Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest fifty cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993. The reason is what Heather Mac Donald first identified nationally as the "Ferguson effect": Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals are becoming emboldened. This book expands on Mac Donald's groundbreaking reporting on the Ferguson effect. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: that racist cops are the greatest threat to young black males. The War on Cops exposes the truth about officer use of force and explodes the conceit of "mass incarceration." A rigorous analysis of data shows that crime, not race, drives police actions and prison rates. The growth of proactive policing in the 1990s, along with lengthened sentences for violent crime, saved thousands of minority lives. In fact, Mac Donald argues, no government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that "black lives matter" than today's data-driven, accountable police department.
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"This is a book that can save lives."
— Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
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Heather Mac Donald is the national bestselling author of The War on Cops, a Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor of City Journal. A former aspiring academic with roots in deconstruction and postmodernism, she has been the target of violent student protest for her work on policing. She received the 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. Her writings have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Partisan Review, among others. She lives in New York.
Pam Ward, an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, found her true calling reading books for the blind and physically handicapped for the Library of Congress’ Talking Books program. The fact that she can work with Blackstone Audio from the beauty of the mountains of Southern Oregon is an unexpected bonus.