I first heard about Heather Mac Donald when she wrote a book, titled:"The War on Cops". Then I read a summary of her April 27, 2016 speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan. It was in their April 2016 free newsletter, Imprimis, which I have been reading since I became a libertarian in the early 1970s. I get the hard copy, but the newsletter is online too. Hillsdale is the only libertarian college in America and does not take any money from any governments.
The quotes that follow are from a recent online article by Heather Mac Donald. She is a person with conclusions based on data, never emotions or feelings:
"The Black Lives Matter movement trades on Americans’ ignorance about the demographics of criminal offending. As long as that ignorance prevails, BLM’s anti-cop narrative will continue destroying the institutions of law and order.
... Census data is the wrong benchmark for evaluating police behavior, however. The proper benchmark is crime rates, because policing today is data-driven, deploying officers to where criminals prey on their victims.
Blacks in New York City commit over 70% of all drive-by shootings, according to the victims of, and witnesses to, those shootings, who are overwhelmingly minority themselves. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for nearly 100% of all shootings in New York City.
These numbers mean that virtually every time an officer gets a “shots fired” call over his radio, he is being called to a minority neighborhood, on behalf of a minority victim, and being given the description of a minority suspect, if anyone is cooperating with the police for once. The cops don’t wish this reality into being. It is forced upon them by the facts of crime.
Such disparities exist in every American city. In Chicago, blacks commit about 80% of all shootings and murders, and whites less than 2%, though both blacks and whites are each a little less than a third of the population. In St. Louis, blacks commit up to 100% of all homicides, though they are less than 50% of the population.
... The biggest predictor of officer behavior is civilian behavior. If a civilian resists arrest, an officer will escalate his own use of force until he gains compliance. If a civilian threatens an officer or bystanders with potentially lethal force, an officer is legally justified in using lethal force in return. Blacks resist arrest at four times the rate of whites, according to one study; a decade’s worth of data show that black males make up over 40% of all cop-killers, though they are 6% of the national population.
... When homicide rates are taken into account, whites are three times more likely than blacks to be fatally shot by an officer.
The American public is clueless about how disproportionate violent street crime is. Even hearing the numbers makes many well-meaning whites uncomfortable, though no one seems to cringe when law enforcement is accused of a reign of racist terror.
... No data collection mandate has ever required the publication of crime or traffic law violation rates by race.
... Nationally, blacks commit 88% of all interracial victimization between blacks and whites, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
... It is time to draw back the curtain on the carnage going on in the inner city. Americans deserve the truth about crime and racial statistics from the governments their tax dollars pay for. "
