cbroken windows\u201d policing) is racist, but law-abiding residents of high-crime communities beg<\/em> the police to enforce public-order laws<\/a> because they know that out of street disorder erupts gun violence and other forms of predation.<\/p>\n

Clinton reiterated her call for \u201cimplicit-bias\u201d training for officers. The premise of such training is that police officers are shooting black males out of such bias. Yet, four studies<\/a> have come out this year alone that demolish this charge. They show that if there is bias among police officers in their shooting decisions, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. \u201cImplicit-bias\u201d training, based on a lie, is a grotesque waste of resources at a time when officers are desperate for more hands-on tactical training that will help them make those crucial shoot\/don\u2019t shoot decisions in the field, or avoid being put into such an excruciating situation in the first place.<\/p>\n

Clinton claimed that \u201cstop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional.\u201d No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined<\/a> the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots. Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department\u2019s practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal, had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal. Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark<\/a> for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn\u2019t match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin\u2019s view. Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city\u2019s population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. Whites are 34 percent of the city\u2019s population; they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run\u2014meaning that someone has been shot\u2014they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.<\/p>\n

Clinton claimed that stop-and-frisk was \u201cineffective\u201d and \u201cdid not do what it needed to do.\u201d Felony crime dropped 85 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s in New York City; more than 10,000 minority males were spared the violent death that they would have experienced had homicides remained at their early 1990s levels. Stop-and-frisk was a crucial part of that crime drop, the longest and steepest on record; it\u2019s hard to imagine anything more effective than New York\u2019s proactive policing revolution. Stop-and-frisk deterred criminals from carrying guns. Equally importantly, it intervened in a range of other criminal behaviors. If an officer saw someone casing a store on a boulevard plagued with burglaries, or saw someone walking quickly behind an elderly lady in a neighborhood plagued with robberies, he would stop that person and ask a few questions. That stop may not have resulted in an arrest, but it could have averted the commission of a crime. Read on<\/a>.<\/p>\n

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* I like a lot of her City Journal stuff, and she\u2019s shown some HBD sympathies, but she\u2019s an admitted atheist. That\u2019s not going to go over well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heather MacDonald writes: Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with \u201csystemic racism.\u201d Race \u201cdetermines\u201d how people are \u201ctreated in the criminal justice system,\u201d she said. Blacks are \u201cmore likely [than whites] … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hillary-clinton"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t