As noted here previously, Heather Mac Donald has written an important book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, that is loaded with timely information. The question now is, will conservatives learn how to fight the information war so more Americans can learn the facts? First up is a recent article from Mac Donald, followed by an excerpt from her book:
Time to End the Demonizing of Police
Two years of corrosive rhetoric about racist cops, based on falsehoods — with disastrous effects.
For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.
Read more: Manhattan Institute
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Our Legal Order Frays
Heather Mac Donald is the author of the book of the moment if not the year: The War On Cops: How the New Attack On Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. This is the book’s chapter 11, “America’s Legal Order Begins to Fray.” Heather writes:
“I’m deliberately not getting involved in things I would have in the 1990s and 2000s,” an emergency-services officer in New York City tells me. “I won’t get out of my car for a reasonable-suspicion stop; I will if there’s a violent felony committed in my presence.” He is not alone in this reluctance to engage. This is what law enforcement has come to after two decades of the most remarkable crime drop in U.S. history.
The virulent antipolice campaign that began with a now-discredited narrative about a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, has made police officers think twice before undertaking precisely the type of enforcement that led to that twenty-year crime drop. The Black Lives Matter movement proclaims that the police are a lethal threat to blacks and that the criminal-justice system is pervaded by racial bias. The media amplify that message on an almost daily basis. Officers now worry about becoming the latest racist cop of the week, losing their job or being indicted if a good-faith encounter with a suspect goes awry or is merely distorted by an incomplete cell-phone video.
Read more: PowerLineBlog
