It's a shibboleth of the left that our criminal justice system is infected with systemic racism. Hillary Clinton herself reaffirmed this article of liberal faith during the debate Monday night, but is it true? Heather MacDonald, author of The War on Cops and a writer for City Journal
argues that the evidence simply doesn't support the claim. Here's part of what she says:
Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the over-representation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.
To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.
Ms Clinton also sought to exploit the myth that "stop and frisk" is a racist police tactic, but MacDonald is having none of it:
Clinton claimed that “stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional.” [But] No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots. Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department’s practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal.
But why did the judge rule that police stops were "racially biased" in the first place?
Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn’t match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin’s view. Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City.
Whites are 34 percent of the city’s population, [but] they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run — meaning that someone has been shot — they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.
What Ms Clinton doesn't know, or doesn't want voters to know, is that "stop and frisk" is a blessing to minority residents of our urban neighborhoods:
Clinton claimed that stop-and-frisk was “ineffective” and “did not do what it needed to do.” [Yet] Felony crime dropped 85 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s in New York City; more than 10,000 minority males were spared the violent death that they would have experienced had homicides remained at their early 1990s levels. Stop-and-frisk was a crucial part of that crime drop, the longest and steepest on record; it’s hard to imagine anything more effective than New York’s proactive policing revolution. Stop-and-frisk deterred criminals from carrying guns. Equally importantly, it intervened in a range of other criminal behaviors. If an officer saw someone casing a store on a boulevard plagued with burglaries, or saw someone walking quickly behind an elderly lady in a neighborhood plagued with robberies, he would stop that person and ask a few questions. That stop may not have resulted in an arrest, but it could have averted the commission of a crime.
Homicides and shootings in New York City rose 20 percent in the first half of 2015, thanks to the Scheindlin-induced drop in pedestrian stops. Then-police commissioner William Bratton responded with a massive deployment of overtime manpower to high-crime corners; officers used “command presence”—i.e., their mere presence on the street—to deter criminal behavior. This roll-out of manpower resources quelled the shooting spike and New York City ended 2015 with a 6 percent homicide increase. Other departments do not have the personnel available to them to make up for a drop in proactive policing.
Perhaps for the sake of the people living in these high crime neighborhoods the left should admit that our political correctness fetish is exacting a high cost in the maiming and killing of young blacks and Hispanics and let the police get the guns from those who are carrying them illegally, even if that means sometimes frisking innocent people. It can be demeaning to be frisked when one is completely innocent, but I should think that the innocent residents of New York and other cities would be willing to suffer a little indignity if it saves the life of just one black kid. Wouldn't you?