BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY JULY 11, 2016) — Nearly two years ago, police in Ferguson, MO, shot and killed Michael Brown. To explain this act, social activists from the extreme left created a metaphor that morphed into a national storyline, namely, that police departments across the nation are randomly and wantonly shooting and killing racial minorities, particularly blacks, for no reason. It’s a conceit author Heather McDonald calls “The Ferguson Effect.”

This article by McDonald was  published in The New York Post on July 9. McDonald is the author of War on Cops (Encounter Books). The piece is adapted from Summer City Journal.

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BY HEATHER McDONALD

SPECIAL TO PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

Since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse, from the White House on down.

In fact, this sentiment appears to be what fueled the slaying of five officers in Dallas after white cops shot black men in Baton Rouge, La., and Minnesota last week.

In response to this feeling, cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops and public-order policing — and criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum.

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that officers were going “fetal,” as shootings in the city skyrocketed. Residents of Chicago’s high-crime areas are paying the price.

Felicia Moore, a wiry middle-aged woman with tattoos on her face and the ravaged frame of a former drug addict, says: “I’ve been in Chicago all my life. It’s never been this bad. Mothers and grandchildren are scared to come out on their porch.”

Through the end of May, shooting incidents in Chicago were up 53 percent over the same period in 2015, which already had seen a significant increase over 2014. Compared with the first five months of 2014, shooting incidents in 2016 were up 86 percent. Shootings in May citywide averaged nearly 13 a day, a worrisome portent for summer.

Anti-police animus is nothing new in Chicago, of course. An Illinois state representative, Monique Davis, told a Detroit radio station in 2013 that people in her South Side community believed that the reason so few homicide cases were solved is that it was the police who were killing young black males. Davis later refused to repudiate her statement: “We can’t say that it is not happening.”

The “no-snitch” ethic of refusing to cooperate with the cops is the biggest impediment to solving crime, according to Chicago commanders. But the Black Lives Matter narrative about endemically racist cops has made the street dynamic much worse. A detective says: “From patrol to investigation, it’s almost an undoable job now. If I get out of my car, the guys get hostile right away and several people are taping [with cellphones].”

Bystanders and suspects try to tamper with crime scenes and aggressively interfere with investigations. Additional officers may be needed during an arrest to keep angry onlookers away. “It’s very dangerous out there now,” a detective tells me.

In March 2016, then-Chief of Patrol (now Superintendent) Eddie Johnson decried what he called the “string of violent attacks against the police” after an off-duty officer was shot by a felon who had ordered him on the ground after robbing him. The previous week, three officers were shot during a drug investigation.

This volatile policing environment now exists in urban areas across the country. But Chicago officers face two additional challenges: a new oversight regime for pedestrian stops; and the fallout from an officer’s killing of Laquan McDonald in October 2014.

In March 2015, the ACLU of Illinois accused the Chicago Police Department of engaging in racially biased stops, locally called “investigatory stops,” because its stop rate did not match population ratios.

This by-now drearily familiar and ludicrously inadequate benchmarking methodology ignores the incidence of crime.

In 2014, blacks in Chicago made up 79 percent of all known nonfatal-shooting suspects, 85 percent of all known robbery suspects and 77 percent of all known murder suspects, according to police department data.

Whites were 1 percent of known nonfatal shootings suspects in 2014, 2.5 percent of known robbery suspects, and 5 percent of known murder suspects, the latter number composed disproportionately of domestic homicides. Whites are nearly absent, in other words, among violent street criminals — precisely whom proactive policing aims to deter. Whites are actually over-stopped compared with their involvement in street crime.

Despite the groundlessness of the ACLU’s racial-bias charges, then–police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and the city’s corporation counsel signed an agreement in August 2015 allowing the ACLU to review all future stops made by the department. The agreement also created an independent monitor for police stops. “Why McCarthy agreed to put the ACLU in charge is beyond us,” says a homicide detective.

On January 1, 2016, the police department rolled out a new form for documenting investigatory stops, developed to meet ACLU demands. The new form, traditionally called a contact card, was two pages long and contained a whopping 70 fields of information to be filled out, including three narrative sections. The new contact card took 30 minutes to complete. Every contact card is forwarded to the ACLU.

Stops dropped nearly 90 percent in the first quarter of 2016. Detectives had long relied on the information contained in contact cards to solve crimes.

When 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was killed in January 2013, days after performing with her high-school band in President Obama’s second inaugural, investigators identified the occupants of the getaway car through descriptions of the vehicle in previous contact cards. Now, however, crime sleuths have almost nothing to go on.

Criminals have become emboldened by the police disengagement. “Gangbangers now realize that no one will stop them,” says a former high-ranking police official. And people who wouldn’t have carried a gun before are now armed, a South Side officer says. The solution, according to officers, is straightforward: “If tomorrow, we still had to fill out the new forms, but they no longer went to the ACLU, stops would increase,” a detective claims.

But a more profound pall hangs over the department because of a shockingly unjustified police homicide and the missteps of top brass and the mayor in handling it.

On the night of Oct. 20, 2014, a report went out over the police radio that someone was breaking into cars in a trucking yard in the southwest neighborhood of Archer Heights; the vandal had threatened the 911 caller with a knife.

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Heather Mac Donald is the author of the just released “War on Cops” (Encounter Books). This piece has been adapted from Summer City Journal.

To Be Continued Tomorrow on THE PLANET.

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“… side by side on the piano keyboard. O Lord, why can’t we?” — from Ebony and Ivory, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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CONCLUDE