The Ferguson Effect: making cops think like insurance companies

At the beginning of the month, Heather McDonald wrote an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal making the case for what she called the Ferguson Effect: the spike in violence due to cops' reluctance to engage in proactive police work in the face of Ferguson-style anti-cop riots. Not surprisingly, her article created a bunch of controversy.

Today she responds to many of her critics, and accuses them of attempting to explain away the significant spikes in violent crime seen in many different cities since Ferguson.

A sharply critical response from some quarters greeted the article. It belonged to a “long line of conservative efforts to undermine racial equality,” wrote Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt in the Guardian, decrying the article as “crime fiction” intended to undermine “the country’s newest civil rights movement.” Charles Blow of the New York Times called me a “fear-mongering iron fist-er” who was using “racial pathology arguments” and “smearing the blood running in the street onto the hands holding the placards.” The article was part of a “growing backlash against police reform,” an attempt to “shame people who dare to speak up about police abuse,” wrote journalist Radley Balko in the Washington Post. ...

These criticisms speak volumes about how activists, members of the media and many academics understand crime and policing.

It is true that violent crime has not skyrocketed in every American city—but my article didn’t say it had. It has gone up in enough places, though, and at startling-enough rates, to warrant close attention. Law-enforcement officials share that opinion.

A big part of what caused the 20-year drop in crime was proactive police methods in formerly crime-ridden cities like New York and LA. It went beyond responding to already-committed crimes and focused on identifying and stopping people likely to commit crimes in the immediate future.

McDonald continues:

“The reactive policing of the early 1990s was easy,” Lou Turco, president of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association in New York City, told me in an interview. “You waited for a complainant to tell you that they’ve been a robbery victim. The hard thing is to get someone off the corner before there’s a victim.” It is this proactive policing, when there is no complainant, that can get you in trouble now, Mr. Turco says. “Every cop today is thinking: ‘If this stop turns bad, I’m in the mix.’ ”

An officer in South Central Los Angeles described the views of his fellow cops: “Guys and gals in coffee shops are saying to each other: ‘If you get out of your car, you’re crazy, unless there’s a radio call.’ ”

This is not good. It risks cultivating in cops an attitude towards crime-fighting similar to insurance companies' attitude towards illness: "Only devote resources once it's clear there's a problem."

People complain that insurance companies will pay for statins to treat high cholesterol but not for proactive therapies and treatments that would prevent high cholesterol in the first place. I think we're seeing this same dynamic evolving among the police, and -- just as with medical care -- it leads to lots of preventable suffering.

The biggest difference here is that insurance companies didn't stop paying for preventative measures because they were demonized for doing so. That seems to have been the case with the police, though. Having seen their brothers in blue put on trial -- literally and figuratively, even for legitimate preventative police work -- they have become reluctant to do anything without evidence that there's already been a crime.

As McDonald notes, the people most affected by proactive policing seem to have the least problems with it.

Many residents of high-crime areas don’t look at proactive and public-order enforcement the way their alleged advocates do. In a recent Quinnipiac poll of New York City voters, 61% of black respondents said they wanted the police to actively enforce quality-of-life laws in their neighborhood, compared with 59% of white voters.

Alas, though. Their advocates don't have time to get their actual opinions. They're too busy making a difference to bother making high-crime areas safe.

America: Officially Losing the Cyber-Terror War

Last week, we learned just how bad the news of China hacking into OPM's databases is. And the answer is: REALLY FUCKING BAD.

The hackers who breached the US Office of Personnel Management accessed a second set of even more highly sensitive data, it was widely reported Friday, in revelations that make the breach one of the biggest thefts of data on federal workers. ... The second set of data files likely included highly sensitive information from forms filled out by people applying for jobs that require security clearances. The 127-page questionnaires ask about criminal and arrest records, mental illnesses, drug and alcohol problems, and financial data for the applicant and often family members, friends and acquaintances. 

Chinese hackers (meaning, in all likelihood, the Chinese military) now have the most intimate and personal information on over 14 million current and former federal employees. If you've ever had a security clearance, malicious hackers now have all your information, and a bunch of information on the people close to you.

But this bad news gets even better worse!

Apparently, Russia and China have managed to decrypt the encrypted files Edward Snowden brought with him, and now all of our spies and covert personnel overseas (and Britain's too, it seems) are compromised. 

Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.

Western intelligence agencies say they have been forced into the rescue operations after Moscow gained access to more than 1m classified files held by the former American security contractor, who fled to seek protection from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, after mounting one of the largest leaks in US history.

Senior government sources confirmed that China had also cracked the encrypted documents, which contain details of secret intelligence techniques and information that could allow British and American spies to be identified.

I saw that over the weekend, Hillary identified America as not only the one country able "to meet traditional threats from countries like Russia, North Korea, and Iran -- and to deal with the rise of new powers like China" but also the only one "prepared to meet emerging threats from cyber attacks, transnational terror networks like ISIS, and diseases that spread across oceans and continents."

What the hell is she smoking? America isn't equipped to counter cyber attacks. We just allowed China and Russia to rob us of our most vital security and personnel secrets! This is a massive defeat in the cyber-terror war. MASSIVE! This is the allies losing the Battle of France. This is bad.

It's even worse when you consider that, under Obama, we've shown ourselves completely unable to credibly respond to traditional threats from Russia and Iran.

• Russia sliced off a chunk of Ukraine and all we did was bleat about how Putin is on the wrong side of history.
• Iran pushes forward towards a nuclear weapon and spits in Obama's face by jacking up their provocations in the Middle East, and Obama forbids his people to criticize the mullahs at all.

Nobody fears or respects us right now. We're in at least as bad a spot now as we were in 1980, when Carter's weakness prompted Russia to invade Afghanistan and Iranian radicals to occupy the US embassy. The Middle East is on fire, China is heating up things with its Pacific neighbors, and Russia invades and occupies its neighbor -- and the lady who helped construct this massive clusterfuck is now doing her best Kevin Bacon impression by telling us that everything is fine?

No. I'm sorry. We've been losing pretty much all the wars we're involved with (including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria). We're now also officially losing the cyber-terror war.

This is bad. This is very, very bad.

CNN connects the dots on Hillary's failure in Libya

CNN is doing something to Hillary that the Lefty MSM almost never does to Democrats: connect the dots between individual news stories to create a larger narrative about the candidate.

I'm honestly (though quite pleasantly) shocked.

Hillary Clinton has another Libya problem.

She's already grappling with the political headaches from deleted emails and from the terror attack that left four Americans dead in Benghazi.

But she'll face a broader challenge in what's become of the North African country since, as secretary of state in 2011, she was the public face of the U.S. intervention to push out its longtime strongman, Moammar Gadhafi.

Libya's lapse into the chaos of failed statehood has provided a breeding ground for terror and a haven for groups such as ISIS. Its plight is also creating an opening for Republican presidential candidates to question Clinton's strategic acumen and to undermine her diplomatic credentials, which will be at the center of her pitch that only she has the global experience needed to be president in a turbulent time.

How about that? The media doing actual journalism on a major Democratic candidate! Will miracles never cease?

Read the whole thing here.

The question Democrats can't afford to have blacks ask

The hubris of Obama infected the Democrats, and they look poised to feel nemesis's swift and harsh judgment.

Eight years ago, the Democrats were operating out of a sense of inevitability. Demography was destiny, and the trends all pointed up for the Left. The "coalition of the ascendant" -- non-whites, single women, Millennials, and Liberal college-educated urban whites -- would shift America to the Left and guarantee Democrats a national majority for a generation at the least.

When this coalition elected Obama -- and then bucked a century of precedent by reelecting him with fewer votes 4 years later -- the narrative of inevitability seemed established. The Democrats had cracked the code and would have a national majority for 20 years.

Things haven't turned out that way, to put it mildly.

Instead of a generational majority, Democrats lost the House and several governorships and state legislatures 2 years into Obama's presidency. They suffered an even worse massacre 4 years later, losing the Senate, falling further behind in the House, and losing even more governorships and state legislatures.

Today, their brightest hope for holding the White House is an old, rich, white lady with questionable ethics, massive baggage, and whose main asset is her famous husband. The ascendant groups they were counting on to keep them in power have become weary and jaded, and now verge on feeling hopeless and used. Six years of Hope and Change have just given them More of the Same ... or worse.

Blacks in particular are key for Democrats to maintain their edge. If blacks don't vote in the historic numbers and at the historic rates that they did for Obama, Democrats are screwed, plain and simple. And today they're asking the kind of questions that Democrats simply cannot afford for them to ask. Questions like, "Is voting even worth it?" or "Will voting make a difference?"

People who ask those kinds of questions don't make voting history, and Democrats need blacks to make voting history (or come damned close) every election for them to have a chance.

Liberals continue to be delusional about human nature.

To the surprise of precisely zero people with any knowledge of either recent history or human nature, crime in New York City has spiked since the NYPD cancelled "stop and frisk" stops.

This is another example of Liberals assuming that civilization and law & order are the default conditions for humanity. They aren't. Hobbes's state of nature is much closer to humanity's default conditions.

If you assume the peace and prosperity we enjoy in the West are inevitable, then you feel free to strip away policies and safeguards -- like good policing policies -- that make such things possible. Wr went through this in the '60s and '70s, and we gained some hard fought wisdom -- or so I thought. Apparently, Liberals never really learned that lesson.

Hopefully it doesn't take as much chaos and death before we stop these mistakes this time.

Fudging data -- it's the new "science"!

Problem: The data shows the globe hasn't been warming since 1998, despite climatologists' predictions.

Legitimate Scientists' Solution: Adjust the model to conform to the data.

Climate Scientists' New Solution: Adjust the data to conform to the model.

NOAA has a new article out purporting to solve the global warming problem since 1998 ... which, for climatologists, is that there's no data indicating that the globe has been warming since 1998. NOAA's solution? Adjust the data from surface temperature reading stations to make it look like the warming trend never stopped. You can read this detailed analysis of how they did it.

Basically, though, it comes down to this:

Sounds like a great idea, guys. Keep up the good work. Yay, "Science"!

Germany has eaten its seed corn.

When I speak with my Lefty friends about the fundamental unworkability of European social welfare policies, my friends scoff at my skepticism. If these policies are so unworkable, my friends say, how have European countries been making them work for so long?

That's pretty easy: they've been eating their seed corn. Originally, their policies ate up their economic dynamism. Now they have eaten up the next generation of workers.

Put Germany on the ballooning list of European countries without a rising generation of workers large enough to pay for their cradle-to-grave welfare state. In the next 10 years, Germany's workforce is going to begin dwindling. By mid-century, it will have collapsed.

I've said it before: the fatal paradox of the European welfare state is that, while it requires societies to have 3 or 4 children per couple in order to maintain itself, the benefits it provides encourage couples to have fewer than 2 children apiece. When they fail -- as virtually all European welfare states are in the process of doing -- they discourage people from having kids even more.

Maybe there's a generous welfare state system that provides ample benefits without requiring people to have lots of kids to make it work. If so, however, it doesn't look like anyone's figured it out yet. We certainly haven't. Neither has Germany.