On Saturday, Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute Fellow and author of The War on Cops, appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the “take a knee” controversy. Mac Donald believes the protest is focused on the wrong issue, as black homicides have increased since the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The following is Mac Donald’s exchange with host Pete Hegseth:
HEGSETH: So you say the real story here is — there is a different story to be told about black homicide rates?
MAC DONALD: It’s the opposite story than the public thinks it knows from Black Lives Matter. The greatest safety that comes to blacks is from the police, and police now are backing off thanks to the Black Lives Matter protests, and black lives are being taken by criminals, not the police.
HEGSETH: You call it the Ferguson Effect. What do you mean by that?
MAC DONALD: Well, after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, a narrative took hold of the national mainstream media that said we’re living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of blacks, and there was incessant attacks on the police.
Cops backed off of the type of discretionary, proactive policing that prevents crime under this incessant accusation that they were racist, and criminals became emboldened.
Since 2014 there’s been a 20% increase in our homicide rate — an additional 900 black males were killed in 2015 compared to the previous year, and last year, another additional 900 black males were killed.
HEGSETH: And as is always the case with the work that you do, the stats back this up. Pew Research released this in January, saying, to your point, 72% of the nation’s officers are less willing to stop and question suspicious persons.
So you’re saying, maybe it’s 2 a.m. on a street corner. Normally, a cop would say: “Hey, why are you loitering here at 2 a.m. on a street corner?” Now they might just drive by.
MAC DONALD: And that’s purely discretionary. The cops continue to run to 911 calls with alacrity, but the things that make criminals actually not engage in crime, they don’t have to do that. And when the elites are telling them they’re racist for doing so, of course they’re gonna get the message. And the victims are the law abiding residents of high crime areas who beg for more police protection.
HEGSETH: There’s also this narrative that it’s always unarmed black men. The Washington Post put out some statistics about 2016, saying this: The police fatally shot 223 blacks — majority armed and dangerous. [The] paper categorized only 16 of those 223 as unarmed. So, is this idea that … we’re gunning down unarmed black men as opposed to hey, a police officer walks into an uncertain situation where there may or may not be a weapon, and has to make a last minute call?
MAC DONALD: Even those unarmed cases are often the — somebody’s trying to grab an officer’s gun. That’s 16 allegedly unarmed — let’s really take that with a grain of salt — out of nearly 8,000 black deaths by black criminals. In fact, a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a cop.