When the Marilyn Mosby-led prosecution of four Baltimore police officers became a fiasco, the Department of Justice stepped in to throw the howling mob a consolation prize, a 163-page report attacking the BPD's practices as racially biased and unconstitutional. That report has now been answered in exactly the terms it deserves by Heather Mac Donald, author of the essential book, The War on Cops. The report, she explains, will victimize the very people it ostensibly seeks to help, by fostering crime with the shackles it places on cops. It is
a mendacious narrative about policing that is contributing to an environment of virulent hatred against cops and that is obstinately blind to the realities of crime. As long as that narrative is dominant, more black lives will be lost, and probably also more blue ones.
The real problem is that President Obama, the Justice Department, and most of the civil rights movement refuse to face reality and insist on fantasy: that crime and criminality is evenly distributed among races, and therefore any disparity is the result of bias.
This use of a population benchmark to analyze police activity is preposterously misguided, given the large disparities in rates of criminal victimization and crime commission. In 2015, more than 90 percent of Balimore's homicide victims were black, even though blacks are only 63 percent of the city's population. Though the police department does not report the race of criminals, it is certain that at least 90 percent of homicide and shootings suspects in Baltimore are also black. To expect police activity to match population ratios when crime commission is not evenly spread throughout the population is either disingenuous or disqualifyingly ignorant.
The stubborn refusal to acknowledge the reality that black people (really, mostly young, fatherless, black males) commit vastly disproportionate amounts of crime, and that they mostly prey on other black people is demanding a high price in blood and suffering.
The people of Baltimore, in the midst of the bloodiest moment in that city's history on a per capita basis, are paying a high price for the mandatory fantasy propounded by the progressive establishment. Mac Donald has the command of the facts and the eloquence to stand up against the lies that are victimizing them, and the rest of the country.
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