There is no more
important book to read right now than Heather Mac Donald’s clear-eyed, riveting
new work The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law
and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. You cannot fully get to the core of the
truth about the current anti-cop sentiment in the country, or be armed with the
facts to shoot down Black Lives Matter lies without reading it. If you can get
a copy, that is – demand is so great that there is currently a one-to-two month
wait for it on Amazon.com. Don’t wait – get the ebook.
In case you
haven’t already been following everything Mac Donald writes, she is the Thomas
W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City
Journal. Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post, New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New
Criterion, and elsewhere.
She is the
recipient of the New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association’s 2004
Civilian Valor Award, the 2008 Integrity in Journalism award from the New York
State Shields, the 2008 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of
Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies, and the 2012 Quill &
Badge Award for Excellence in Communication from the International Union of
Police Associations. In other words, unlike the legion of talking heads in the
news media pontificating about the racism in American law enforcement, Heather
Mac Donald has actually done the journalistic legwork, is qualified to discuss
the subject, and is bold enough to speak the truth about it.
The War on Cops begins by noting
that crime is skyrocketing in cities across the United States as “the most
anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close.” This isn’t,
however, “the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies,
rather, in the delegitimization of law and order itself.” If we don’t begin to
counter the present lies about law enforcement propagated by the Black Lives
Matter movement and facilitated by a complicit media and by the “academic
victimology industry,” Mac Donald concludes, civilized urban life will break
down – which we are already beginning to witness.
Ms. Mac Donald
took time out to answer a few questions about crime, terrorism, and the recent
Dallas cop shooting for FrontPage Mag.
Mark Tapson: More than a dozen years ago you
wrote Are Cops Racist? in which you pushed back against the
anti-profiling crusade and warned that it was undermining the law enforcement progress
of the previous decade. What, if anything, has changed between that book and
your newest one?
Heather Mac Donald: We are now living in the most anti-law
enforcement administration in recent memory and most likely in American
history. The specious “driving while black” crusade of the 1990s and early
2000s was mostly promulgated by left-wing activists, albeit with help from the
mainstream media.
Today, we have a
president who regularly spreads the poisonous lie that the criminal justice
system is racist. The academic victimology industry, presciently identified by
David Horowitz’s pioneering work, has only become more entrenched and powerful
over the last decade. It, too, is the essential helpmate of the Black Lives
Matter movement, propelling the anti-cop narrative to powerful mainstream
status.
MT: What were your
thoughts upon hearing of last week’s Dallas shooting in progress, when police
were dying and being wounded even as they tried to protect the demonstrators
who had gathered there to protest their supposed racial bias?
HM: I was overcome by acute
fear for this country. The elite
establishment has been playing with fire in stoking the Black Lives Matter
hatred of the police, and that fire may now be raging out of control.
MT: With the rise of
Black Lives Matter and a news media and government administration that are
fomenting anti-cop sentiment, is it too alarmist to suggest that we are headed
toward a breakdown of civil society if nothing is done?
HM: It is not only not
alarmist to warn of a breakdown of civil society, it is imperative to issue
such a warning. Officers working in inner-city areas face animus and resistance
to their lawful authority on a daily basis. Law and order, and respect for the
law, are disintegrating. A Chicago police officer told me last month that he
has never experienced such hatred in his twenty years on the job. The Dallas
assassinations, like the assassinations of two New York City police officers in
December 2014, are just a more extreme, horrific version of the animus that
officers encounter regularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
MT: This is a little
off-topic from your book, but you’ve written about anti-terrorism before – in
light of the proliferating Islamic attacks on American soil, are our
counterterrorism efforts being hindered in much the same way as our law
enforcement is with crime?
HM: Our unwillingness to
speak the truth about Islamic terrorism is if anything more perverse than our
unwillingness to recognize the reality of black crime. The elites mostly just
ignore black crime. In the case of Islamic terrorism, however, they
affirmatively rebrand it as, for example, an eruption of Republican homophobia
or opposition
to transgender bathroom use, as we saw in the recent Orlando attacks.
My guess,
however, is that actual anti-terrorism activity is much less hindered by
official myopia. Intelligence agents are not encountering vicious and sometimes
physical hatred as they go about their work, unlike police officers in urban
areas. And intelligence gathering, the key to successful counterterrorism,
still largely occurs off-stage, despite the efforts of Julian Assange, Edward
Snowden, and their allies in the cyber libertarian Left.
MT: Why
do you think the left is so impervious to facts and common sense where law
enforcement and counterterrorism are concerned? Is it just willful blindness or
is there also a radical element that simply finds common cause with criminals
and jihadists?
HM: The
nation’s elites are committed to the belief that white racism is the biggest
evil in the world. That narrative is a source of self-righteousness and a sense
of superiority. It blinds the elites to any acknowledgement of inner-city
dysfunction or Islamic
misogyny and homophobia.
And since the
1960s, we have glorified anti-establishment protest. College bureaucrats and
professors encourage high school and college students to play at being
oppressed radicals, notwithstanding that those students are among the most
privileged individuals in human history, enjoying access to intellectual,
social, and physical resources that kings in the age of absolutism could never
have dreamed of. It is hard to know whether there are any true “radicals” in
our society, whatever that may mean, or whether it is all self-engrossed
play-acting for the gratification of the preening elites.
From FrontPage Mag, 7/15/16
