Cops Under Fire! The Media War Against Law Enforcement
by Bill McIntyre, Editor

Fed up with the liberal media’s never ending campaign against police officers following a tragic shooting in New York City, Heather MacDonald, a noted columnist and John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute, decided enough was enough.

“I was reading The New York Times coverage of the Amadou Diallo case, which was extraordinary in its intensity. They painted a consistent picture of the police as out of control. I was skeptical of the Times,” she said.

MacDonald started poking around to see if the charges promoted by the Times were at all true about the New York Police Department. By the time she was done, MacDonald had exposed critical flaws in so-called racial profiling “studies” in more than half a dozen articles and now a newly published book called, “Are Cops Racist?”

MacDonald: “I found that virtually everything in the Times were virtual lies. I came to the conclusion after that research that cops were the one group in society that it was perfectly legitimate, and indeed encouraged, to be bigoted against,” she said.

Since her book has landed on the shelves critics have been impressed. National Review’s Jack Dunphy said, “Mac Donald's voice deserves to be heard É her words should be shouted from the rooftops, most especially in those cities where anti-profiling hysteria has brought about less-effective law enforcement and higher crime.”

The Weekly Standard called Mac Donald’s work “meticulous, even-handed, and absolutely devastating to those who make unfounded charges of racism against the police.”

Deeper scrutiny

MacDonald had no idea that her investigation would last four years. She simply wanted answers following that controversial shooting death on Wheeler Avenue in the Soundview section of the Bronx involving New York City police officers.

MacDonald followed her instincts and started asking more questions and doing more research after the whole “racial profiling” controversy kept festering.

“I wanted to look into that to see if those charges could withstand deeper scrutiny. I discovered, after considerable work, that the available studies on the subject were basically junk science, they wouldn’t earn you an ‘F’ in a freshman statistics course,” she said.

MacDonald, whose writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times and The New Republic, isolated the critical flaw in the charge that the police are racially profiling. She said that nearly all studies on the subject offer no violator benchmark.

“The technical racial profiling study compares law enforcement data—such as stops, arrests or searches tabulated by race—to some crude population measure, like a recent census or an estimation of drivers on a turnpike. But that is deeply, deeply flawed because the police don’t determine where to put their forces based on a census survey they go where the crime is,” she said.

MacDonald insisted that when researchers are looking at police data they have to compare it to, at a bare minimum, crime rates. If not, then the studies are not just worthless, but dangerous.

“These flawed studies have the effect of telling the police that if they have ‘too many’ law enforcement interactions with minorities then they are racist. The police have gotten the political message that’s been sent out by the media and the political elite É and they’ve backed off assertive policing,” she said.

MacDonald, who has testified before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives, said the impact of a less assertive police force means more strife in already troubled communities. In response to caustic accusations of racial profiling, Cincinnati police decided to pull back instead of facing charges of discrimination.

“That’s when the police basically said they wouldn’t make discretionary arrests. The leader of the anti-cop brigade in Cincinnati, Rev. Damon Lynch III, criticized the police for ‘de-policing.’ I imagine this would have been a rather bitter and ironic message to the cops because this was the same man who had been incessantly criticizing the police for abusing young black men. The anti-cop rabble-rousers sometimes try to play it both ways,” she said.

Chilling effect

MacDonald predicted that the anti-cop fervor would mean fewer good cops joining the force.

“I’ve talked to many officers who say they no longer encourage people to go into the job now,” she admitted.

And it’s not just white cops under attack, MacDonald said it’s all cops.

“Black cops are just as susceptible to the racial profiling charge. The cop haters don’t really distinguish between black and white cops. Black cops who’ve left their job feel just as oppressed by the media’s crusade against policing as white cops do,” she pointed out.

So what will it take to stop the anti-police momentum?

“Maybe a second terrorist attack will produce a more long lasting support for the police. I hope that’s not the price that we have to pay. Besides that, it will take a few politicians that are willing to educate themselves about how the police actually do their jobs,” she said.

MacDonald conceded that many politicians have adopted ethnic compassion at the expense of law enforcement. She called that a mistake.

“They’re not showing minority sensitivity by beating up on the police. It’s a real time for political leadership,” she concluded.

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"The cop-hating press has never needed evidence for its charges."