The Patriot Post® · In Brief: What Killed Tyre Nichols
Heather Mac Donald is one of the nation’s foremost researchers on crime and policing. Naturally, she weighed in on the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black Memphis police officers.
Is U.S. policing in a death spiral? Yes, as long as the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers is portrayed as a manifestation of racism. The problems underlying that horrifying episode — the recruitment crisis, lax hiring standards, and depolicing — will worsen, intensified by the very policies ostensibly adopted to prevent another such travesty. The vicious circle of rising crime and a flight from the profession will accelerate.
She criticized Joe Biden for having “adopted the racism narrative before much was known” about the incident, and repeating that narrative numerous times. Other Democrats did likewise. Mac Donald proceeds to recount the tragic and awful details of Nichols’s death, leaving the distinct impression that the police involved were grossly and criminally negligent. She then says:
The Nichols beating is not the product of racism; it is the tragic culmination of the very narrative being offered to explain that beating. The idea that policing is racist, both in its treatment of black suspects and in its hiring of black officers, has led to manpower loss, a lowering of standards, and a drop in proactive enforcement. The resulting increase in crime then puts more downward pressure on hiring standards in order to try to replenish the depleted ranks. Unable to compensate for officer attrition, police departments are left without enough well-trained sergeants and lieutenants to supervise officers who maybe should never have been hired in the first place.
Since 2014, Black Lives Matter agitation has decimated police ranks and driven away potential applicants who do not want to be presumed racist from their first day on the job.
Mac Donald highlights the Memphis numbers as “typical” — hundreds of officers lost to resignation and retirement, and lowered standards to fill the gaps, all while crime soared. The same is true in cities across the nation.
Yet across the country, even as the political stigma against police poisons recruiting, the pressure to align police demographics with local demographics remains unrelenting. Vanita Gupta, the third-highest ranking official in the Justice Department and the former head of the department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama, told the Washington Post last week: “We have all been promoting … police officers that will reflect the communities that they serve.” Such diversity hiring is in part a response to the “recognition” of what Gupta calls “racial bias in our criminal justice system.” And one of the alleged sources of bias is hiring criteria that have a disparate impact on blacks.
This disparate-impact thinking is the second cause of watered-down hiring standards.
Worst of all is the compounding effect of the “systemic racism” narrative.
An insufficient number of officers means more crime. Those officers remaining on a force will be less likely to intervene in suspicious behavior. They know that if an interaction turns violent, back-up may be slow to arrive.
Potential criminals will be more likely to break the law as the risk of being stopped or arrested plunges. With crime rising, existing officers will work longer hours without time off or adequate rest, increasing the possibility of threat misperception. Without sufficient back-up, an officer confronting a resisting suspect may be more inclined to escalate his own use of force beyond what appears justified to civilian observers, starting the anti-cop cycle all over again. Yet with crime rising, the political pressure to hire more cops, by any means, goes up in tandem.
Cops need more support and training, for one thing, but Mac Donald argues that the real solution is far bigger and deeper:
The only thing that will get policing out of its death spiral is the widespread repudiation of the racism narrative. It is not racism that brings officers into more frequent contact with minorities; it is exceedingly high rates of crime in minority communities. It is not the police who are responsible for the fact that blacks between the ages of ten and 24 die of gun homicide at 25 times the rate of whites in that age bracket; those black victims are shot almost exclusively by black criminals. In 2022, seven allegedly unarmed blacks were fatally shot by police officers, out of a national homicide death toll for blacks that will likely exceed 10,000 and a black population of 44 million. Meantime, dozens of blacks are killed every day (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the U.S. population), to no attention from the mainstream media or from Black Lives Matter activists, because their assailants are not cops and are not white.
Departments across the country must urgently review their training and hiring standards to ensure that another abomination like the fatal torture of Tyre Nichols does not reoccur. But they will be less able to provide the protection that law-abiding residents of high-crime communities desperately deserve so long as the president, academia, and the media insist that police are the embodiment of America’s allegedly lingering white supremacy.