Heather Mac Donald: Enforce the Law, Regardless of Race

BUCK: Heather Mac Donald is with us now. She’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the excellent book — I’ve got a copy of it at home — The War on Cops. Her last piece in the City Journal: The Guardians in Retreat. Heather, thank you so much.

MAC DONALD: Well, thank you so much for having me on, Buck and Clay. It’s an honor.

BUCK: The Guardians in Retreat. Tell us about this. What’s going on?

MAC DONALD: Oh, it’s another example of white culling that is happening across our major institutions. The Art Institute of Chicago, which is one of the great museums in the world, decided to terminate its docent program not because the docents were doing a poor job or they weren’t communicating effectively with students, but because they were overwhelmingly white. And that in today’s world in institution after institution is a sin that you simply cannot overcome.

And so they’ve decided to give up on highly trained free labor that has introduced generations of Chicago children to the greatest masterpieces of world civilization, replace them with six paid art educators, which will be chosen not on the basis of knowledge but on the basis of the utter irrelevancy of race. If you’re a white — or if you’re especially a white male — and you are not trans or gay, you are finding doors closing to you across the culture.

CLAY: Heather, I appreciate you coming on and the work that you have done on police and the data and the danger relative to the way the media covers it is truly extraordinary. And so, 1995 was the last time this many police officers were killed, as we just saw in 2021. Why are, in your opinion, based on the data, police under attack like they have not been in basically a quarter century in this country? What is the data telling us?

MAC DONALD: Well, the data is telling us that in the first half of 2021 ambush assaults on officers were up 91%. As you say, 2021 overall was the highest since ’95. What’s going on here, I believe, is the effects of ruthless, relentless demonization of the police on the part of the elite Democratic establishment, and that includes President Joe Biden.

Joe Biden had the utter shamelessness in October during Police Week to memorialize slain officers in D.C. to bring up his constant theme that blacks in America were somehow under assault from police officers and that our criminal justice system was not meting out fair justice. That is a complete lie. None of data shows it. Even left-wing criminologists if they’re forced with a gun to the head to be honest, they will acknowledge that what drives the criminal justice system is crime, not race.

But Biden, even as recently as October, has been sending that message, and criminals get the message. You also have things like progressive prosecutors, whether it’s George Gascon in Los Angeles or the recently elected Alvin Bragg in New York City declaring, publicly announcing that they are not going to prosecute the crime of resisting arrest.

I can think of nothing more corrosive to respect for the rule of law than sending out a message that our prosecutorial establishment does not regard the disrespect for officers, the refusal to go along with lawful orders as something that should be absolutely punished. When you allow, as we saw with the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis during the first outburst of the George Floyd race riots in late May of 2020…

That police precinct was torched. It was burned to the ground. It was deliberately abandoned on the part of the city’s leaders because they did not want to have bad video showing them engaged in strong combat with the Black Lives Matter rioters. When you allow the symbols and the reality of law enforcement to be so destroyed, you are destroying everybody else’s safety. We do not have to accept this.

This crime wave that is taking down the young, elderly, the law-abiding. We do not have to accept it. It is not normal. We have to start enforcing the law again without regard to the consequences of disparate impact, which is why everybody’s backing off of law enforcement because they don’t want you to have a disparate impact on minorities. When you back off on law enforcement to avoid a disparate impact on minority criminals, the first people who suffer are the law-abiding minority victims.

BUCK: Speaking to Heather Mac Donald, author of the book, the best-selling book, The War on Cops. Heather, is the pivot happening now? Because one of the big things we’re discussing now on the show is not just the move away from masks and various mandates because there’s an election looming, and more and more people are realizing how stupid and pointless a lot of this stuff was. Is that happening in a different way or on different subject when it comes to the soft-on-crime policies?

You mentioned the handing out of free crack pipes. That’s going on. But you do have Bragg, the DA in New York, coming under a lot of heat for his just seemingly insane statement on who he will and won’t prosecute. Cops are getting refunded, if you will, in places like Austin and other jurisdictions, other cities where they were defunded in the past. Is the pivot happening, or there are places that are still holding out against it?

MAC DONALD: Oh, there’s many places still holding out, and here’s what to look for. If we go back to enforcing the law, it will have a disparate impact because black crime rates are astronomically higher. They’re about 13-times higher, homicide rate for blacks than for whites. So when you enforce the law against shootings, blacks in New York City commit about 75% of all shootings though they’re 23% of the population.

A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker. If we go back to enforcing the law, we will have a disparate impact on criminals, and the majority those criminals are black. If Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, backs down under the ACLU pressure — which will happen, and he’s already said that he wants to collect racial data on judges to see if they are setting higher bail or holding violent offenders rather than letting them loose on the streets at a higher rate for blacks — that’s gonna set off alarm bells.

I’m yet to be persuaded that the long-standing race narrative in the United States that every aspect in American society that is racially disproportionate as a result of racism has been dislodged. It is going to take people standing up and saying, “There are other explanations to ongoing racial disparities than racism.” Yes, this is a country that had a terrible history, and that history lasted very recently.

In the sixties and seventies, even in the North, blacks were still being treated with contempt. But we are a changed country. Right now, the reality is black privilege, not white privilege. There’s not a single institution that is not bending over backwards to hire and promote as many blacks as possible. The criminal justice system has nothing to apologize for.

And we have to combat the leftist narrative that says, “Here’s a racial disparity. You know, there’s not 13% blacks in Google; that’s because of racism and discrimination against black engineers.” No. It’s because of an academic skills gap, culture gap, whatever. So I’m gonna hope that we’ve turned the corner on this, but I tell you, it’s a hard haul because the academy and the Democratic establishment still remains wedded to the phony racism narrative.

CLAY: Heather, quickly here, you had a stat that I was trying to reference earlier this week. The percentage chance that a police officer is shot by a black person versus the chances that they shoot a black person, it was something like 18,000 more? What is that stat? Do you remember in your book specifically?

MAC DONALD: Last year, there were four unarmed blacks, allegedly. I say allegedly unarmed because that’s the Washington Post databases and they classify people that are trying to grab an officer’s gun as unarmed. There are four unarmed blacks shot by the police out of a population of between 44, 47 million. If you look at the number of police officers who were killed last year, which is 73, and you do a per capita comparison, and you take into account the historical rate at which blacks have shot police officers fatally, which is about 42% of all cop killers are black…

I’m sorry. This is a lot of numbers to throw out. The bottom line is a police officer is 400 times as likely to be killed by a black criminal as an unarmed black person is to be killed by a police officer. So the narrative, again, as we know — as you guys keep pressing home, Buck and Clay — is completely false. And, you know, the other thing that one needs to said, the libertarian left… Libertarians and the left always say, “Oh, it’s so safe to be a police officer.

“Nothing to worry about. These guys have it really easy.” Well, again, let’s look at the rate of deaths. Police officers were a thousand times as likely to be killed last year as blacks were by police officers. So if it’s safe to be a police officer, and you’re a thousand times more likely to be killed than an unarmed black is. Let’s, for heavens’ sakes, acknowledge — contrary to what Biden tells black parents all the time — that as far as the police go, it is very, very safe to be black.

Who should we be worried about? These insane teen thugs who are going around spraying bullets across city streets, taking down 1-year-olds, 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds. Last year in Chicago alone there was a 1-month-old girl shot in the head, a 4-year-old boy shot twice in the head, a 6-year-old girl shot in the head, 7-year-old girl shot in the head, 9-year-old girl shot in the head. They’re not shot by the cops. They’re shot by thugs, and those thugs should be off the streets and in prison. No matter their race. No matter their age.

CLAY: Heather Mac Donald, thank you so much for this time. Thank you for the work that you have done contextualizing the danger to police out on our streets. Thank you.

MAC DONALD: Thank you, Buck and Clay. Such an honor.