Since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, there's been

an ongoing public debate about the American criminal justice system. Critics, including

former President Barack Obama and his Justice Department, the activists of Black Lives

Matter, and many in the elite press, charged the policing is shot through with racism, specifically

that young blacks, young black males in particular are routinely being harassed, harmed,

and even killed by the police with near impunity, and as a corollary that blacks are unjustly

being imprisoned at rates disproportionate to their numbers.

President Donald Trump's promise to restore law and order in American cities

was a centerpiece of his campaign last year,

and many of his opponents said he was exaggerating the safety problem in the inner city

and thereby race-baiting and demonizing minorities. But with an undeniable

increase in homicides and shootings in cities across the country since 2014, it seems that Trump

was right to raise the issue. The anti-police narrative, our guest Heather McDonald has argued,

has led officers in high-crime areas to start to

disengage from proactive policing, leading to more violent crime. That phenomenon has come to be

called the Ferguson effect, a term Heather popularized with a much-discussed Wall Street Journal

editorial. We'll talk with Heather about the state of policing, the facts about

crime, James Comey, and her recent encounters with campus protesters that put her in national

headlines. Hello, I'm City Journal editor Brian Anderson.

Thanks for joining us for the Ten Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary

with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.

Welcome back to Ten Blocks. I'm your host, Brian Anderson. Joining us on the show today is Heather McDonald. She's a long-time contributing editor of City Journal, the Thomas Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of The New York Times bestseller, The War on Cops, which will be out in an updated paperback edition this fall.

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