Appearing on Steve Malzberg’s weekly Sunday commentary show Eat the Press, Manhattan Institute conservative scholar and New York Times bestselling author Heather Mac Donald scolded the media for ignoring widespread black-on-black crime while conveying a false narrative of rampant racist policing, stating, “there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police.”
After Malzberg declared that he could not imagine anything “more dangerous than a media which pushes the narrative that police hunt down and kill black men,” Mac Donald concurred.
“You’re absolutely right,” she said. “The perception that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men is an optical illusion.”
“It is based on extraordinarily selective coverage on the part of the press; they only cover police shootings of black men,” she continued.
“If they were to cover police shootings of white men with the same intensity, the public would believe that we were living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of white men,” she added.
Rejecting the idea that police choose crime scenes, Mac Donald explained that police are naturally present where crime takes place.
“The fact of the matter is police go where the crime is,” she said. “They don’t make these decisions themselves, they are driven by where people are most being assailed by these mindless barbaric drive-by shootings where kids are being gunned down in their bedrooms, in their front porches, at barbecues, and that is overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods.”
Additionally, Mac Donald added, police are the most dedicated government agency to protecting black lives.
“The cops don’t wish that reality, it is forced on them by the reality of crime,” she said. “They are there in order to save lives. There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that ‘black lives matter’ than the police.”
Noting the harm done by calls for the abolition of police and the closing of prisons, Mac Donald claimed that the damage was already being seen.
“The cops are backing off under this phony narrative of police racism,” she said. “Last year saw the largest percentage increase in homicide in the country’s history and the victims were overwhelmingly black.”
Stating that another two thousand black males were killed last year compared to the previous year, including four dozen black children gunned down, Mac Donald noted the hypocrisy of those supposedly committed to black lives.
“Not a single one of those child deaths were protested by Black Lives Matter activists,” she said.
Mac Donald attributed high crime rates, in part, to the retreating of cops from crime-ridden areas.
“When the cops back off criminals become emboldened,” she said, “and the crime now which has been focused in the inner city is spreading. It is coming to a neighborhood near you.”
She then addressed the tendency of ignoring black-on-black crime.
“People tend to turn their eyes away from the astronomically higher levels of black-on-black crime,” she said. “The opposite of what a white supremacist country would do.”
“People feel guilty about it, they feel bad about it, they don’t want to look at it,” she added. “But when you ignore it you know it spreads and it is going to tear this country down with further anarchy.”
Referring to the recently introduced George Floyd police reform bill, Malzberg suggested that qualified immunity for police — which states that if an area of law is unclear or an officer operated in good faith, he cannot be held personally liable and his assets cannot be attacked — was the most crucial issue of the bill.
In response, Mac Donald noted that many professions enjoy qualified immunity.
“The police are the only public union, public group of employees, that are being stripped of qualified immunity,” she said. “Remove that — even though teachers still enjoy it and sanitation workers still enjoy it — and cops will shut down further.”
Mac Donald also criticized the George Floyd bill for being “pervaded with the absolute destructive idea that any kind of criminal justice practice that has a disparate impact on blacks is inevitably racist.”
Calling out the “woke” media for its hypocrisy, Mac Donald concluded by claiming the media had no real concern for black lives.
“The media thinks of itself as so progressive and woke — it doesn’t give a damn about black lives,” she said. “I mean there have been kids shot in Chicago over the last week [and] not a single one of those got any kind of media attention.”
The interview came as demands to defund police, driven by Black Lives Matter protests, have gained traction in Democrat-run cities and among progressive members of Congress.
Last month, a group of House Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Presley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), asked House appropriators to defund a police program in order to help criminal illegal aliens evade deportation from the United States.
Also last month, a poll released by Fox News showed the majority of voters oppose reducing any type of funding that goes towards police departments.
In February, San Francisco Mayor London Breed released a plan to redistribute $120 million from the city’s law enforcement budget to projects aimed at helping the city’s black minority.
Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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