Who gets to say what?

Heather Mac Donald writes in Quillette about the death of the author and the end of empathy.

The anti-cultural appropriation crusade views racial and sexual identity as something that can be stolen, if a writer from an allegedly privileged group has not been granted ‘permission’ (from whom is never clear) to imagine the life of someone from an official victim group. Publishers are at present rejecting manuscripts of novels and stories because their authors entered into the forbidden territory of victim identity.

Anyone who believes, however, that human beings are incapable of grasping the experience of an allegedly oppressed Other has never read literature, with its stunning insights into, say, female psychology (see, inter alia, The Slaves of Solitude, by Patrick Hamilton) and the lash of stigma (see Esther Waters, by George Moore). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Twain, Thackeray, and countless other authors who have expanded the radius of human sympathy could not be published today. Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner, among others, used dialects in their novels; who is to say whose languages are off limits? Here, again, the rules are asymmetrical. Members of official victim groups are encouraged to expound on and portray the lived experience of ‘white privilege’ and ‘toxic masculinity.’

...An English professor at California State University, Fresno, demanded that all white editors everywhere resign. It’s time for white editors to “STEP DOWN and hand over the positions of power,” wrote Randa Jarrar on Twitter. “We don’t have to wait for them to fuck up. The fact that they hold these positions is fuck up enough.” Never mind that one of the Nation editors was Hispanic; apparently she had no agency. (Jarrar had previously garnered negative publicity in April for gloating over the death of former First Lady Barbara Bush.)

White editors will demur from Jarra’s demand that they step down, of course. Instead, they will keep their positions of authority and compensate for their whiteness with ever more exacting tests of who gets to say what. Such barriers around the human imagination spell the end of literature and the end of empathy.

Read more here.

Constantly reinforced delusions

At American Greatness Heather MacDonald is a guest on a fifteen-minute podcast, which is also transcribed at that blog if you prefer to read it rather than listen to it.

Heather discusses what she calls the "phantom problem" of racial and gender victimization. She says there is a web of constantly reinforced delusions about the safety of American society. Heather believes we are a well-meaning people that believe in giving everyone a fair shake.

Compared with the costs of crime, prison is a bargain.

Excerpts from Heather Mac Donald's testimony before Congress on criminal justice and the deincarceration movement:

Prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Drug enforcement is not the driving factor in the prison system, violent crime is. Even during the most rapid period of prison growth from 1980 to 1990, increased sentences for violent crime played a larger role than drug sentences in the incarceration build up. Since 1999, violent offenders have accounted for all of the increase in the national prison census.

Today, only 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time for drug offenses—nearly all of them for trafficking. Drug possession accounts for only 3.6 percent of state prisoners. Drug offenders make up a larger portion of the federal prison caseload—about 50 percent—but only 13 percent of the nation’s prisoners are under federal control. In 2014, less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court were convicted of simple drug possession; the rest were convicted of trafficking. The size of America’s prison population is a function of our violent crime rate. The U.S. homicide rate is seven times higher than the combined rate of 21 Western nations plus Japan, according to a 2011 study by researchers of the Harvard School of Public Health and UCLA School of Public Health.

The most dangerous misconception about our criminal justice system is that it is pervaded by racial bias. For decades, criminologists have tried to find evidence proving that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to systemic racial inequity. That effort has always come up short. In fact, racial differences in offending account for the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas found that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to be sentenced to prison, however, due to their more extensive criminal histories and the gravity of their current offense.

...Incarceration is not destroying the black family. Family breakdown is in fact the country’s most serious social problem, and it is most acute in black communities. But the black marriage rate was collapsing long before incarceration started rising at the end of the 1970s, as my colleague Kay Hymowitz has shown. Indeed, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his prescient call for attention to black out-of-wedlock child-rearing in 1965, just as that era’s deincarceration and decriminalization movement was gaining speed.

It is crime, not incarceration, that squelches freedom and enterprise in urban areas. And there have been no more successful government programs for liberating inner-city residents from fear and disorder than proactive policing and the incapacitation of criminals.

Compared with the costs of crime, prison is a bargain. The federal system spends about $6 billion on incarceration; the state system spent $37 billion in 2010 on institutional corrections. The economic, social, and psychological costs of uncontrolled crime and drug trafficking dwarf such outlays. And prison spending is a minute fraction of the $1.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars devoted to means-tested federal welfare programs, as Senator Sessions has documented.

Violent crime is currently shooting up again in cities across the country. Police officers are backing away from proactive enforcement in response to the yearlong campaign that holds that police are the greatest threat facing young black men today. Officers encounter increasing hostility and resistance when they make a lawful arrest. With pedestrian stops, criminal summons, and arrests falling precipitously in urban areas, criminals are becoming emboldened. While I do not think that the current crime increase is a result of previous changes in federal sentencing policy, it behooves the government to tread cautiously in making further changes. However, I unequivocally support the “productive activities” component of Section 202 of the Act, to the extent that it aims to engage all prisoners in work.

In closing, let me say that the committee would provide an enormous public service if it could rebut the myth that the criminal justice system is racist. Thank you for your attention.

Incessant drumbeat against the police

Glenn Reynolds links to an opinion piece by Heather Mac Donald in the Wall Street Journal:

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

...This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported.

...Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014.

“Any cop who uses his gun now has to worry about being indicted and losing his job and family,” a New York City officer tells me. “Everything has the potential to be recorded. A lot of cops feel that the climate for the next couple of years is going to be nonstop protests.”

A New York City cop tells me that he was amazed to hear people scoffing that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, only looked a “little red” after Brown assaulted him and tried to grab his weapon: “Does an officer need to be unconscious before he can use force? If someone is willing to fight you, he’s also willing to take your gun and shoot you. You can’t lose a fight with a guy who has already put his hands on you because if you do, you will likely end up dead.”

Politicians and activists in New York and other cities have now taken aim at “broken windows” policing. This police strategy has shown remarkable success over the past two decades by targeting low-level public-order offenses, reducing the air of lawlessness in rough neighborhoods and getting criminals off the streets before they commit bigger crimes. Opponents of broken-windows policing somehow fail to notice that law-abiding residents of poor communities are among the strongest advocates for enforcing laws against public drinking, trespassing, drug sales and drug use, among other public-order laws.

“There are no real consequences for committing property crimes anymore,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Armando Munoz told Downtown News earlier this month, “and the criminals know this.” The Milwaukee district attorney, John Chisholm, is diverting many property and drug criminals to rehabilitation programs to reduce the number of blacks in Wisconsin prisons; critics see the rise in Milwaukee crime as one result.

If these decriminalization and deincarceration policies backfire, the people most harmed will be their supposed beneficiaries: blacks, since they are disproportionately victimized by crime. The black death-by-homicide rate is six times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other black civilians, not the police. The police could end all use of lethal force tomorrow and it would have at most a negligible impact on the black death rate. In any case, the strongest predictor of whether a police officer uses force is whether a suspect resists arrest, not the suspect’s race.

Contrary to the claims of the “black lives matter” movement, no government policy in the past quarter century has done more for urban reclamation than proactive policing. Data-driven enforcement, in conjunction with stricter penalties for criminals and “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.

Read more here.