What do you think?
Rate this book
Are Cops Racist?
False charges of racial profiling threaten to obliterate the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in America's inner cities. This is the message of Heather Mac Donald's new book, in which she brings her special brand of tough and honest journalism to the current war against the police. The anti-profiling crusade, she charges, thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. In careful reports from New York and other major cities across the country, Ms. Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby's harmful effects on black Americans. The reduction in urban crime, one of the nation's signal policy successes of the 1990s, has benefited black communities even more dramatically than white neighborhoods, she shows. By policing inner cities actively after long neglect, cops have allowed business and civil society to flourish there once more. But attacks on police, centering on false charges of police racism and racial profiling, and spearheaded by activists, the press, and even the Justice Department, have slowed the success and threaten to reverse it. Ms. Mac Donald looks at the reality behind the allegations and writes about the black cops you never heard about, the press coverage of policing, and policing strategies across the country. Her iconoclastic findings demolish the prevailing anti-cop orthodoxy.
192 pages, Paperback
First published November 11, 2002
About the author
Heather Mac Donald
15 books251 followersHeather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Mac Donald's newest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018), argues that toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.
Mac Donald’s The War on Cops (2016), a New York Times bestseller, warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. Other previous works include The Burden of Bad Ideas (2001), a collection of Mac Donald’s City Journal essays, details the effects of the 1960s counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. In The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan than Today’s (2007), coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, she chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country’s porous borders. In Are Cops Racist? (2010), another City Journal anthology, Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby’s harmful effects on black Americans.
A nonpracticing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has frequently testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York.
A frequent guest on Fox News and other TV and radio programs, Mac Donald holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned an M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.
At the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation's 2018 annual meeting in downtown Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Mac Donald, “the greatest thinker on criminal justice in America today.”
Mac Donald’s The War on Cops (2016), a New York Times bestseller, warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. Other previous works include The Burden of Bad Ideas (2001), a collection of Mac Donald’s City Journal essays, details the effects of the 1960s counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. In The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan than Today’s (2007), coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, she chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country’s porous borders. In Are Cops Racist? (2010), another City Journal anthology, Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby’s harmful effects on black Americans.
A nonpracticing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has frequently testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York.
A frequent guest on Fox News and other TV and radio programs, Mac Donald holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned an M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.
At the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation's 2018 annual meeting in downtown Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Mac Donald, “the greatest thinker on criminal justice in America today.”
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 16, 2011
A unflinching look at how a problem is created to satisfy the agenda of a group or organization. The author shows how it is impossible to stop people based on the racial make-up of the area. Especially since a lot of the people being stopped are not residents of the area. This is another example of police being hampered in doing their job in order to spare the "feelings" of others.
April 6, 2024
A STRONG DEFENSE OF EFFECTIVE POLICING AGAINST COMMON CRITICISMS
Author Heather MacDonald wrote in the Introduction to this 2003 book, “For the past decade the press has been on a crusade to portray cops as brutal and racist, despised by the communities they are sworn to protect. That image is not just false, but dangerous. This book aims to tell the truth about policing---above all, about policing and race. The last ten years should have been a time of triumph for law enforcement, not an occasion for frenzied cop-bashing. Policing got smart and produced the largest crime crop in American history: from 1991 to 1999, the nation’s violent crime fell more than 25 percent… The result was an urban renaissance nationwide… But instead of reaping accolades for their achievements, police officers found themselves under assault. For the press, so-called racial profiling became the very hallmark of policing, despite the fact that the evidence for such a practice is nonexistent… in truth the anti-police campaign was a giant exercise in denial; it was the means by which the nation’s elites avoided talking about the stubborn problems of inner-city culture---above all, its greatly elevated rates of criminal behavior. If officers stop and arrest disproportionately more blacks than whites, claimed the conventional dodge, it is because cops are racist, not because blacks commit more crime. So rather than tacking the culture that produced such high rates of criminality, the nation’s media and political elites campaigned to purge law enforcement of ‘bigotry.’” (Pg. 3-5)
She adds, “Is policing perfect? Is every cop a gentleman? Of course not. But rogue officers by no means represent the profession as a whole. Unless the country pulls back---and fast---from scapegoating of the police, it will soon find the public safety gains of the last decade melting away.” (Pg. 7)
She acknowledges, “Black motorists today almost routinely claim that the only reason they are pulled over for highway stops is because of their race… they are subject to harassment, including traumatic searches. Some of these tales are undoubtedly true. Without question there are obnoxious officers out there, and some officers may ignore their training and target minorities. But since the advent of video cameras in patrol cars, installed in the wake of the racial profiling controversy, most charges of racism… have been disproved as lies… The typical study purports to show that minority motorists are subject to disproportionate traffic stops. Trouble is, no one yet has devised an adequate benchmark against which to measure is police are pulling over, searching, or arresting ‘too many’ blacks and Hispanics… a valid benchmark for stops would be the number of serious traffic violators, not just drivers. If it turns out that minorities tend to drive more recklessly, say, or have more equipment violations, you’d expect them to be subject to more stops…” (Pg. 13-14)
She admits., “There’s not a single narcotics officer who won’t freely admit that there are cocaine buys going down in the men’s bathrooms of Wall Street investment firms… But that is not where community outrage… is directing the police, because they don’t produce violence and street intimidation.” (Pg. 20)
She recounts, “New Jersey troopers asked the attorney general to … study speeding behavior on the turnpike… According to the study… blacks make up 16 percent of the drivers on the turnpike and 25 percent of the speeders in the sixty-five-mile-an-hour zones… Black drivers speed twice as much as white drivers, and speed at reckless levels even more. Blacks are actually stopped less than their speeding behavior would predict---they are 23 percent of those stopped.” (Pg. 31)
She suggests, “[Police commissioner] Safir is … right to push the cops to show more respect for civilians. Too many officers have a rude, contemptuous attitude, and Safir’s excellent… Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect training program for cope is a good antidote. But if the police bear a heavy responsibility for maintaining cordial community relations, the community shares that responsibility too. It is a travesty that [Rev. Al] Sharpton and his … followers focus all their energy on stigmatizing the police.” (Pg. 61)
She argues, “remember the ‘economic exclusion’ argument… [that the] racist power structure is excluding hordes of qualified young black men… it is ludicrous to attribute their joblessness to corporate bigotry rather than to their own unemployability. The high school dropout rate in Cincinnati is between 60 and 70 percent… will the young men … show up every day to work on time and respond appropriately to authority? Has any of them even applied for a job and been turned down? Last summer … an amusement park north of the city, had to import 1,000 young Eastern Europeans for summer jobs because it could find no local youths to apply.’ (Pg. 68)
She admits, “But the Cincinnati Police Division does have one very big problem: it has to fight too hard to get rid of bad apples on the force… seeking to give managers more power, the department instituted binding arbitration for disciplining officers… The arbitrators almost always vote pro-union and anti-management… No protesters are calling for giving management more power to fight police corruption… the activists are making the usual demands for stronger civilian oversight. And they are racializing the discipline issue.” (Pg. 71)
She asserts, “In the month following the riots, violent crime of all kinds rocketed up 20 percent… Arrests for quality-of-life offenses… have plummeted since the riots, as the police keep their heads down… Scurrying around with anti-racism task forces and aid packages tells young kids: this is the way to get the world to notice you… destruction, instead of staying in school, studying, and accomplishing something lawful… political and business leaders… should find black citizens who are willing to speak about values and personal responsibility, and who embody them in their own lives.” (Pg. 81)
She recounts eight ‘myths’: “1. Community policing was successful under Mayor Dinkins and his commissioner… 2. The NYPD junked community policing and started merely ‘throwing officers’ at crime…. 3. The New York police are not involved with the community… 4. The NYPD has created a ‘climate of fear.’ … 5. Quality-of-life enforcement is discriminatory…. 6. The Street Crime Unit and ‘stopping and frisking’ are the very essence of [Rudy] Guiliani’s NYPD… 7. Bratton-Safir-style policing encourages brutality… 8. New York could have solved its crime and community-relations problems by modeling itself on other departments…” (Pg. 101-113)
She suggests, “the NYPD needs to devote every discretionary training hour to communication and self-control. It needs to increase role-playing exercises across the range of situations officers confront, from violently hostile to sympathetic…” (Pg. 138) Later, she adds, “Such exercises as the plainclothes cultural-sensitivity course are a colossal and a colossal and outrageous waste of time. It cannot be overstated how scarce training time at the NYPD is…” (Pg. 145)
She states, “Islamic anti-American terrorism… is by its very definition perpetrated by radical Muslims to avenge American imperialism in the Middle East. If we concentrate our investigation on Middle Eastern Muslims… we are following the terrorists’ own self-definition… Such hard truths about the terrorist threat, however, violate the central precept of our modern discourse about crime … that all groups commit crime or terrorism at equal rates.” (Pg. 165)
This book will be of great interest to those studying contemporary law enforcement issues.
Author Heather MacDonald wrote in the Introduction to this 2003 book, “For the past decade the press has been on a crusade to portray cops as brutal and racist, despised by the communities they are sworn to protect. That image is not just false, but dangerous. This book aims to tell the truth about policing---above all, about policing and race. The last ten years should have been a time of triumph for law enforcement, not an occasion for frenzied cop-bashing. Policing got smart and produced the largest crime crop in American history: from 1991 to 1999, the nation’s violent crime fell more than 25 percent… The result was an urban renaissance nationwide… But instead of reaping accolades for their achievements, police officers found themselves under assault. For the press, so-called racial profiling became the very hallmark of policing, despite the fact that the evidence for such a practice is nonexistent… in truth the anti-police campaign was a giant exercise in denial; it was the means by which the nation’s elites avoided talking about the stubborn problems of inner-city culture---above all, its greatly elevated rates of criminal behavior. If officers stop and arrest disproportionately more blacks than whites, claimed the conventional dodge, it is because cops are racist, not because blacks commit more crime. So rather than tacking the culture that produced such high rates of criminality, the nation’s media and political elites campaigned to purge law enforcement of ‘bigotry.’” (Pg. 3-5)
She adds, “Is policing perfect? Is every cop a gentleman? Of course not. But rogue officers by no means represent the profession as a whole. Unless the country pulls back---and fast---from scapegoating of the police, it will soon find the public safety gains of the last decade melting away.” (Pg. 7)
She acknowledges, “Black motorists today almost routinely claim that the only reason they are pulled over for highway stops is because of their race… they are subject to harassment, including traumatic searches. Some of these tales are undoubtedly true. Without question there are obnoxious officers out there, and some officers may ignore their training and target minorities. But since the advent of video cameras in patrol cars, installed in the wake of the racial profiling controversy, most charges of racism… have been disproved as lies… The typical study purports to show that minority motorists are subject to disproportionate traffic stops. Trouble is, no one yet has devised an adequate benchmark against which to measure is police are pulling over, searching, or arresting ‘too many’ blacks and Hispanics… a valid benchmark for stops would be the number of serious traffic violators, not just drivers. If it turns out that minorities tend to drive more recklessly, say, or have more equipment violations, you’d expect them to be subject to more stops…” (Pg. 13-14)
She admits., “There’s not a single narcotics officer who won’t freely admit that there are cocaine buys going down in the men’s bathrooms of Wall Street investment firms… But that is not where community outrage… is directing the police, because they don’t produce violence and street intimidation.” (Pg. 20)
She recounts, “New Jersey troopers asked the attorney general to … study speeding behavior on the turnpike… According to the study… blacks make up 16 percent of the drivers on the turnpike and 25 percent of the speeders in the sixty-five-mile-an-hour zones… Black drivers speed twice as much as white drivers, and speed at reckless levels even more. Blacks are actually stopped less than their speeding behavior would predict---they are 23 percent of those stopped.” (Pg. 31)
She suggests, “[Police commissioner] Safir is … right to push the cops to show more respect for civilians. Too many officers have a rude, contemptuous attitude, and Safir’s excellent… Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect training program for cope is a good antidote. But if the police bear a heavy responsibility for maintaining cordial community relations, the community shares that responsibility too. It is a travesty that [Rev. Al] Sharpton and his … followers focus all their energy on stigmatizing the police.” (Pg. 61)
She argues, “remember the ‘economic exclusion’ argument… [that the] racist power structure is excluding hordes of qualified young black men… it is ludicrous to attribute their joblessness to corporate bigotry rather than to their own unemployability. The high school dropout rate in Cincinnati is between 60 and 70 percent… will the young men … show up every day to work on time and respond appropriately to authority? Has any of them even applied for a job and been turned down? Last summer … an amusement park north of the city, had to import 1,000 young Eastern Europeans for summer jobs because it could find no local youths to apply.’ (Pg. 68)
She admits, “But the Cincinnati Police Division does have one very big problem: it has to fight too hard to get rid of bad apples on the force… seeking to give managers more power, the department instituted binding arbitration for disciplining officers… The arbitrators almost always vote pro-union and anti-management… No protesters are calling for giving management more power to fight police corruption… the activists are making the usual demands for stronger civilian oversight. And they are racializing the discipline issue.” (Pg. 71)
She asserts, “In the month following the riots, violent crime of all kinds rocketed up 20 percent… Arrests for quality-of-life offenses… have plummeted since the riots, as the police keep their heads down… Scurrying around with anti-racism task forces and aid packages tells young kids: this is the way to get the world to notice you… destruction, instead of staying in school, studying, and accomplishing something lawful… political and business leaders… should find black citizens who are willing to speak about values and personal responsibility, and who embody them in their own lives.” (Pg. 81)
She recounts eight ‘myths’: “1. Community policing was successful under Mayor Dinkins and his commissioner… 2. The NYPD junked community policing and started merely ‘throwing officers’ at crime…. 3. The New York police are not involved with the community… 4. The NYPD has created a ‘climate of fear.’ … 5. Quality-of-life enforcement is discriminatory…. 6. The Street Crime Unit and ‘stopping and frisking’ are the very essence of [Rudy] Guiliani’s NYPD… 7. Bratton-Safir-style policing encourages brutality… 8. New York could have solved its crime and community-relations problems by modeling itself on other departments…” (Pg. 101-113)
She suggests, “the NYPD needs to devote every discretionary training hour to communication and self-control. It needs to increase role-playing exercises across the range of situations officers confront, from violently hostile to sympathetic…” (Pg. 138) Later, she adds, “Such exercises as the plainclothes cultural-sensitivity course are a colossal and a colossal and outrageous waste of time. It cannot be overstated how scarce training time at the NYPD is…” (Pg. 145)
She states, “Islamic anti-American terrorism… is by its very definition perpetrated by radical Muslims to avenge American imperialism in the Middle East. If we concentrate our investigation on Middle Eastern Muslims… we are following the terrorists’ own self-definition… Such hard truths about the terrorist threat, however, violate the central precept of our modern discourse about crime … that all groups commit crime or terrorism at equal rates.” (Pg. 165)
This book will be of great interest to those studying contemporary law enforcement issues.
May 15, 2021
No, Cops aren’t racist
…and the institution of law-enforcement is not “systemically racist.” Police should be allowed to use “profiling” based on crime statistics in their area of responsibility. We cannot allow them to be handicapped in the execution of their job. If there is a “bad apple” cop out there, there are other ways to root them out; we need to make it easier to fire cops based on their ACTIONS, not on their THOUGHTS. Do police unions have too much power, snd are they staffed with corrupt cops? I don’t know
…and the institution of law-enforcement is not “systemically racist.” Police should be allowed to use “profiling” based on crime statistics in their area of responsibility. We cannot allow them to be handicapped in the execution of their job. If there is a “bad apple” cop out there, there are other ways to root them out; we need to make it easier to fire cops based on their ACTIONS, not on their THOUGHTS. Do police unions have too much power, snd are they staffed with corrupt cops? I don’t know
April 3, 2025
Not an academic text but MacDonald does pose interesting questions. While supporting the police and arguing against the charges of racism, she does challenge the police to adopt best practices. An excelent read.
December 5, 2016
Identity politics is not just a thing to which social justice warriors masturbate to in their parents' basements while smoking weed and being racist. It actually kills people. Read this fucking book.
July 29, 2020
Excellent read
August 21, 2017
Good review, but needs more documentation to back it up.
June 2, 2009
According to this books, law enforcement has a tough job to do and being racist is not one of their objectives. They just can't help it.
December 17, 2020
It was just ok. Not too much more to add. Timely read.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews