HOW TO ACTUALLY SAVE BLACK LIVES

National Review

 

How to Actually Save Black Lives

By WILFRED REILLY

&

ROBERT MARANTO

&

PATRICK WOLF

May 24, 2024 6:30 AM

 

The BLM movement is not the way.

 

Looked at in retrospect, the Black Lives Matter movement — which spent much of the past decade claiming that unarmed black men are “murdered” about once daily by U.S. police officers and that America is currently overseeing a “genocide” of black Americans — reminds us of a movie.

 

In director Billy Wilder’s now classic film, Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas played a cynical reporter who intentionally delayed the rescue of a trapped miner named Leo Minosa in order to sell the story as a serial. While Douglas’s character cashed in on the national drama he created, the cigar-chomping local sheriff used Minosa’s rescue to promote his reelection campaign, and almost every local business fleeced the well-heeled tourists who drove in to gawk at the whole thing. Unfortunately, however, the manufactured multiday delay ended up killing Minosa — a hapless victim of yellow journalism and business boosterism.

 

The real-life event that inspired the picture, the failed rescue of my fellow Kentuckian W. Floyd Collins, won cub reporter William Burke Miller a Pulitzer Prize. Unlike his silver-screen counterpart, Miller never endangered his subject. Still, as director Spike Lee declared on Turner Classic Movies, Ace in the Hole tells dark truths about the role of sheer greed and ambition in American local and national politics — truths that not everyone wants to hear.

 

Since the globally broadcast death of George Floyd almost exactly four years ago, we have come to see much of BLM in this same light. After years of virtue-signaling, serious efforts to defund American police (one of which famously reached the op-ed pages of the New York Times), and more than $10 billion in donations to race-activist groups, the Black Lives Matter movement has almost certainly resulted in the loss of thousands of additional black lives, as reflected in the near doubling of the age-adjusted African-American homicide rate. Simultaneously, it has failed to significantly reduce police killings of black civilians, which have long been rare.

 

Neither point just made can be seriously contested. During the years immediately following the death of George Floyd, a time of widespread rioting and urban chaos, the annual U.S. murder toll surged above 20,000 for the first time since the 1990s. Meanwhile, rates of (often justified) police violence against African Americans have remained remarkably stable. According to the Washington Post, a fine paper but one just slightly to the right of Mr. V. Lenin, there were 239 shootings of armed or unarmed black Americans in 2016 — the first full year after the launch of the Post’s “The Counted” police-violence database. By comparison, there were 255 such shootings in 2022 and 235 in 2023 — very similar numbers.

 

In defiance of fact, the long-dominant Black Lives Matter narrative has consistently claimed that racist police present an almost existential threat to black Americans and, therefore, that we must defund the police. Some may believe this story, but others obviously use it to forward their own ends. As Harvard-affiliated Democratic pollster John Della Volpe recently boasted at a political-science conference, Black Lives Matter language and imagery can serve as a dramatic “hook” to boost progressive-voter turnout. And anyone who questions the dominant narrative undermines progressive elites, so such critics must be crushed.

 

A cynic might note that this analysis quite likely explains why Harvard itself attempted to terminate tenured professor Roland Fryer after his rigorous scholarship found that police do not disproportionately kill African Americans. (In fact, with all other variables held steady, officers are almost 30 percent more likely to shoot white suspects.) It also explains, as we have shown in a peer-reviewed paper just published — “Which Police Departments Make Black Lives Matter?” — why the most widely cited research dealing with Black Lives Matter focuses on progressive activism rather than on the practical impacts of the movement, much less on how to improve policing and save lives. Politics is driving policy, which is tragic given that police really could do better at protecting all Americans. We know this — that police departments can improve — because many recently have.

 

In our research paper, the team behind this National Review piece ranks the police departments of the 50 largest U.S. cities, adjusted for poverty, by their effectiveness in (1) keeping homicide rates low and (2) not taking civilian lives while doing so.

 

Some departments excel. On our Police Professionalism Index (PPI), New York City, perhaps surprisingly, easily takes first place. The top 20 cities also include Boston, Mesa, Ariz., Raleigh, N.C., Virginia Beach, five California cities excluding the largest metropoles but including San Diego and San Jose, and five Texas cities including El Paso and Austin. In contrast, Baltimore ranks dead last — no pun intended. Its homicide rate (a staggering 56.12 per 100,000 individuals per year) is roughly 15 times New York’s — and Baltimore cops kill roughly ten times as many civilians per capita as the NYPD. Competence matters, as does training. Baltimoreans frankly should be outraged, particularly given that the top-ranked NYC department used to be in the Charm City’s league in terms of the variables we analyze.

 

Fifty years ago, the NYPD killed about 100 civilians every year, compared with ten today. Similarly, in the single year of 1990, New York City had 2,245 homicides — concentrated among “people of color” — versus only 462 in 2020. Measurable reforms to the NYPD, which centered on loading the department with tough but good cops and with competent users of computer technology, likely saved tens of thousands of primarily black lives while reducing incarceration rates.

 

How did NYC cops improve? Our article lays this out at greater length, but New York basically got serious about recruiting potentially great cops, training them, and holding them accountable. In the 1990s, now-legendary NYPD commissioner William Bratton mandated the use of CompStat: a statistical program that tracks reports of crime — such as 911 calls — by location in real time. In weekly meetings, top police brass praised precinct commanders who sent officers exactly where criminal activity had been concentrated and broke it (a practice sometimes called racist today) and grilled others about their failure to do the same. Ineffective managers had to “get up” — improve — or get out. The homicide rate was halved inside two years.

 

While not every flatfoot was as enthusiastic about this step, the NYPD also strengthened its internal-affairs unit with a focus on getting unprofessional officers — a category that might well have included Derek Chauvin, who had several use-of-force complaints prior to the murder of George Floyd, if Minneapolis had a similar policy in place — off the streets. Resolving police-personnel issues before rather than after a disaster was the goal, as Charles Campisi details in Blue on Blue: An Insider’s Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops.

 

To copy the NYPD’s success, voters in Baltimore and other poorly policed cities (Kansas City, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and Miami come to mind) must ask questions: Are police chiefs allowed to hire and retain officers of the necessary quality? If not, why? Can they fire any subordinates who are not up to their tough jobs? Are there enough cops on the force to do the job? Do police use CompStat and other online tools to track what works in fighting crime? Does the internal-affairs unit hold the relatively few truly brutal cops fully accountable?

 

Building a great police department, and actually saving black (and white and all other) lives, is possible, but it takes time. It’s long past time to stop the noisy politicking and start both supporting our cops and implementing those specific, real reforms policing needs.

 

Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University and the author of the upcoming book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. Robert Maranto holds the 21st Century Endowed Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Patrick Wolf is a distinguished professor of education policy and holds the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas.