Part 2 cont’d from above.
Nevertheless, there are reasonable measures to further lower officer use of force—above all, more hands-on tactical training, practice in de-escalation, and techniques to control stress. Federal support should go to such practical training, not to implicit bias sessions, which are an insult to officers’ intelligence and street knowledge. Nor should police hiring be based on race. A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Existing efforts to boost minority hiring in many departments have already resulted in the elimination of a clean criminal record requirement and in lowered standards for reading comprehension and writing. These changes risk increasing disciplinary problems, rather than reducing them.
Figuring out how to encourage officers to intervene in their fellow officers’ questionable behavior is necessary, though doing so is especially challenging when it is a supervisor who is misusing his authority. Some powerful unions place too many roadblocks in the way of firing incompetent or abusive cops. Getting rid of qualified immunity, however, will only lead to cops shutting down further.
This committee should denounce the defunding of police agencies. Shrinking their resources will result in poorer service to the law-abiding residents of high crime areas. Officers in depleted departments who cannot get back-up when they face dangerous suspects will be even more stressed out, and more at risk of poor judgment. Response times will increase. Cash-starved agencies will train less, not more. Lower pay scales will result in less qualified recruits.
Shifting police funding to social services will not solve crime. For decades, New York City was the welfare capital of the United States, spending one-seventh of all government welfare dollars. Crime continued to rise. Crime started falling in the city only when the New York Police Department adopted the data-driven policing that has now become the norm across the country.
But the most urgent task before this committee is to repudiate the narrative that law enforcement is infected by racism. The atmosphere in which officers are working is becoming more vicious and volatile. The attempts on officers’ lives, some successful, that we have seen in the last two weeks will increase. And under the pervasive charge that they are racist, officers will back off of proactive policing in minority neighborhoods. The victims will be overwhelmingly black.
In 2015 and 2016, when officers also retreated to purely reactionary policing, an additional 2,000 black males died, the largest two-year increase in homicide in half a century. Harvard economist Roland Fryer, University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell, and University of Utah economist Richard Fowles have recently documented what I have called the Ferguson Effect: the sharp rise in crime during episodes of pervasive anti-cop rhetoric and depolicing.
There are bad cops of all races who must be removed. But the overwhelming majority of officers are motivated by a desire to help the most vulnerable among us. Though many officers work under unimaginable conditions, encountering the worst consequences of pervasive family breakdown, they continue to believe fervently in the good people who support them. If this mania of cop hatred is not quelled, those good people will suffer further and the nation’s cities will become places of fear and decay.
https://www.city-journal.org/repudia...lice-narrative
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestseller The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.