Are Cops Racist?
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
False charges of racial profiling threaten to obliterate the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in America's inner cities. This is the message of Heather Mac Donald's new book, in which she brings her special brand of tough and honest journalism to the current war against the police. The anti-profiling crusade, she charges, thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. In careful reports from New York and other major cities across the country, Ms. Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby's harmful effects on black Americans. The reduction in urban crime, one of the nation's signal policy successes of the 1990s, has benefited black communities even more dramatically than white neighborhoods, she shows. By policing inner cities actively after long neglect, cops have allowed business and civil society to flourish there once more. But attacks on police, centering on false charges of police racism and racial profiling, and spearheaded by activists, the press, and even the Justice Department, have slowed the success and threaten to reverse it. Ms. Mac Donald looks at the reality behind the allegations and writes about the black cops you never heard about, the press coverage of policing, and policing strategies across the country. Her iconoclastic findings demolish the prevailing anti-cop orthodoxy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A contributing editor for the City Journal, Mac Donald asserts that in a post-Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima climate, police in New York and New Jersey have been wrongfully attacked by the media as being prejudiced when most are merely doing their jobs. Mac Donald readily admits"racist cops do exist," but sees the police mostly as shackled, less-effective agents of justice who hold back in black and Latino neighborhoods for fear that they'll be called racist. One section usefully highlights police anger-management techniques and communication with citizens and community groups, and notes that both need to be improved to help prevent police brutality. Yet the book often reads like overcompensation for perceived media bias. Mac Donald's interviews focus primarily on citizens who view the police positively, with little data to back up the book's positive-to-negative spin ratio. Practically all officers profiled come across as beleaguered, fair-minded street soldiers struggling beneath a media onslaught. And, quite glaringly, the book doesn't make good on the promise of its subtitle. Anecdotes about black Americans who long for a stronger police presence are passing mentions; Mac Donald spends much more time singling out publications (particularly The New York Times) as well as writers, theorists and politicians who've jumped on the anti-racial profiling bandwagon. An antagonistic tone and jeering asides (the author ridicules a politician for incorporating parts of the play The Vagina Monologues into her swearing-in ceremony) further squander the potential for meaningful dialogue that Mac Donald's ideas afford.
