The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald

St. Louis were up 39 percent, robberies 43 percent, and homicides 25 percent. Murders in Nashville rose 83 percent in 2015; Milwaukee closed out the year with a 72 percent increase in homicides. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24 percent and homicides 17 percent by May 2015; that surge continued into 2016, with more than 100 Chicagoans shot in the first ten days of the new year, a threefold increase from the same period in 2015. Washington, D.C., ended 2015 with a 54 percent increase in murders; Minneapolis was up 61 percent in homicides. This ongoing crime spike is a stark contrast to the 20-year trend of increasing public safety that continued into the middle of 2014, and cities with large black populations have been hit the hardest.

      The most plausible explanation for the surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments that began in the summer of 2014. The airwaves filled up with suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today, in the wake of a handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, typically following resistance to arrest—most famously, Eric Garner on Staten Island, New York, in July 2014; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore in April 2015. In the midst of violent protests and riots, including attacks on the police, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder embraced the notion that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media have pumped out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cell-phone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force.

      Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now stirs up angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in October 2014. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range in St. Louis. Arrests in black communities have become even more fraught than usual.