The Promise of President Trump: Heather Mac Donald

‘Mr. Trump can give proactive policing its due in saving thousands of minority lives.’

It has been nearly three decades since a president took office during a period of rising violent crime. The homicide spikes of the past two years were the largest in almost half a century. Mr. Trump correctly identified the cause during the presidential campaign: a false narrative that portrays policing as lethally racist. President Obama amplified that narrative; the Trump administration must stop it.

Police morale has cratered during the past two years; officers have pulled back from proactive enforcement in high-crime areas. Having a leader in the White House who does not make specious charges of racism based on phony statistics is essential to persuading officers to intervene in suspicious street behavior.

President Obama’s Justice Department last week handed the incoming administration a gift: a damning report on the Chicago Police Department that canserve as a road map for everything the new team should avoid. The report accused the Chicago police of unconstitutional use of force without articulating a standard or providing any quantified evidence.

The next Justice Department will revamp the oversight philosophy that led to the Chicago travesty. It should review police activity in the context of crime, not population data. Bureaucrats in Washington must grasp that officers focus on high-crime areas to save lives. The new administration should retire disparate-impact analysis, not only in criminal justice but across the economy. Such analysis finds discrimination in race-neutral procedures by ignoring the behavioral differences among groups. The most important “disparity” when it comes to crime and policing is that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. That is the civil-rights issue that needs attention.

The federal government is at best a marginal player in local crime-fighting, and it should stay that way. But Washington can provide prosecutorial support to get criminals off the street. And Mr. Trump can give proactive policing its due in saving thousands of minority lives.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal