That’s one of the shocking conclusions of “Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About,” a book by Wilfred Reilly, a Black professor who teaches at the University of Kentucky.
What Reilly means is that, after the 2014 Ferguson MO uprising following the police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black man, a sense of low morale and futility invaded police departments across the country, as a manufactured witch hunt against “police brutality” led to public outcries to purge “bad cops” (as Pamela Price is currently claiming to do here in Alameda County). Cops everywhere reported the same anxiety: they felt harassed and pursued everywhere, from City Councils that denounced them to Mayors who tried to defund the police to newspaper editorials excoriating them as racists. Even on the floor of the august U.S. House of Representative, members of Congress vilified police; Oakland’s own Barbara Lee, who’s running for the U.S. Senate, said, “For generations, law enforcement has systematically abused and tormented communities of color.”
This vilification led to the so-called Ferguson effect, “an increase in violent crime rates in a community caused by reduced proactive policing due to the community's distrust and hostility towards police.”
Because of this public hostility, police morale plunged, police budgets were slashed, and the ability of the police to intervene in crime was hindered by drastic limitations on their power: no more pursuing fleeing criminals in cars, far fewer car stops or frisks, no more interventions in shoplifting, and in general a much more permissive approach to suspicious behavior. No cop wanted to be sued by John Burris and other ambulance-chasing attorneys; no cop wanted to be put on administrative leave while a hostile District Attorney waited in the wings, anxious to pounce. Why bother pursuing criminals, the reasoning went, if you’re going to suffer as a result, and no one will back you up?
The Ferguson effect is real: crime is up nationwide in urban areas, and cities like Oakland are suffering from unprecedented spikes in violent crime. This is why Reilly put the blame for astronomical Black shooting deaths on Black Lives Matter: that movement literally accomplished what they set out to do—weaken police departments—with the result that criminals now feel emboldened. As well they should: it’s easier to get away with crime than ever, and even if a criminal is arrested in Alameda County, he’ll encounter the sympathy of Madame District Attorney, while cops themselves are her targets.
And yet we’re not allowed to say these things; they’re taboo. If you point out how much crime is committed by Black people relative to their percent of the population, you’re immediately impugned as a racist. This is cancel culture at its most repugnant and vicious. It’s why so many Americans are sullenly, if secretly, turning rightward in their politics, at least in the area of public safety. Even lifelong Democrats are drifting Republican. It’s very insulting to witness reality, to express what you see, to know you’re right, and then have your neighbors ostracize and shun you.
The truth—and one day historians will point it out—is that there is no such thing as police brutality in America or, if there is, it’s practically non-existent, and applies as much to White, Asian and Brown people as to Blacks. There’s also no truth to so-called “racial disparities” in any aspect of policing or sentencing. These are lies told by the woke left (and amplified by the woke media) in order to deceive the American people and solidify their own hold on power, and the money that comes with it.
I don’t feel sorry for those of us who see through woke propaganda. We’re grownups and can take it, and we moreover have the ability and means to fight back (as we’re doing with the Price recall). Who I feel sorry for are the people, many of them young, who fall for the “police brutality” narrative. It drives me crazy to talk with Oakland liberals and have them tell me how awful the police are. I’m sorry, also, for the Black people who suffer as a result of these lies: it’s their neighborhoods, after all, that are victimized the most by criminality. But the group I resent the most are the influencers in Oakland and Alameda County who peddle the Big Lie. You know their names—Fife, Bas, Thao, Kaplan, Kalb, Price, Brooks and the others. Day after day, these grifters repeat the same falsehoods, borrowing from the Trump (and Hitler) playbook that says “the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it” and “the more times you say the lie, the more plausible it becomes, even to rational people.” This is a horror story that remains to be exposed and crushed by History, and will be—if we can manage to come to our senses and repudiate these wokes that are killing us.
I know that this post will offend some people I like and respect, even some people I work with on the Pamela Price recall. But it’s so important to speak the truth, which is why I write this column. If folks can’t handle it, so be it.
Steve Heimoff