# The War on Cops  ## Metadata - Author: [[Heather Mac Donald]] - Full Title: The War on Cops - Category: #books ## Highlights - Giuliani’s first police commissioner, William J. Bratton, was a champion of Broken Windows policing, ([Location 71](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=71)) - The biggest beneficiaries of that crime decline were the law-abiding residents of minority neighborhoods. ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=81)) - Black Lives Matter movement holds that police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. ([Location 87](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=87)) - President Obama repeatedly charged that the criminal-justice system treats blacks differently from whites. ([Location 92](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=92)) - The Black Lives Matter narrative about racist law enforcement occurred in a vacuum; carefully excluded was any acknowledgment of inner-city crime and social breakdown. ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=107)) - The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimation of law and order itself. ([Location 120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=120)) - Black criminals who have been told that the police are racist are more likely to resist arrest, requiring the arresting officer to use force and risk an even more violent encounter. If the present lies about law enforcement continue, civilized urban life may once again break down. ([Location 121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=121)) - a second myth took hold: that the American criminal-justice system is rigged against blacks. ([Location 137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=137)) - Sadly, the president himself contributed directly to that chill wind against the nation’s police forces. ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=145)) - On November 24, 2014, President Obama betrayed the nation. ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=149)) - he perverted his role as the leader of all Americans and as the country’s most visible symbol of the primacy of the law. ([Location 153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=153)) - It’s an understandable reaction,” he said. Understandable, so long as one ignores the evidence presented to the grand jury. ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=157)) - Instead, Obama reprimanded local police officers in advance for an expected overreaction to the protests: ([Location 167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=167)) - Media coverage of racial tension portrayed black violence as customary, and riots as virtually a black entitlement. ([Location 192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=192)) - This kind of misinformation about the criminal-justice system and the police can only increase hatred of the ([Location 199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=199)) - By this process, the media could easily reach predetermined conclusions. ([Location 210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=210)) - The next highest categories of driving infraction are blasting loud music out your car and driving with tinted windows. If you attend police-and-community meetings in poor areas, you will regularly hear complaints about cars with deafening sound systems. Should the police ignore such complaints? ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=228)) - How many qualified black applicants have been rejected after applying to join the Ferguson police force? Not an interesting question, evidently. ([Location 238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=238)) - Even after the grand jury found insufficient grounds to indict Officer Wilson, the media kept flogging a story that was driven by facile, and ultimately dangerous, preconceptions. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=255)) - Moreover, if authorities are using traffic fines to generate revenue, they would presumably “target” the people most likely to be able to pay those fines, not the poorest residents of an area. ([Location 296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=296)) - The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks—who are responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas. ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=306)) - “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug. ([Location 337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=337)) - Note: This quote is especially worth noting. - The Times’ most influential readers often know even less about policing and crime than its editorialists, and they use the paper as an authoritative source of information about such matters. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=340)) - President Obama has disseminated the ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=345)) - dangerous lie that the criminal-justice system treats whites differently from blacks. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=345)) - “too uncomfortable to confront ([Location 353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=353)) - The investigation “did not support” the charges? The DOJ decided “not to file charges”? This phrasing massively misrepresents the content of the report on the shooting. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=375)) - This is not a standard-of-proof issue; it is an absence-of-any-case-whatsoever issue. ([Location 393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=393)) - The Canfield Green neighborhood, where the shooting occurred, was plastered with SNITCHES GET STITCHES signs. ([Location 405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=405)) - a reign of terror against witnesses had served to sustain a false narrative. ([Location 419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=419)) - Racist cops gunning down innocent black men in cold blood is simply too good a story to retract. “Hands up, don’t shoot” has lived on among diehard cop-haters. ([Location 432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=432)) - In New York City, as a point of comparison, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which hears complaints about the New York Police Department, substantiated only 7 percent of the complaints that it received in 2014. ([Location 454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=454)) - accurately, represent standard procedure in the department, rather than aberrations. The report routinely uses the words “frequently” and “common” as substitutes for an actual showing of established practice. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=457)) - Had the Justice Department blasted Ferguson’s management and training failures and left it at that, it would have been on solid footing. But the imperative to racialize the problems was overwhelming, especially given Holder’s previous statements against Ferguson and the subsequent discrediting of the Brown story. So the department trots out the usual statistical analyses with which to bootstrap a charge of “intentional discrimination” against blacks. And these statistical analyses are irredeemably deficient. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=465)) - New York City is typical: blacks are only 23 percent of the population but commit over 75 percent of all shootings in the city, ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=485)) - Black and Hispanic shootings together account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=489)) - DOJ does not come close to showing that the reason that the city wants to raise money from enforcement is to discriminate against blacks. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=521)) - some people face an escalating series of fines for repeated failures to attend their court hearings. ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=527)) - “When did the poor get the right to commit crimes? ([Location 530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=530)) - For the last 20 years, America’s elites have talked feverishly about police racism in order to avoid talking about black crime. The Justice Department’s second Ferguson report is just the latest example of that furious attempt to change the subject. ([Location 531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=531)) - Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 die from shootings at more than six times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined, thanks to a ten times higher rate of homicide committed by black teens. ([Location 537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=537)) - Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College sociologist. Members of the New York City Council and a preposterously named protest group called “New Yorkers Against Bratton ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=567)) - All these complaints embody a truth ignored by criminologists and street-level agitators: ([Location 583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=583)) - the fierce yearning of the law-abiding poor to enjoy the same civility and order in their neighborhoods as the residents of Park Avenue take for granted in their own. ([Location 584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=584)) - Such a statistic only shows that the police are going where the crime and ([Location 589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=589)) - disorder are. All crime commission, whether felony or misdemeanor, is racially disproportionate. ([Location 589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=589)) - To the extent that one believes that criminality is an economic problem, not a cultural one, New York’s public-safety-induced economic revival was the best antipoverty and anticrime program that the city has ever offered. ([Location 598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=598)) - The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers today is de-policing. ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=614)) - That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed, that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=623)) - police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. Blacks are killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. ([Location 640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=640)) - the looters and arsonists were pushed to the breaking point by racism, poverty, and police brutality, ([Location 710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=710)) - In May 2012, for example, students from Mervo High School in Northeast Baltimore crammed into a 7-Eleven store that was offering free Slurpees as a promotion. The teens grabbed all the merchandise they ([Location 721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=721)) - could get their hands on—$6,000 worth in total—and fled from the store. ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=722)) - But over 72 percent of black children are born to single-mother households today, ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=735)) - “uprising” born of understandable ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=764)) - enjoying the desideratum of every reality-TV cast: a wide and devoted audience. ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=771)) - riot porn, ([Location 773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=773)) - Miguel Marquez ([Location 774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=774)) - The smartphone camera has only magnified the specular nature of the anarchy, as passersby memorialize their own presence at the festival of lawlessness. ([Location 781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=781)) - “a serious attempt at forcing change. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=789)) - This claim of disparate treatment is simply untrue. ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=796)) - A Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas, conducted in 1994, found that blacks had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites, and were less likely to be found guilty at trial. ([Location 800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=800)) - Taxpayers have coughed up $22 trillion on more than 80 means-tested welfare programs (not including Social Security, Medicare, or grants for economic development) since the War on Poverty was launched in 1964, according to the Heritage Foundation. ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=808)) - Lowered crime is a precondition to economic revival, not its consequence. ([Location 818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=818)) - highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, typically following resistance to ([Location 891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=891)) - cell-phone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force. ([Location 895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=895)) - Cuomo’s order as gravely flawed because it created a separate justice system for police officers, among other reasons. ([Location 905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=905)) - Officers complain that civilians don’t understand how hard it is to control someone resisting arrest. ([Location 917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=917)) - Broken Windows policing, has saved thousands of black lives, brought lawful commerce and jobs to once-drug-infested neighborhoods, and allowed millions to go about their daily lives without fear. ([Location 947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=947)) - They can’t have it both ways: denouncing the police for proactively enforcing the law, and then accusing them of a “dereliction of duty,” in Charles Blow’s words, when they quite understandably decrease such enforcement. ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=998)) - The Black Lives Matter movement proclaims that the police are a lethal threat to blacks and that the criminal-justice system is pervaded by racial bias. ([Location 1021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1021)) - distorted by an incomplete cell-phone video. ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1023)) - The cops were there because they do believe that black lives matter. ([Location 1062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1062)) - Baltimore arrests dropped a third through November 2015; misdemeanor drug arrests were down nearly two-thirds. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1082)) - the Post’s findings confirm that the Black Lives Matter movement is a fraud. ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1110)) - for 2015, the Post documented 987 victims of fatal police shootings, about twice the number historically recorded by federal agencies. Whites were 50 percent of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent. ([Location 1112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1112)) - 4 percent of black homicide victims are killed by the police, compared with 12 percent of white and Hispanic homicide victims. ([Location 1123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1123)) - innocent’s chance of getting shot by the police is dwarfed by his chance of getting shot by criminals. ([Location 1158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1158)) - A serious “black lives matter” initiative would educate the public about the need to obey police commands. Instead, the incessant refrain that cops are racist could well increase the likelihood that black suspects will violently resist arrest—sometimes at the cost of their lives. ([Location 1249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1249)) - It pulled 350 officers off the street to meet the decree’s mountainous paperwork requirements. ([Location 1318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1318)) - it is crime, not race, that determines such police deployment. ([Location 1382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1382)) - L.A.’s gangs are obsessively self-defined by skin color. ([Location 1396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1396)) - The greatest beneficiary of the campaign against police departments will be the police monitoring business. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1399)) - Oakland ([Location 1405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1405)) - now allocates 18 officers for internal affairs investigations but only 11 for homicides. ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1406)) - If the Justice Department were serious about police reform, it would publish its standards for opening a pattern-or-practice investigation so that police agencies could take preventive action on their own. It has never done so, ([Location 1417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1417)) - every stop that the ([Location 1430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1430)) - officers made would have been tallied against the department in DOJ’s racial profiling calculus, simply because the Kitchen Crips and their rivals are black. ([Location 1430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1430)) - The public discourse around policing has focused exclusively on alleged police racism to the neglect of a far more serious and pervasive problem: black crime. ([Location 1433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1433)) - The fierce desire of so many inner-city residents for safe neighborhoods was absent from the plaintiffs’ case in Ligon v. New York. Instead, the plaintiffs’ attorneys—who included members of the white-shoe law firm Shearman & Sterling—presented a monochromatic picture of an out-of-control, poorly managed police department irrationally harassing innocent pedestrians. ([Location 1529](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1529)) - One of the many revelations to emerge from the Ligon trial is that the NYPD has an entire office devoted to defending the department against federal civil rights class-action lawsuits. ([Location 1602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1602)) - such circumstances would provide “reasonable suspicion” only for a robbery stop, not for a trespass stop. ([Location 1680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1680)) - statistical models of Professor Jeffrey Fagan, ([Location 1758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1758)) - wholly detached from the realities of crime and policing in New York. ([Location 1767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1767)) - A straight line can be drawn between family breakdown and youth violence. ([Location 1890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1890)) - Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time. ([Location 1903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1903)) - Saul Alinsky, the self-described radical who pioneered the idea in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district during the Great Depression, defined ([Location 1913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1913)) - community organizing as creating “mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people. ([Location 1914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1914)) - The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obama’s potential organizees as ludicrous. “Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people?” a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. “Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall. ([Location 1928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1928)) - ACLU lawsuits, which had stripped the housing authority of its right to screen tenants. ([Location 1933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1933)) - a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. ([Location 1938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1938)) - The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage. ([Location 1940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1940)) - Note: Marriage will not civilize them. They behave in this manner because they are already uncivilized. - Obama offers fleeting glimpses of Chicago’s social breakdown in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, but it’s as if he didn’t really see what he recorded. ([Location 1941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1941)) - Most tellingly, Obama’s narrative is almost devoid of men. ([Location 1949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1949)) - Obama inhabits a female world. His organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are. When Obama sees a group of boys vandalizing a building, he asks rhetorically: “Who will take care of them: the alderman, the social workers? The gangs?” The most appropriate candidate—“their fathers”—never occurs to him. ([Location 1950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1950)) - Alinskyism, after all, pre-supposes that the problems afflicting a poor community come from the outside. ([Location 1954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1954)) - Obama leapfrogs over concrete individual failure to alleged collective failure: ([Location 1984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=1984)) - What defines their identities isn’t family, or academic accomplishments or interests, but ruthless fealty to small, otherwise indistinguishable pieces of territory. ([Location 2000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2000)) - In the Alinskyite worldview, the school system was to blame, not the students who committed the violence. ([Location 2015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2015)) - No one pointed out that the threat from which Jackson the Civil Rights Avenger was protecting black students came from other black students, not from hate-filled white politicians. ([Location 2026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2026)) - If parents and students protest whenever such discipline is enforced, they undercut their own call for greater safety. ([Location 2035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2035)) - Of course, the government has been “taking responsibility” for children for several decades now, at a cost of billions of dollars, without noticeable effect on inner-city dysfunction. ([Location 2051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2051)) - If “collective action,” as Obama put it in 1995, could compensate for the absence of fathers, the black violence problem would have ended years ago. ([Location 2053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2053)) - Official Chicago’s answer to youth violence has also opted for collective, rather than paternal, responsibility. ([Location 2072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2072)) - Youth Advocates Program (YAP), ([Location 2092](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2092)) - Providing their families with a government-funded gofer to carry out basic adult tasks like getting car insurance will not compensate for a lifetime of paternal absence. ([Location 2099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2099)) - YAP represents the final stage of Alinskyism: its co-optation by the government-funded social-services industry. ([Location 2101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2101)) - A fleeting reference to “parental” responsibility for children is allowed, before the speaker quickly moves on to society’s more important role. But anything more specific about fathers is taboo. ([Location 2142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2142)) - Some members of Chicago’s Left will argue against holding fathers or mothers responsible for their children. ([Location 2150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2150)) - Note: WHAT!!!!!! - An Alinskyite approach to the related problems of illegitimacy and crime is only a distraction. Seeking redress and salvation from the “power structure” just puts off the essential work of culture change. ([Location 2165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2165)) - Alice Goffman, ([Location 2181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2181)) - She draws a devastating picture of cultural breakdown within the black underclass, but she is incapable of acknowledging the truth in front of her eyes. Instead, she deems her subjects the helpless pawns of a criminal-justice system run amok. ([Location 2185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2185)) - Even the Sixth Street criminals try to get themselves arrested when the local gang violence becomes too hot, since prisons and jails are the only place they feel safe. ([Location 2337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2337)) - (Such pervasive antiwhite antagonism is perhaps the best-kept secret about black inner-city culture.) ([Location 2356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2356)) - “terrible collateral damage inflicted on the young black men of Sixth Street by their interminable struggle with the police”—echoing Goffman’s contention that such struggles simply happen, rather than being the result of voluntary behavior. ([Location 2361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2361)) - This section reports from some of the nation’s largest penal institutions to reveal a world of incessant aggression and intermittent violence, in which inmates maneuver constantly to subjugate one another and to corrupt their guards. ([Location 2378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2378)) - In fact, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. ([Location 2384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2384)) - the prison population accurately reflects the incidence of crime. ([Location 2388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2388)) - one in 33 black men was in prison in 2006, compared with one in 205 white men and one in 79 Hispanic men. ([Location 2406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2406)) - The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime. ([Location 2410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2410)) - In 2005, the black homicide rate was over seven times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, ([Location 2413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2413)) - From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders in America. ([Location 2414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2414)) - They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient ([Location 2436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2436)) - punishment. ([Location 2439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2439)) - A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas (as mentioned in Chapter 8) discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. ([Location 2440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2440)) - percent. Even so, violent and property offenders continue to dominate the ranks: in 2004, 52 percent of state prisoners were serving time for violence and 21 percent for property crimes, for a combined total over three and a half times that of state drug offenders. ([Location 2555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2555)) - “Incarceration begets more incarceration [in] a vicious cycle. ([Location 2568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2568)) - The evidence is clear: black prison rates result from crime, not racism. ([Location 2615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2615)) - power in jails flows between officers and inmates in multiple directions. ([Location 2761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=2761)) - The activists’ agenda is clear: to make incarceration so expensive that law-enforcement authorities will have to abandon it for all but the most heinous crimes. ([Location 3463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3463)) - The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. ([Location 3473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3473)) - policy based on fiction is unlikely to yield positive results. ([Location 3495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3495)) - Hispanics were 48 percent of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2013, blacks were 27 percent, and whites 22 percent. ([Location 3509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3509)) - Obama said nothing about crime rates. ([Location 3582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3582)) - A 2011 study of California and New York arrest data led by Darrell Steffensmeier, a criminologist at Pennsylvania State University, found that blacks commit homicide at 11 times the rate of whites and robbery at 12 times the rate of whites. ([Location 3584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3584)) - If the country is really serious about lowering the prison count, however, it is going to have to put aside the fictions about the prison population. ([Location 3605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3605)) - sentences to be “proportionate” to the crime, echoing a 2014 National Academy of Sciences panel that they chaired. This is a meaningless principle, since no objective, “proportional” relationship between a crime and its punishment exists. ([Location 3667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3667)) - what changes criminal behavior is not the severity (i.e. the length) of a punishment, but its certainty and the swiftness with which it is imposed. ([Location 3756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3756)) - Judicial discretion in sentencing, once the norm, was curtailed during the 1980s and 1990s because of the perception that judges were being too lenient with criminals. Now the pendulum is swinging back.) ([Location 3806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3806)) - In the final analysis, America does not have an incarceration problem; it has a crime problem. ([Location 3879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3879)) - the core criminal-justice population is the black underclass. “Young black males between the ages of 17 and 26 drive the system,” says corrections expert Steve Martin. “Family is the solution—and the work ethic. You show me people with intact families and those folks work—their chances of ending up in prison are zero. ([Location 3881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01EEQ9BUA&location=3881))