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“There is no New York City institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than the New York Police Department; thousands of black men are alive today who would have been killed years ago had data-driven policing not brought down the homicide levels of the early 1990s. The Garner death was a tragic aberration in a record of unparalleled restraint. The NYPD fatally shot eight individuals last year, six of them black, all posing a risk to the police, compared with scores of blacks killed by black civilians. But facts do not matter when crusading to bring justice to a city beset by ‘centuries of racism.'” – Heather Mac Donald in The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal [at city-journal.org]

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66 COMMENTS

  2. I’ll go out on a limb here and guess this offended someone. They are saying “focusing police on high crime areas… somehow (grits teeth)… saves a lot of black lives….” and you can just FEEL the riot inducing rant boiling up through Al Sharptons skin.

  3. Much like the city itself, the NYPD was out of control under a succession of “Democratic” mayors. Despite the publicity of some high-profile cases such as Diallou, the fact is that the black community was much safer under Giuliani than any of the previous “Democratic” mayors.

  5. How can the progressive utopia of NYC have centuries of racism? They fail to realize high crime areas are mostly black and blacks create a large proportion of crimes. That it is the progressive policies that made generations of felons who can no longer integrate with the rest of society. Progressives only care about black lives and their economic situation when it is time to vote. For a century urban areas have been under democratic/progressive control and nothing has been done to make the situation better. If there is still racism, it is the fault of the progressives.

  6. Can we get an accurate count of the number of rounds fired by the NYPD over the last 12 months that did not occur on the firing line?

    I thought not…

  7. I’m confused, she is stating a controversial (read: “racist”) truth that is statistically proven, why is anyone paying her any mind? She is too rational about this, how are we supposed to have a riot when people are going around citing facts like this?

  8. I agree with the lady. Still, someone should have been prosecuted for the choking death of Garner. Having a net positive effect does not excuse the mistaked. You can be darn sure a non officer would have been indicted under the same scenario.

    • It was not a choking death, or at least that’s the official statment, died in the ambulance of a heart attack. If you want to indict someone, make it the greedy bastards that sent a squad of thugs in uniform to collect taxes in single cigarettes. Garner was no angel, but with a rap sheet as long as a shopping list, he probably couldn’t get a normal job under any circumstances, selling single cigarettes doens’t even rise to the level of jaywalking in my opinion.

      • This.

        From the video I saw, it didn’t look like much of a chokehold. I’m not sure that they even found his neck under the blubber.

        If would be good to see all of what the Grand Jury saw, but NY law doesn’t seem to work like that. It could be that the heart attack was simply caused by the strenuous activity of tussling with the cops, which was a direct result of his resisting arrest. for a totally bogus “crime”, but the NYPD doesn’t write the law.

        • It was a chokehold. Even if you call it aomething rlse, you’re not going to put your forearm across someones throat and not choke them. And here’s the funny thing, you or anyone else WILL resist when someone, anyone, puts their hands around your neck from behind, “chokehold” or not. Doesn’t matter if its your best friend, you will instinctively react and resist.

          Yeah, blame the NYC politicians for a dumb and thuggish tax law AND blame the NYPD for their hand in it. Dont pretend like this thin blue line are the good guys. They actively work with the mayors office and governor to advise on and invent new gun control laws, and ruthlessly enforce them.

          They ae deep blue and progressive politically, and led wholeheartedly by their longtime Democratic unions, and they will ruin your life if you have a round of loose ammo rolling around your floorboard while driving through NYC.

        • The chokehold was released before his death and before he fell unconscious. The cause of death was the weight on his back compressing his chest.

      • We can debate whether there was a choke hold or not.
        Is there any doubt this man would have lived beyond that day if there were no interaction with the NYPD for selling cigarettes?

        • I can agree with that. Being a criminal and committing crimes tends to bring you into contact with the police. That’s an inherently risky situation. The precise risks vary, of course, with the nature of the criminal involved, his history, the specific crime involved this time, how this criminal chooses to approach his contact with the police, among other factors. In general, though, yes, I would agree that committing crimes, including resisting arrest, is a stupid thing.

          As we’ve heard and read many times, one’s safety and security are greatly improved by avoiding stupid people doing stupid things in stupid places. I’ll go even further and say they’re improved exponentially by not being that stupid person doing the stupid thing in the stupid place, yourself.

  10. Well here is a stubborn fact: the vast majority of police blindly do the bidding of the ruling class to take criminals off the streets … which would be fine if the ruling class would stop classifying so many good people as “criminals”.

    Definition: “good people” respect other people’s rights.

  11. The vast majority of violence, at least according to the FBI’s National Gang Threat Assessment, is in fact gang-related — and committed mainly against other gang members.

    This violence is almost entirely drug-related.

    The solution to it is simple, and there is only one (1) [singular] solution to it: end the failed War on (some) Drugs. Full-stop. No exceptions.

    It’s the whole “get tough on crime” initiatives started under Richard Nixon and continually escalated since then — mostly notably by Carter, Clinton, and Obama in a game of political dick measuring and one-up-manship — that primarily keeps urban black communities on a continual downward spiral. Not only are all of these convicted felons (half of them having committed no violent crimes) locked out of the legal economy by liberal economic policy in regards to drug enforcement, but they’re also barred from receiving government assistance of practically any kind — which yet another failing boondoggle deliberately designed to keep the poor in the poor house to begin with.

    READ: “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age of Colorblindness”

    Written by Michelle Alexander, who is decidedly quite liberal herself, but the book is pretty eye-opening nonetheless.

    Most of today’s societal ills in the U.S. can literally be traced directly or indirectly back to the failed Drag War.

    • It is a great book. I don’t think too many people on this site are interested in reading it. Much easier for many to say lazy black and brown people.

    • Personally I think it has more to do with the fact that minorities have been saturated with the progressive message for longer that other groups here in the U.S.

      They’ve been told that they shouldn’t work to improve their own economic conditions until others have have paid then back for past wrongs. That is immoral for then to do so and anyone who does is selling out and betraying their race.

      There are similar cultural elements in the U.K. In both countries kids who try to do well in school are belittled and bullied, sometimes with serious violence.

      Humans are lazy, not just the brown ones. But it’s the blacks in the U.S. who have an emotionally satisfying argument regarding a time when their race suffered a legitimately severe injustice. Unfortunately, once the individuals who suffered have died, and the individuals who inflicted have died, there is no one left to pay back and no one left to receive that payment. The only way to make such a past injustice “right” at that point is to move forward.

      They are suffering a modern injustice, of course, this time at the hands of progressives who tell then that there’s no point in trying. If they try, whites will keep then down. If they try and succeed and whites don’t keep them down, then they are betraying the rest of their race, and are Uncle Toms.”

      That’s the real oppression today, being told “trying to improve yourself and your situation makes you a bad person.”

      Thomas Sowell had pointed out that the 40’s and 50’s, despite the overt racism, the economic situation of blacks was slowly improving. Not as fast as it should have been, but improving. In the 60’s and 70’s that improvement stopped and reversed, coinciding with the rise of the message that whites will keep you down, so don’t try. Of course discrimination alone has never been able to prevent economic improvement in the discriminated against ethnicities, though I’m sure it slows it down.

      I’m curious to see if this makes me a “racist.”

    • Ending the drug war is not a singular solution to gangs anymore than ending prohibition was a singular solution to the mafia.

      • And yet it was a prerequisite. Yes, the gangs won’t magically go away, but they will lose a lot of their power base, making them that much easier to root out – and, most importantly, ensuring that no-one else steps into their place.

        • With the inner-city drug money gone, the *competition* for what little money is left would be vicious and brutal.

        • It would be a bonus since the remaining animals would eliminate each other until a small group was left that could then be dismantled with a coordinated law enforcement effort.

    • Pretty much every single president since Nixon (who started all that mess) has ramped up the War on Drugs and/or the associated “tough on crime” policies. Reagan enthusiastically did so, for example, and some of the worst policies date back to his period. Bush did so as well.

      In the Obama administration, let’s not forget about Biden, who was one of the chief architects of the original war on drugs, and SWAT no-knock raids.

      • There’s too much money involved considering the massive expenditures that federal and state government routinely incur. It’s become a “self-licking ice cream cone” that employs thousands in both the law enforcement and prison industry. It’s readily apparent that both political parties generate support from various factions, be it police unions or private investors, from continuing the war on drugs.

  12. “…There is no New York City institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than the New York Police Department”

    The fact that you have to use a statement like “I have lots of black friends” as some sort of justification for not being racists means you are, in fact, racists.

    All lives should matter, none more than any others. Isn’t the motto of the Police “To Protect and Serve?” I don’t see that there are any qualifiers on that motto regarding skin melanin content.

    • “The fact that you have to use a statement like “I have lots of black friends” as some sort of justification for not being racists means you are, in fact, racists.”

      Not necessarily.

  13.  who would have been killed years ago had data-driven policing not brought down the homicide levels of the early 1990s

    I have to throw a flag on this play. Homicide rates plunged since the early 90s all across the western world, and the truth is nobody really knows why.

    • I’d believe it has more to do with the fact that everyone had a cellphone with a camera and everyone instantly records everything now and/or calls the police.

        • One of the more interesting theories, that seems to be strongly supported by the data, is that this has to do with the banning of leaded gas, and the corresponding decline in lead in the environment.

          http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

          The strongest evidence is in that the correlation seems to be holding strongly everywhere – as soon as lead emissions in a country, or even a single city, go down, you start seeing a decline in crime with a certain time lag that is the same for all locales.

          This can also explain the higher per capita crime rates in cities, and a bunch of other stuff that didn’t have an adequate explanation to date.

  14. My opinions of the Garner case aside, his death was in part due to the progressive criminal code in NYC enacted by progressive politicians and their progressive constituency. The same politicians that made it their crusade to not only go after smoking but have now regulated e-cigs as part of their “war on smoking”, are also those that stand up and criticize their enforcers for doing their bidding. I find it telling that several prominent gun controllers have tried to liken their war on gun owners to their progressive crusade against smokers.

    • It is a health care crisis! Just wait until the Surgeon General mandates warnings stamped on guns that “using firearms may be hazardous to your health.”

  16. At the heart of the issue (as ludicrous as it sounds) is that the left wants to replace local police departments with a federal police force. How can the elites in Washington enforce their laws in Wyoming if the local PD turn a blind eye? In Washington state and Colorado you can now break federal marijuana laws with impunity. This is bad for statists. The president even publicly stated his desire to establish such a force at the beginning of his presidency, although he has yet to make a push for it since it could never get pushed through a Republican congress.

    The problem is there’s virtually no public support for such a force. So how can they create such support? By fostering mistrust in police. The locals can’t control their racist police so the feds need to step in and take control, that’s their theory. The only way to do this is to stir up racial animosity among minorities. There’s two reasons they can’t pick out a case of a cop deliberately murdering a minority out of racism, first those cases are extremely rare, and second if they did the cop would be prosecuted and incarcerated and there would be no grounds for cries of injustice. So they take incidents of self defense and spread lies in order to gin up anger and when the grand jury sees the fact and let the cop go they erupt. The mob will be too busy looting to investigate the facts of the case.

    The problem is that most of us are smart enough to smell the BS. They are only generating support for the local PDs among the vast majority of Americans. But the left was built on a permanent underclass and anything that convinces minorities that they’re being oppressed helps them keep their positions of power, so they keep trying.

    • Sorry, but I’ve seen no evidence that local police forces need federal help to alienate the public and squander their support. They seem to be doing a bang-up job of it on their own.

      • How so? Shooting a much larger man than yourself in self defense? Or do you mean by setting up speed traps? I guess I’d agree if you mean the latter. Anyway, it’s not the federal government I’m referring to, it’s the leftists, some of whom are in the government, some not. Some are journalists, some are in local government, some are academia, etc.

        • I’m thinking more like shooting every dog in sight, throwing flash-bangs into cribs, SWAT-teaming small-town mayors with actual knowledge that they committed no crime–that sort of thing.

        • You may have a point, but I highly doubt a federal police force would do any better. Just look at the ATF.

        • Oh, I’m entirely with you on that one. Replacing the locals with feds would only make it worse.

    • The faux Libertarians at Reason also have an interest in undermining the police. They think the only reason that we have a gang problem is that drugs are illegal and if you legalize them the criminal class will stop being criminals just like the mafia did after the end of prohibition. They view the gangs as prototypical anarcho-capitalists and want to free them from legal restraints. Just as your typical gun grabber things eliminating guns will eliminate crime the faux Libertarian thinks that legalizing drugs turns criminals into law abiding citizens.

      • Legalizing drugs would eliminate the black market and the high profits that come with the risk, but thinking that the criminal element will just wither away is beyond naive. There were criminals before the drug laws and there will be criminals after the drug laws. There are plenty of people that will find new crimes to commit as opposed to flipping burgers for minimum wage. IMO in a perfect world there would be no such thing as a consentual crime, but if you take away the crimes of consent you will see a rise of non-consentual crimes such as theft and robbery. Some people are just too lazy to work.

    • >> How can the elites in Washington enforce their laws in Wyoming if the local PD turn a blind eye? In Washington state and Colorado you can now break federal marijuana laws with impunity.

      This problem has been solved by the feds a long time ago, by enabling the local police departments to act as a federal law enforcement branch, in exchange for getting their share of the loot (aka “asset forfeiture”).

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_sharing

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States

      • We’ll see how they do in Washington and Colorado. The feds can only dangle the bait, and yes there are a lot of takers. Meanwhile, civil forfeiture is considered by those who know of it’s existence as one of the most vile of governmental practices. It’s existing on pretty shaky ground. Although it’s not really any different than the feds withholding highway funds to force states to lower their speed limits or legal BAC limits. The statists want as much control over everyone’s lives as possible and they don’t really care about the means to the objective.

        • Shaky grounds? It was confirmed as valid by SCOTUS, it doesn’t get more solid than that. That it goes directly contrary to the 5th is irrelevant in this day and age.

          So it’s not something that can be solved judicially, and as you note, all players in the game are quite happy with it – both parties are, as well as law enforcement. The only way to change this is from within the parties. For Democrats, the civil rights angle (noting that all these policies disproportionally target minorities) has been working quite successfully for the past couple years, though we’ll see if it brings any solid results. For Republicans, it goes directly contrary to their “tough on crime” staple – which, let’s face it, sells very well to their voter – but the libertarian wing of the party has been fighting it for a long time now on constitutional grounds. So maybe, just maybe, there’s a possibility there of a movement that cuts across party lines to get rid of that crap, but I think that it’ll take a long time to get there.

  18. That’s true, but when you fail to hold the few responsible when they screw the pooch, you are sending the wrong message. A large block of the nation is pointing and laughing, but it is not funny.

  19. There is no New York City institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than the New York Police Department

    I don’t know about that, but I do know that the NYPD is the most integrated and (except for gun-handling and marksmanship) the best trained big city police force in the country. The NYPD puts LAPD and the Chicago checkerboard hats to shame. Okay, those two do not present a high bar, but still.

    Whether racial animus drives certain policing procedures in NY is another matter entirely. Stop and frisk was driven from the top down, not from the street cops up. That’s not to say that the street cops objected to it. However, it did create a huge divide between police and community. The cops are paying for it now. The politicians, as always, get off scot-free.

  21. Most of the ‘thoughtful’ posts I see about ‘police shooting Blacks’ also feels a need to state that there is a large (or larger) degree of Blacks killing Blacks. If I’m having to deal with improper police treatment that is of a lethal nature … meaning they might kill me … it doesn’t make it any less of an issue or concern to me to hear that Black-on-Black crime has higher numbers. To my mind, that’s not the same issue, and doesn’t justify me being shot based only on what I look like and not what I was doing. Not all of the stories I’ve heard this year sound ‘justifiable’ to me.

  22. To this I say NY, NJ, and you know the rest of the list of gun unfriendly locations have been cranked up by the race baitors (bastards). The Al not so sharp ton’s and the lot wont protest the high rate killers on the streets of DC, Oakland, Camden, your favorite and mine Chicago ……..∞ because the bad guys that kill more in a month than the cops in a year are armed and DON”T GIVE A CRAP! But that’s where they should be protesting. To those same BAITORS when the SHTF in those aforementioned areas the first people we call are the cops so to them(COPS) I say THANK YOU for helping out the very people who would spit at you when they need you in spite of their attitudes toward you. Yours is one of those thankless jobs like firefighters and soldiers.
    Again to those in BLUE THANK YOU !

  23. Sounds like generations of race-baiting and race card playing by the Left has come home to roost, now that some thug assumed room temperature in a police-involved incident on their leftist mayor’s watch. I’m neither taking joy, nor shedding a tear, over anyone’s role in this mess.

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