Are Cops Racist? - Hardcover

MacDonald, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 156663489X ISBN 13: 9781566634892

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 2002

Synopsis

Brilliant journalist Heather Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby's harmful effects on black Americans.

About this title

About the Author

Heather Mac Donald, a nonpracticing lawyer, is a John M. Olin Fellow at The Manhattan Institute in New York and a contributing editor of City Journal, the quarterly magazine of urban affairs. Her first book, The Burden of Bad Ideas (also published by Ivan R. Dee), was enthusiastically praised and is now in a sixth printing. She lives and writes in New York City.

Reviews

MacDonald asserts that complaints against police of racism and racial profiling undermine the interests of minority victims because blacks are the primary victims of violent crimes and drug activities, the center of the objectionable practice of racial profiling. The author believes that major liberal news media, such as the New York Times, have done a major disservice in misreporting such racially charged incidents as the police killing of Amadou Diallo and the police-station rape of Abner Louima. She dismisses the causes of the Diallo killing as bad police tactics and the Louima rape as overreaction by some officers who take any resistance as a personal assault. She takes issue with statistical analyses on racial profiling that compare police stops of black citizens with their overall proportion of the general population rather than with their proportion of the criminal population. Because her interview subjects are decidedly pro-police, some readers might find this a one-sided view of controversial police practices, but it provides another viewpoint on an important issue. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

MacDonald (The Burden of Bad Ideas) is one of the few authors who attempts to justify current policing methods, arguing that the truth about policing and issues related to race is not known to the general public. She contends that the police should be receiving accolades for all the good work they do; instead, they are constantly attacked by the media (especially the New York Times), which offer unsubstantiated claims that racial profiling is running amok. MacDonald presents a great deal of evidence to debunk this media-driven myth: law-abiding inner-city citizens want a highly visible police presence, black officers pull over the same percentage of minority motorists as do their white counterparts, officers receive many hours of sensitivity and diversity training, and so on. In particular, she takes great exception to what she sees as the New York Times's biased approach to covering police matters, showing, for instance, that they do not report such incidents as police officers capturing gun-wielding felons without firing a shot, as the NYPD has done 155 times since 1995. This book is essential reading for anyone who assumes that racial profiling is an undisputed fact. Highly recommended for collections in criminal justice and the social sciences.
Tim Delaney, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156663489X
• ISBN 13: 9781566634892
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186