Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

I've got a bonus episode for you today, which is audio from a debate between Alex Vitale,

a recent guest on the show, sociologist, and author of the book The End of Policing,

and Heather MacDonald, one of the leading intellectual champions of urban neo-conservatism

over policing and mass incarceration.

She's at the Manhattan Institute. Surprise, surprise.

McDonald's argument in favor of aggressive policing was basically a catalog of the human-scale horrors caused by urban gun violence in black communities, perpetrated by and large by black men.

Vitaly was civil and careful in his arguments.

Most importantly, though, his critique of over-policing and mass incarceration took crime seriously

as the real problem that it is for the most marginalized and exploited people in our society. In doing so, he deftly

disarmed McDonald, who was left making the absurd case that the absence of fathers in black homes

is the primary cause of gun violence in black communities, as if family structure and stability

does more to shape political

economic reality rather than the other way around, to name just one of many, many problems

with that argument.

That and her touting the so-called Ferguson effect, of which she is a leading touter, the notion

that the intensifying criticism of police in recent years is responsible

for a recent rise in violent crime in some cities. I've made this point before in my interviews

with both Vitaly and James Foreman Jr. And that point is that it's critical for the left to not

run from debates about crime. When we do run

from those debates, we cede the stage to reactionary law and order charlatans like McDonald.

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