Patrolling the streets: A Q&A with Heather Mac Donald

Criminal justice expert Heather Mac Donald has been one of NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s most enthusiastic supporters, describing him as “modern policing’s premier innovator.” Mac Donald – a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of a new book on policing in the United States – spoke with City & State’s Jon Lentz about Bratton’s embrace of “broken windows” policing, the decline of stop-and-frisk in New York City and the national debate over the “Ferguson effect.” The following is an edited transcript.

C&S: NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton announced that he is stepping down next month. What is his legacy?

HMD: His legacy is a complete revolution in both the philosophy and method of policing. He has shown that violent crime in America is not an inevitability. Until Bratton took over in ’94 in his first tour as police commissioner, it was widely assumed that the police could only react to crime after the fact by making an arrest, they couldn’t actually prevent it. The FBI’s uniform crime reports used to contain an annual disclaimer saying that homicide is a societal problem that the police can’t really do anything about. So when Bratton set himself an actual, numerical goal for lowering crime his first year, that was unheard of. And he met his goals, and he beat them. And he did so by a very rigorous approach to crime data and by holding precinct commanders accountable and asking officers to be proactive. As a result, now, the nation has had a 50 percent crime drop until we saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement – that’s now under threat. But people now take it for granted that the police are capable of lowering crime, and that’s a massive change.

C&S: Bratton is a leading proponent of “broken windows” policing. Is this strategy effective?

HMD: What’s not sufficiently understood is that, even if it were the case that enforcing low-level public order offenses had no effect on felony crime, it would still be a moral imperative to do it because that’s what people in high-crime areas with high levels of street disorder beg the police to do. In police-community meetings in high-crime areas, they’re not saying, “Why aren’t you arresting the robbers?” They’re saying, “Why can’t you get the hundreds of teens hanging out on the corner fighting with each other, why can’t you arrest them for truancy or loitering?” Leaving aside large-scale efficacy, which is there, it’s simply essential that the police respond to the complaints that they get about public disorder.

C&S: Controversial stop-and-frisk tactics have been sharply reduced in New York City, including under Bratton.

HMD: The tactic is lawful, it’s constitutional, and the judicial decision that declared that the NYPD was engaged in racially driven stops was completely wrongly decided and based on junk science methodology of analyzing police behavior. In the first six months of 2015, there was a 20 percent increase in homicides and shootings were way up, and Bratton and de Blasio were clearly extremely concerned. What Bratton did was start the “Summer All Out” program a month early and he managed eventually to put a lid on the homicide increase and ended 2015 with about a 6 percent increase in homicides. Bratton has the luxury of enormous amounts of manpower in the NYPD, so even without a more assertive use of stops, the NYPD can simply use command presence to deter retaliatory shootings. But the technique is lawful, and it is a legitimate response to when officers are seeing suspicious behaviors on the street. They should absolutely intervene.

C&S: As you researched your new book, “The War on Cops,” what surprised you?

HMD: What the public does not understand is the enormous amount of support for the police among law-abiding residents in high-crime communities. This never gets reported. But I talked to people like a cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx, Mrs. Sweeper, who told me, “Police, Jesus, send more police.” The only time she feels safe to go into her building lobby is when police are there, because it’s otherwise colonized by kids hanging out, trespassing, smoking weed and selling drugs. I hear people like an elderly lady who burst out spontaneously in the 41st Precinct at a community meeting in the South Bronx last summer and said, “How lovely when we see the police! They’re my friends.” There are thousands of people out there like that who want the police to be active and engage in public order enforcement and get the drug dealers off the street corners. And they’re not reflected, certainly not by the Black Lives Matter movement, and their voices are not heard in the press.

C&S: What’s your take on the criminal justice policies of the two presidential candidates?

HMD: I’m very concerned about Hillary Clinton’s policies. She has continued a very dangerous set of lies that President Obama has been disseminating, which holds that the criminal justice system is racist. It is not. The criminal justice system responds to where people are being victimized, and given the vastly disproportionate rates of both criminal victimization and commission in minority communities, that is going to result in police activity being disproportionately involved there and in incarceration rates that are disproportionate. There is just no evidence that the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison is due to systemic racism. That is a lie, and it’s a dangerous one. It is resulting in officers backing off proactive policing in many black areas and cities with large black populations.

C&S: You’re referring to the so-called “Ferguson effect.”

HMD: Right. And as a result, crime is going up in those cities. Last year in cities with large black populations, homicides were up anywhere from 54 percent in Washington, D.C., to 90 percent in Cleveland. Those are black lives that are being taken to not a single peep of protest from the Black Lives Matter activists. Clinton continues to repeat this lie that the cops are racist and they’re engaged in disparate treatment, and that is only going to result in the continuation of de-policing and more black lives being lost. Trump, to his credit, and I’m not here to make any kind of election endorsements, but he at least has pointed public attention to the fact that law enforcement is under severe threat now.

C&S: U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said there is “no data” showing a “Ferguson effect.”

HMD: She’s completely wrong. There’s been studies that have shown a connection between de-policing and violent felony increases. There was a study done of the aftermath of the anti-cop riots in Cincinnati in 2001 and the resulting crime increase. After the Ferguson riots, drug arrests and other types of stops went way down in St. Louis and the homicide and shooting rates went up. In Baltimore after the Freddie Gray riots, the police basically stopped making drug arrests and the shootings went way up. So she’s just wrong. There’s a whole “Ferguson effect” denial industry out there, and they’re increasingly desperate because even somebody like Richard Rosenfeld, who was an early and influential “Ferguson effect” denier has changed his mind, in a report for the Justice Department, no less, saying that last year’s homicide increase was significant, nearly unprecedented, and it’s a real issue that needs attention.

C&S: Yet much of the population is deeply unhappy in the wake of high-profile incidents in which unarmed blacks were killed by police. Even Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina spoke of Capitol Police demanding to see his ID and also getting stopped by police seven times in one year, in part because he is black.

HMD: There is no question that black males pay a crime tax. And they stand a greater chance of getting stopped than a white male because they match a description of a suspect. In New York City, blacks are 23 percent of the population; they commit over three quarters of all shootings. Whites are 34 percent of the population; they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. When you add Hispanic shootings to black shootings, you account for over 98 percent of all shootings. That means that when the police respond to a shots fired call, there’s virtually never a description of a white suspect. They don’t wish that. It’s a reality forced on them by the reality of crime. Police are more often in minority neighborhoods because that’s where crime is being committed, by blacks against blacks. If we want to change policing in this country, here’s the solution: Get crime rates down. If blacks had the crime levels of Asians, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Policing is a function of crime, pure and simple. It’s not a function of race.

C&S: What can police do better?

HMD: They do need constant training in courtesy and respect. They can develop very hardened, obnoxious attitudes, and that is not helpful. They need to make sure they treat everybody they encounter with due respect.