In 1990, 2,245 people were murdered in New York City, the most ever. In Los Angeles, the high-water mark for homicide came in 1992, when 1,092 people were killed. In the years since, those grim numbers fell steadily in both cities, reflecting a national drop in violent crime. In 2014, New York saw 333 murders; in Los Angeles, the number was 260. In those two cities alone, thousands of people are alive today who would not be if not for the advances in policing methods that came into practice in the early 1990s. This is to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of additional people who would have been robbed, assaulted, or otherwise victimized if crime rates had remained constant at their appalling early-1990s numbers. No writer has expended more energy in chronicling how those remarkable gains were achieved than Heather Mac Donald. And no writer is more dismayed at seeing those gains being undone.
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And the evidence, Mac Donald tells us, is that America’s police officers have of late been slandered in a deliberate campaign of misinformation and dishonest interpretation of data, perhaps the most pernicious example of which is, as in President Obama’s remarks noted above, the assertion that blacks are unfairly targeted by racist police officers and unjustly funneled through the justice system by equally racist (or at least indifferent) prosecutors and judges. She cites a 1997 study by criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen, who reviewed “massive literature on charging and sentencing” and reached a conclusion that was surely discomfiting to those searching for a biased system. The researchers concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were imprisoned proportionately than whites, and for longer terms. Study after study has confirmed these findings, says Mac Donald, yet “this consensus hasn’t made the slightest dent in the ongoing search for systemic racism.”
