Condemning the Department of Justice report on Baltimore as just another salvo in an Obama administration "war on cops," Heather Mac Donald argues that the DOJ got it all wrong: Baltimore cops are not biased against blacks, she writes for the conservative National Review. They are merely trying to save blacks from themselves, and such a mission requires dogged policing.
Mac Donald, a fellow with the Manhattan Institute, has written a new book, "The War On Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe." She thinks that racism in American criminal justice is a myth and that President Barack Obama has fomented hostility against police by alleging systemic bias.
But even with her prejudices, Mac Donald's arguments seem on their face logical and valid.
As a counter-narrative, they need addressing.
Her main issue with the DOJ report on Baltimore is its "drearily familiar" methodology: "Because blacks are stopped and arrested by the Baltimore police at a higher rate than their representation in the Baltimore population, the police are guilty of racial bias. This use of a population benchmark to analyze police activity is preposterously misguided."
Given the disproportionately high number of Baltimore blacks who are both victims and perpetrators of crime, Mac Donald argues, it should be no surprise — and generally accepted — that police focus their attention on predominantly black communities afflicted with crime.
"To expect police activity to match population ratios when crime commission is not evenly spread throughout the population is either disingenuous or disqualifyingly ignorant," Mac Donald writes.
This is how Anthony Barksdale, a respected former Baltimore police commander — and an African-American — put it the other day in The Baltimore Sun: "You go where the violence is. If there was a drug shop in Roland Park that had 15 homicides and 40 shootings … we'd be locking preppy white people up left and right. We'd be identifying the most violent professors in the community. You go where the crime is."
Makes sense, right? It's an enticing logic with the potential to stop all conversation about the DOJ's scathing report on the broken relationship between our police and large sectors of the city: If you want to make the city safer, you send cops where the crime is. Don't ask them to enforce the law and then accuse them of racism.
When Martin O'Malley ran for mayor in 1999, he pledged to make "Clifton Park as safe as Roland Park." And once elected, he launched a zero-tolerance campaign to clean up drug corners in mostly black communities and get potential perpetrators off the streets. His approach was effective for a while. But in most of the years since then, Baltimore has remained one of the most violent cities in the country, even with what the DOJ found to be a post-O'Malley continuation of "aggressive use of stops, frisks, and misdemeanor arrests."
So during an epoch of drug addiction, drug dealing and violent crime going back three decades, the DOJ says, police went about their work in the wrong manner. They routinely violated the civil rights of citizens and left us with shattered trust, if trust ever existed, especially between police and blacks.
This has prompted another round of hand-wringing about what a messed-up, racist city we have.
But those who found the DOJ report depressing would also find salve in Mac Donald's comforting logic: "The police enforce drug laws where residents ask them to, and that is overwhelmingly in minority areas plagued by open-air drug markets. If residents of white neighborhoods lived in the thrall of the drug trade, they would be demanding enforcement and enforcement would follow."
I get Mac Donald's point — who doesn't? — but she conveniently overlooks a larger one. The DOJ concluded that many of the stops made by police have been without a valid legal basis. She seems to be arguing that such stops are justified in high-crime areas — in Park Heights, but not in Roland Park — though the Constitution applies in both those neighborhoods.
She also steps around what appears to clearly be a pattern of discrimination. For example: Black residents were far more likely to be stopped and searched as pedestrians and drivers, though police were more likely to find illegal guns and drugs on whites.
Mac Donald seems to want to use the DOJ report as more evidence of the "war on cops" — and that's her Trumpian prerogative. But those of us who live here should see validity in the larger issues the report raises and acknowledge this: Over the years, constitutionally dubious police practices have had a disparate impact on a large segment of Baltimore, and, whether intentionally discriminatory or not, those practices have eroded the community trust that is critical to the crime fight in this struggling city.
That is all we need to know to go forward from here — acknowledge what is broken, fix it and get to a better place.