Heather MacDonald recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee on alleged racial bias in law enforcement. It is not a pretty report (“False Testimony: Sworn statements at a recent congressional hearing on
policing veered sharply from the truth; here are the facts”). Here’s her opening and
closing paragraphs:
The anti-police narrative depends
on suppression of facts, and the duplicity of anti-cop forces reached a
shameless new high at a congressional hearing last week. Committee members
should sanction the false testimony, given under oath, and publicly correct the
record.
The House Judiciary Committee, now
controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of
unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust
between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session,
a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video
screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that
the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed
in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of
full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the
African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the
deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore,
as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack
Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal
charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after
trial.
. . .
The Republicans on the committee
failed to push back against this narrative of systemic police bias, choosing
instead to tell feel-good stories about “our brave men and women in uniform.”
Such tales do little to rebut Black Lives Matter ideology, since both
statements could be true: individual officers display heroism, and
policing is infected by “structural racism,” in Davis’s words. The only way to
dislodge the “endemic racism” argument is to challenge its factual basis
directly. I was the only witness at the hearing with the ability to do so, but
the Republicans asked me not one question. This is not a matter of personal ego
but rather of the public battle of ideas.
The Democratic committee members
and their witnesses clearly laid out their agenda should they retake the White
House and Senate: mandatory implicit-bias training for cops, a huge waste of
money that could be spent instead on tactical and de-escalation training;
mandatory racial-profiling data collection, which will be measured,
misleadingly, against a population benchmark; racial quotas for police hiring,
which require lowered standards; and more federal consent decrees for police
departments, which cripple the ability of cops to engage in proactive policing
and divert millions of dollars into the pockets of federal monitors. As
inimical as these policy items are to effective policing, the narrative that
drives them—that the police are a threat to black communities—is more dangerous
still. That narrative rests on duplicity, as amply demonstrated at last week’s
hearings. Republicans, who invoke patriotism on a regular basis, are doing the
country no favors by ceding the criminal-justice narrative to the activists and
race-baiters.
Her full report is here. Sad to say, GOP members of the
House Judiciary Committee include Jim Jordan and Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert
of Texas; Matt Gaetz of Florida; and Andy Biggs
of Arizona.
(E-mail links for Jordan and Chabot are embedded in case you would like to email them with the link to MacDonald's report.)
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