'War on Cops' author: Criminals emboldened, police are backing off

As criminals become more emboldened, police officers are becoming more hesitant to enforce the law. That's the case author Heather Mac Donald makes in her book, "The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe."

Mac Donald and others have called this phenomenon "The Ferguson Effect," referencing the police shooting of an African-American man in Ferguson, Mo., and the unrest that followed.

Mac Donald says that while the U.S. does have an appalling history of racism, racism on the part of police officers is not the biggest problem in our criminal justice system.

"When police officers get out of their cars today to conduct an investigation, ask a few questions, make a pedestrian stop, they find themselves surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds," Mac Donald said. "People cursing at them, sometimes throwing things at them, resisting their lawful authority and sometimes violently resisting arrest."

Mac Donald pointed to the experience of one New York City police officer who was trying to make an arrest when he was surrounded by an angry crowd of people who began yelling at him, one person threatened to kill him, the officer told Mac Donald.

"That sort of resistance is now typical," Mac Donald said.

The rancorous attitude toward law enforcement is due in large part to a "false narrative about policing that has taken over our national discourse," she said. "That narrative holds that the police are the greatest threat facing young black men today, and that we're living through an epidemic of racially biased police shooting of black men."

This narrative has been amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, the media and President Barack Obama, Mac Donald said, pointing to one speech by the president in which he quoted a statistic that African-Americans were arrested at twice the rate of white people.

"(These statements) profoundly delegitimate our criminal justice system and with it the moral basis for government itself," she said.

Not only are those statistics dangerous, they are also false, said Mac Donald. "Virtually everything that the public thinks it knows about policing and race from the Black Lives Matter movement is wrong. Reverse it and you have the truth."

Every police shooting is a tragedy, and given law enforcement's history of involvement during slavery and the Jim Crow era, police shootings of black men are particularly fraught, she said.

However, those incidents are not representative, Mac Donald said, calling the "hands up, don't shoot" narrative surrounding the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri a "hoax" and arguing that the Black Lives Matter movement is based on "falsehoods."

Mac Donald then listed some statistics she had gathered, she did not cite a specific study:

• Last year police fatally shot 987 civilians, most of which were armed

• In 2014 police made over 11 million arrests

• Deadly weapons assaults against police occurred 27 times a day in two-thirds of the nation's police departments

• For every 10 deadly weapons assaults on a police officer, the police shoot one person

• 12 percent of all white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by a police officer

Mac Donald said that of the 987 police shooting victims 50 percent were white and 26 percent were black and that the reason people don't think the narrative should be flipped is because the media focuses less on white victims.

"So if we're going to have an anti-cop lives matter movement it would actually make more sense to call it white and Hispanic lives matter," Mac Donald said.

Mac Donald said to the crowd that if they take one thing away from her speech it would be that when talking about police activity, "the relative benchmark is crime, not population."

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Mac Donald gave this speech and took questions Dec. 8, 2016 at the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.

To hear the full discussion, click the audio player at the top of the page.

Further reading

• Data: Blacks far more likely to be cited in St. Paul cop stops

• What's it like to 'drive while black'? Take a ride with these guys

• Q&A: With Ferguson on edge, tensions also simmer in Minneapolis

• Previously: Judge tosses suit over police tactics in Ferguson protests

• More from MPR News Presents

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