New York Post - 06.08.2019

New York Post, Tuesday, August 6, 2019

nypost.com

T

HE Democratic candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the

Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that black par-

ents will no longer have to fear when their children walk the streets —

the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. Pete Buttigieg

has said police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move po-

licing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that

police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police

shootings. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or

Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent

crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more

frequently officers encounter vio-

lent suspects from any given racial

group, the greater the chance that

members of that racial group will be

shot by a police officer.

In fact, if there is a bias in police

shootings after crime rates are taken

into account, it is against white ci-

vilians, the study found.

Earlier studies have also dis-

proved the idea that white officers

are biased in shooting black citi-

zens. The Black Lives Matter narra-

tive has been impervious to the

truth, however. Police departments

are under enormous political pres-

sure to hire based on race, despite

existing efforts to recruit minorities,

on the theory that doing so will de-

crease police shootings of minori-

ties. The Obama administration rec-

ommended in 2016 that police de-

partments lower their entry stan-

dards to be able to qualify more mi-

norities for recruitment.

Departments had already been de-

emphasizing written exams or elim-

inating requirements that recruits

have a clean criminal record, but the

trend intensified thereafter. The Bal-

timore Police Department changed

its qualifying exam to such an extent

that the director of legal instruction

in the Baltimore Police Academy

complained in 2018 that rookie offic-

ers were being let out onto the street

with little understanding of the law.

Biden’s plan would require police

hiring to “mirror the racial diver-

sity” of the community as a precon-

dition of federal funding.

This effort to increase minority

representation won’t reduce racial

disparities in shootings, concludes

the PNAS study, since white officers

aren’t responsible for those dispari-

ties; black crime rates are.

Moreover, lowered hiring stan-

dards risk bad police work and cor-

ruption. A 2015 Justice Department

study of the Philadelphia Police De-

partment found that black officers

were 67 percent more likely than

white officers to mistakenly shoot

an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic

officers were 145 percent more

likely than white officers to mistak-

enly shoot an unarmed black sus-

pect. Whether lowered hiring stan-

dards are responsible for those dis-

parities wasn’t addressed.

The persistent belief that we are

living through an epidemic of ra-

cially biased police shootings is a

creation of selective reporting.

In 2015, the year the PNAS study

addressed, the white victims of fa-

tal police shootings included a 50-

year-old suspect in a domestic as-

sault in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who ran

at the officer with a spoon; a 28-

year-old driver in Des Moines,

Iowa, who exited his car and

walked quickly toward an officer

after a car chase; and a 21-year-old

suspect in a grocery-store robbery

in Akron, Ohio, who had escaped

on a bike and who didn’t remove

his hand from his waistband when

ordered to do so.

Had these victims been black, the

media and activists would have

jumped on their stories and added

their names to the roster of victims

of police racism. But because they

were white, they are unknown.

The “policing is racist” discourse

is poisonous. It exacerbates anti-cop

tensions in minority communities

and makes cops less willing to en-

gage in the proactive policing that

can save lives. Last month, viral vid-

eos of pedestrians in Harlem, The

Bronx and Brooklyn pouring water

on passive NYPD officers showed

that anti-police hostility in the inner

city remains at dangerous levels.

The anti-cop narrative deflects

attention away from the real crimi-

nal-justice problem, which is high

rates of black-on-black victimiza-

tion. Blacks die of homicide at

eight times the rate of non-His-

panic whites, overwhelmingly

killed not by cops, not by whites,

but by other blacks. Democratic

candidates should get their facts

straight and address that issue.

Until they do, their talk of racial

justice will ring hollow.

Heather Mac Donald is a Manhat-

tan Institute fellow. Adapted from

National Review.

‘Policing Is Racist’

Is a Poisonous Lie

HEATHER

MAC DONALD

A

T some point in the late-1960s,
you could be forgiven for
thinking that the FBI was run-
ning the KKK.
The bureau infiltrated, manipu-
lated and ran the Klan into the
ground. The name of the operation:
COINTELPRO-White Hate. With
violent white hate again on the rise,
we should take some inspiration —
even if the methods can’t be repli-
cated — from the FBI’s past grap-
pling with racist extremists.
If there were any doubt that the
country has a white-nationalist
problem, the shocking attack on an
El Paso Walmart should remove it.
These self-radicalizing freaks take
inspiration from previous acts of
vicious mayhem and cheer high
body counts on Internet message
boards. They are domestic subver-
sives and terrorists and deserve to
be treated as such.
There is no doubt that if we had
suffered a string of massacres on
our soil carried out by Islamic radi-
cals, we would do everything in our
power to diminish and eradicate
the danger — indeed, we have. The
national response to racist extrem-
ists should show the same alacrity
and resolve, while acknowledging
that they represent a different,
more difficult-to-counter threat
than the old Klan did.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson
told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to
go after the Klan as he had done
with the Communists. Running until
1971 and involving 26 field offices,
COINTELPRO-White Hate targeted
groups and people deemed violent
threats, not their ideology per se.

The effort was comprehensive

and no-holds-barred. In his his-

tory of the FBI, Tim Weiner

writes, “The FBI dangled small

fortunes before potential KKK in-

formers, offered outright bribes to

Klansmen who could serve as

double agents inside state and lo-

cal police forces, planted bugs and

wiretaps in Klaverns, carried out

black-bag jobs to steal member-

ship lists and (on at least one oc-

casion) dynamite catches.”

In an article in the journal Social

Science History, David Cunning-

ham recounts how the FBI

degraded, and came to effectively

control, Klan groups.

The FBI acquired hundreds of

Klan informants. According to one

FBI official, “there would be a Klan

meeting with ten people there, and

six of them would be reporting

back the next day.” One informant

even became the speechwriter for

the leader of the United Klans of

America, Robert Shelton.

The FBI worked to pre-empt vio-

lent acts, and gained an enormous

influence over Klan groups. The

New Orleans office was so success-

ful at degrading the Louisiana chap-

ter of the UKA that the office’s con-

cern became propping the group

up, lest its disintegration loosen the

FBI’s control. The Charlotte office

managed to decimate the violent

North Carolina UKA and shift its

membership to an alternative group

under FBI influence.

Overall, Klan membership

shrank to 4,300 in 1971, from an es-

timated 14,000 members in 1964.

Per Shelton himself, “the FBI’s

counterintelligence program hit us

in membership and weakened us

for about 10 years.”

Of course, the contemporary

FBI obviously isn’t going to take

over the alt-right, nor should we

want it to. The abuses of the

COINTELPRO programs — the

FBI also targeted civil-rights

groups, among others — became

notorious when they were

exposed in the 1970s.

There are also practical obsta-

cles to the FBI duplicating its

anti-Klan work. The Klan was an

organization, whereas today’s

white supremacists are free-float-

ing haters posting anonymously

on the Internet.

Yet the FBI needs to be intensely

focused on this threat. The bureau

should take an intelligence-based

approach. It should monitor sewer

message boards like 8chan, the fo-

rum for white-supremacist propa-

ganda. Posters who cross from First

Amendment-protected speech to

incitement should be prosecuted.

The FBI should interview anyone

expressing sympathy with terror-

ism — just as it does with suspected

Islamist extremists — and surveil

such persons as appropriate and

permitted under the law.

El Paso was an outrage — and

surely not the last. We need to react

accordingly. Twitter: @RichLowry

BREAK THE NEW ‘KLAN’

rich

lowry

POSTOPINION

‘

If there is a bias in police shootings...

it is against white civilians.

’