Heather Mac Donald joins Brian Anderson to discuss what President Trump can do at the federal level to restore public safety and reduce crime.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. I’m Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Today, I’m joined by Heather Mac Donald. Heather is the Manhattan Institute’s Thomas W. Smith fellow. She’s a contributing editor of City Journal and has written for the magazine almost since its inception. Her byline appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal and many other leading publications. And she’s the author of a number of books, including the bestsellers When Race Trumps Merit, The Diversity Delusion, and The War On Cops.
Today, we’re going to discuss the newly inaugurated President Trump and his role, to the extent he has a role, in restoring safety and order to American communities and cities. So, Heather, great to talk with you, as always. Your recent piece for City Journal, “Can Trump Make America Safe Again?,” describes how the Biden Justice Department and other federal agencies over the last four years have really failed to prioritize public safety, instead promoting a program of DEI hiring and disparate impact analysis that I think you can make a plausible argument has contributed to a decline in safety and law and order. They also identified the number one domestic terrorist threat as white supremacy. They had, in other words, a radical approach to criminal justice questions on the federal level. So, what were the consequences of these policies during Biden’s term?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, thank you so much for having me on, Brian. It’s always a pleasure.
The consequences were inevitably ignoring the real disorder that was engulfing cities that began, frankly, under Trump’s watch with the George Floyd race riots that resulted in complete anarchy, the glorification of violence, ideologically supported by many members of the left. And Biden claimed that the biggest problem was white supremacy. This was simply counterfactual. The Department of Homeland Security, various intelligence agencies would periodically put out various alerts. “Expect the one-year anniversary of January 6th. Going to be big white supremacist rallies and violence.” Again, it never happened.
Meanwhile, Biden was using the utterly irrelevant criterion of race and sex to an extent as well to make key appointments within the justice system. His US attorneys, 48 percent of them were black. That sadly guarantees inferior candidates even without a skills gap. Anytime you make an irrelevant criterion like gender or skin color, a key decision-making factor, you are going to mathematically guarantee a much lower on average qualified group of candidates. Add to that the huge black skills gap when it comes to legal capacities and 48 percent black attorneys means that you have not put your best people in place in a very, very key position.
Two-thirds of Biden’s judicial appointees were persons of color. He put more black females on the federal bench than all other presidents combined. Those are appointments for life. We’re going to be saddled with them for a long time. And then he sent out the message that he considers racial disparities in the criminal justice system, that is if blacks are arrested more, if blacks are prosecuted more, if they are disproportionately overrepresented in prison, that’s because we have a racist criminal justice system. He made fighting those racial disparities a key part of his criminal justice plan. Well, the only way you can eliminate racial disparities in the criminal justice system is by stopping policing, stopping prosecuting.
The disparities are not the result of racism. They are the result of vast disparities in criminal offending. In New York City, for example, blacks, they’re 20 percent of the population, but they commit two-thirds of all shootings. A black New Yorker is 46 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker. That’s not the fault of the police. We can come up with lots of explanations for it, the breakdown of the black family being very, very high on the list of reasons, but when you tell the police that they are racist for trying to save the victims of crime, who are themselves overwhelmingly black, you are asking for more crime. And that’s what we got under the Biden administration.
Brian Anderson: Of course, shortly after taking the oath of office on Monday, President Trump signed a number of executive orders, quite a few in fact, including one that abolishes DEI in the federal government. Now, symbolically, that’s a big victory for those who want to see merit and colorblindness restored. Practically speaking though, how effective do you think this order can be in this context of law enforcement? And should the new administration expect significant pushback at the agency level in law enforcement?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, DEI is a very large term, and if what he means by that is he is not going to use race as a factor in making criminal justice appointments, I think that’s a big deal because the quality of our personnel matters. We should not be indifferent to questions of merit. There really are differences in people’s skills. And high-level positions in the Justice Department, you have to know the law. These are very complicated questions and you have to be assured that if you engage in colorblind constitutional law enforcement, that as a disparate impact, you are not going to be raked over the coals by your supervisors for being a racist. He didn’t say anything in his executive orders that I was aware of about disparate impact, the theory of disparate impact per se, but I have to think that that is coming, and that has been one of the most poisonous concepts to come out of the legal academy that we’ve seen in the last 60 years, which, again, holds that any neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior.
So, if it’s a standard of needing to know nuclear physics in order to get a job in the Department of Energy, which Biden cast aside for his science advisor in the Department of Energy, she knew nothing about nuclear physics, but she was a black female concerned about diversity, so she had the top science job in the country. Or if it’s a question of behavioral standards, such as thou shalt not shoplift or mass loot, and that has a disparate impact on blacks, then you can’t have that standard.
We’ve got to get rid of that concept. And to do that, Trump has a certain degree of control over federal regulations. He’ll still probably need to go through the whole notice and comment process to get rid of disparate impact in federal regulations. In some cases, it’s a statutory concept, so he’s going to need to press Congress to amend statutes to say that when the civil rights laws talk about ending discrimination, which they rightly do, they’re talking about intentional discrimination. They’re not talking about the effect of neutral, fair, colorblind laws. Those are not discriminatory.
So, we have a moment here to radically change the course that this country has been on for the last 60 years for the better. And the momentum behind Trump is very exciting. He knows what he needs to do, his advisors know what they need to do, and I hope that nothing deflects his attention from returning this country to its principles that were ignored for over a century, but that are the greatest principles on earth.
Brian Anderson: Street crime does remain elevated in many large American cities over where it was pre-COVID certainly, although it has come down as well a little bit over the last year and a half, I guess maybe two years. As you note in this piece, crime is largely a state and local issue, but you do note that federal prosecutors and federal law enforcement agents can provide a vital backup to local authorities. I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit?
Heather Mac Donald: Yes. Well, first of all, I think people really need to realize that the crime that we’re seeing in our cities today, the disorder, the random violent, barbaric assaults, they are policy choices. They are in effect willed by mayors, by city prosecutors, by state legislators because they are completely predictable. They are the result of our refusal to commit the drug addicted mentally ill, to allow them to roam the streets. They’re the result of our refusal to incarcerate repeat criminals.
When you have those two conditions applying, it is a virtual certainty that every two weeks what happens in New York, somebody is going to be pushed into a subway or on the tracks because when you allow these mentally ill, psychotic, schizophrenic drug users to be roaming without saying, “You’ve got to get off the streets,” they will continue committing crime. Our policymakers are responsible. They are allowing this to happen on their watch. It is not random. I’m not saying they want it, but they are responsible because they are negligent and reckless in not stopping it.
These changes, there’s laws that need to be changed. The street crime is, yes, it’s overwhelmingly a local issue of police deployment. Are you going to do proactive policing? Are you going to hold your commanders accountable? Are you going to follow through on the brilliant CompStat revolution that was instituted in New York in the 1990s under then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and police Commissioner William Bratton that demanded that police commanders take accountability for the crime trends on their watch that was ruthlessly demanding use data on a minute-by-minute basis? Those things work, and that’s for the local command to take over.
However, there is a federal role here. At the very least, FBI agents, DEI agents, ATF agents can work with local police on task forces to crack down on the hotspots, the crime hotspots where shootings occur overwhelmingly. These again are known locations. The federal prosecutors can go through trials much more fast than local prosecutors. They’ve got longer sentences. That has a deterrent value. Speed and certainty of punishment has a deterrent value.
The final thing I would say, Brian, and I’m very conflicted about this, in general, I am completely opposed to federal grant-making. It is this magical, mystical thinking that localities have that if they get sent a federal grant from Washington, wow, it’s new money. It’s all this new stuff that they’re getting. Whereas in fact, it’s the same pot of money. There’s no new magical source that the federal government has to send money back to the localities. It’s the same damn taxpayers. We’re either sending our money to our local state and city, or we’re sending it to Washington, and the stuff that we’re sending to Washington then gets reprocessed and sent back to the localities.
So generally, I would say end all federal grant-making. That’s what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy should target in their Department of Governmental Efficiency. It’s a complete waste of money. We get less money than we had before. Nevertheless, that’s not going to happen. Everybody believes in the myth of free money, so here’s what they should do. There is a lot of federal grants, again these are local money recycled through, that goes to local law enforcement. One of the favorites is something, it’s an acronym called COPS, which is used to help localities give them more money to hire cops.
Here’s what the Feds should do. You do not get any more federal money unless you change your laws of commitment so that you don’t have mentally ill drug addicts. And I keep emphasizing, Brian, mentally ill and drug addiction. These are the so-called MICAs, the mentally ill chemical abusers. That combination of mental illness and chemical abuse elevates any mentally ill person’s risk of committing violence to very, very high levels. The MICAs are what are the threat. It’s what you see on San Francisco’s streets. It’s what you see in New York. It’s what you see in Washington D.C. Those are the people we should be scared about.
The federal government should say, “No money unless you change your commitment laws. No money for homeless outreach, unless you actually get people off the street.” These feckless outreach workers should not be allowed any longer to say, “Oh, please, would you come inside?” And if the drug addict says, “No, I’d rather stay on the streets,” and the reason they all want to stay on the streets is because they have unlimited access to drugs, and to be perfectly honest, in cities like LA and San Francisco, it’s a party scene, you don’t get to do that. You have to say you’re off the streets. No federal grants for homeless housing unless the rule is if we build the housing, you must use it. You don’t get to say, “I have a right to housing and I’m not going to use it.”
So, the federal government should leverage its grant-making power to ensure that public order is restored to the city streets. And the other thing that they can use, the federal grant-making power, is immigration enforcement.
Brian Anderson: Right. That was my next question. Other Trump executive orders signed this week focus on illegal immigration in the crisis at the border. I think in the area of immigration enforcement, you would contend that the Trump administration can, in fact, make a significant impact on crime. So, I wonder, walk us through the actions that the administration should take here and what some of the challenges will be, one of which is an effort to engage in any kind of deportations. You can easily see how that’s going to be treated by mainstream press outlets, even though there’s significant public support for such measures right now.
Heather Mac Donald: Well, the deportations to the extent that they’re visible are going to be a big public relations battle, if not disaster for the left-wing places. But I think the more interesting battle to watch is going to be the legal one. It’s going to involve federal preemption, issues of federalism.
The most sickening situation in our country today is the blatant refusal to cooperate with federal law enforcement when it comes to immigration enforcement. These sanctuary cities, it’s just shocking the way that they are resisting lawful federal authority. States and cities have declared that they will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. And the way this works most typically is if the federal government knows that an illegal alien has been prosecuted for a crime and, one hopes, for once jailed, they’ll have a record of that illegal alien in prison or jail. We’ll ask the local jail or the state prison, “Please notify me when you’re going to release that alien back to the street so that I can pick him up and we will deport him.”
And you would think if you were a local police chief dealing with Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan vicious brutal gang, that you would be begging the Feds, “Take these guys off of our hands. Get this criminal out.” It’s a lot easier to make an immigration case against an illegal alien than it is to make a criminal case against a criminal. You don’t need witnesses. You don’t need a probable cause, high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s very simple documents. You’re illegal, you’re out of here.
Instead, these big city chiefs, under pressure from their mayors, under pressure from the illegal alien advocates have said, “We need so many illegal aliens. We don’t have enough that we also want the street criminal illegal aliens. You will not take them away from us.” And so the federal government says, “Please, we want you to detain the illegal alien criminal after release so that we can pick them up.” And they say, “No way, we’re not doing it. We’re not going to alert you to its release. Maybe we’ll give you 15 minutes advance notice to come and pick him up,” which is, of course, inadequate. And so what happens is the illegal alien criminals go right back to the streets. They’ve eluded capture from ICE and they go right back to committing crimes.
Now, this is going to be a big battle. Under the first Trump administration, the sanctuary localities sued Trump and said, “We don’t have to comply with these detainers.” And only one appellate court sided with the Trump administration. The others said, “Oh, that’s right. This is just too oppressive, a use of federal power on these wonderful freedom-loving sanctuary jurisdictions.” The case Trump had taken an appeal to the Supreme Court, it was sitting there before the Supreme Court, and then the Biden administration withdrew the appeal. So, it’s a very unsettled area of law.
This is going to start up again, and it’s going to be very interesting to watch. And you’re going to have the jurisdictions that do believe in immigration enforcement. They’re going to go for something called the 287 G Power, which, it deputizes local law enforcement officers to make immigration arrests. So, it’s a force multiplier. So, that’s going to be happening, and it’s going to have an effect because in New York City, for instance, right now, about 75 percent of all crimes committed in Midtown Manhattan, violent crimes are committed by illegal aliens. In October of ‘23, you had 47 illegal aliens with similar serious criminal histories being picked up a day at the border. Many more were getting away. They were the so-called known got-aways.
So, we do have a problem in this country with illegal alien criminals. The advocates always say, “Well, because we claim that illegal aliens have a lower crime rate than Americans generally,” which is only true thanks to the fact that we have a very high crime rate among blacks. If you compare illegal alien crime rates to whites, they’re way, way higher. But let’s just pretend, concede that that’s right. That’s still no reason not to deport the criminals. It’s a complete non-sequitur. Okay, maybe it’s a lower rate, but why should we have any? We shouldn’t have any illegal alien criminals. They can all be deported. That’s what Trump’s going to do. Again, we’ve got grant-making power here. $300 million of grants go to sanctuary cities in 2021, much more now. Again, Trump will withhold those grants, the sanctuaries will sue, and we’ll see what happens.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, it’s going to be a fascinating experiment to watch. And it’s going to start pretty soon, I believe, like today.
The last 10 years anyway have been hard, I think you would agree, on law enforcement as a profession. And as you’ve written for a long time, the nation’s police face a crisis that’s not just one of trying to maintain public safety in what has been a deteriorating situation, but also of low morale, and increasingly hard-time departments are having recruiting, finding good new potential officers. So, I wonder if this is something, even with crime enforcement being primarily a local phenomenon, that the president can, with his bully pulpit, help turn some of that around, change the cultural climate with regard to policing.
Heather Mac Donald: Rhetoric matters. It absolutely matters. The police under Biden, under Obama, lived with the incredibly incorrect, dangerous, constant narrative that the police were the biggest threat facing blacks, especially black children. Obama started the meme. Biden continued it at every opportunity, saying, “Black parents are right to fear that their child will be killed by a cop every time that child steps outside.” It’s just preposterous.
Yes, black children, black juveniles are 100 times more likely to be shot than white juveniles in the post-George-Floyd world, the post-George-Floyd race riot world. Why? Because they’re being shot by other black juveniles. They are not being shot by whites. They’re not being shot by police officers. But to hear that again and again from the President of the United States is a complete discouragement if you’re on the job, and it is a complete deterrent from becoming a police officer. Why enter a profession when the first thing people know about you on your first day of the job is that you’re a racist?
So, Trump can change that discourse 180 degrees. He can celebrate law enforcement. He will. I’m disappointed, from what I understand, this blanket January 6th pardon that he took in retaliation for Biden’s last-minute pardons on the day of the inauguration does include people who assaulted the cops. I don’t understand why he went that far. It’s a offense against law and order for anybody to attack a law enforcement officer, whether it’s Antifa, Black Lives Matter activists or a MAGA person caught up in some hysteria. And he should have carefully made that distinction. I hope this moment will pass and Trump will go on to live more up to his previous rhetoric, which showed a deep understanding of the fact that you cannot have a civil society without law and order, and you cannot have law and order without a police force that is willing to do the constitutional things that are necessary to protect the innocent.
Brian Anderson: Final question, Heather, if Trump does everything that you suggest in this recent article, how different do you think the crime and public safety picture might look in the United States in a few years, by the end of his term, let’s say?
Heather Mac Donald: If he can in fact incentivize good involuntary commitment laws that actually work, that do not live with this fiction that there is something compassionate and noble and righteous about allowing the mentally ill drug addicted to decompose on the streets and we’re all just going to walk by, if he can put a stake through the heart of that self-regarding fiction, if he can re-energize the police, if he can get rid of illegal aliens, criminals, and frankly, enforce the border as a general matter, I do not think that there’s any reason that somebody who is simply allegedly an illegal alien should not fear deportation, that’s an assumption of risk, I think we could have a totally different crime situation in this country.
I think we would not have to worry about the looting. We could maybe have drug stores where you don’t have to wait five minutes for somebody to come and unlock the toothpaste. You can have a rebirth of the retail sector. Things can change, because we did it in New York in the 1990s. As I say, crime, public disorder are choices. We have to hold our public officials accountable because they turn their eyes away. They would rather futz around with their progressive causes of gender equality, trans equality, than do the basic reason that they are been elected, which is to make sure that civil society can proceed without fear, that the property is secure, that the streets are secure, and people can live with the fruits of civilization.
Brian Anderson: Thanks very much, Heather. You can read more of Heather Mac Donald’s work in her books and on the City Journal website. We’ll have a link to her extensive author page in the description.
You can find City Journal on X, @cityjournal, and on Instagram, @cityjournal_MI. If you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, please give us a nice rating on iTunes.
Heather Mac Donald, always great to talk with you, and thank you so much for the insightful discussion.
Heather Mac Donald: Thank you so much, Brian. Great talk.
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