As the anti-cop sentiments from the Left continue to pressure law enforcement to restrain their forces from policing the streets, more and more black lives are being snuffed out by senseless, and often preventable, violence. Therefore, the Black Lives Matter movement can no longer in good faith claim to care for the black community.

This has Heather Mac Donald asking in her latest piece at City Journal, "Will the anti-cop Left please figure out what it wants?"

There's no denying the numbers: crime is up in major cities all across America and it shows no signs of getting better, despite the countless probes by the Obama administration into the alleged systemic racism in urban precincts and the demonstrations calling for an end to police brutality. Black deaths aren't declining, they are rising sharply and it's not at the hands of cops.

It's a refrain, Mac Donald says, we've heard for years now: "[A]ctivists have demanded the end of proactive policing, claiming that it was racist." She lists exactly what results that thinking has fostered:

Well, the police got the message. In response to the incessant accusations of racism and the heightened hostility in the streets that has followed the Michael Brown shooting, officers have pulled back from making investigatory stops and enforcing low-level offenses in many urban areas. As a result, violent crime in cities with large black populations has shot up—homicides in the largest 50 cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015…

Stops in Chicago are down nearly 90 percent this year through the end of March, compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 78 percent and homicides up 62 percent through April 10. Over 100 people were shot in the first ten days of 2016.

And guess what; now the Left is complaining that cops aren't "doing their job." It can't figure out what it wants.

So, now with less police meddling in the affairs of citizens, crime is overtaking the streets. Mac Donald writes about attending a meeting in the South Bronx in which residents complained to the city's police commander:

“There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.” Another man asked: “Why are they hanging out in crowds on the corners? No one does anything about it. Can’t you arrest them for loitering?” A middle-aged man wondered: “Do truant officers exist anymore?” If cops ignore such heartfelt requests for public order because the activists tell them that it would be oppressive to respond, they will betray the very people who need them the most.

What the activists ignore is the hard evidence that shows proactive policing keeps crime down. According to Mac Donald, when police began to patrol and intervene in the 1990s rather than wait for a crime to be committed to make an arrest, a "record-breaking 20-year national crime drop" occurred. 

But that success is being compromised with this new wave of protests targeting cops, and they are the ones feeling at risk at their jobs. Many now fear they will be the next face of "racist cop," plastered all over the nightly news. Others feel afraid to conduct their business in fear they could be accused of civil rights violations. Mac Donald writes:

Black Lives Matter ideology has also chilled informal interactions that could lead to an arrest. “I feel like I can’t talk to anybody because someone might accuse me of violating their civil rights,” a South Side patrol officer told the Chicago Tribune in February.

Mac Donald offers another example how decreasing police presence increases crime. In 2012, Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy discontinued an anti-gang task force because activists criticized the program for allegedly making too many stops in minority neighborhoods. The result was a rise in homicides "ultimately reaching 500 that year." But guess what happened when the program was reinstituted a year later? The shootings decreased.

Yet, the Obama administration, BLM activists, and the ACLU continue to push a false narrative that police target blacks disproportionately to whites, but this is just not the case. Mac Donald breaks down how they are skewing their numbers:

[In Chicago] Blacks were 72 percent of all stop subjects in a four-month period in 2014, according to the ACLU, though blacks constitute only 32 percent of the city’s population. Last week, a Police Accountability Task Force appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel used the same population benchmark to declare that the department has no “regard for the sanctity” of black lives: blacks made up 74 percent of all police shooting victims, lethal and non-lethal, between 2008 and 2015, according to the Task Force; whites made up 8 percent of police shooting victims, though they, too, comprise roughly a third of Chicago’s population.

This flawed methodology for benchmarking police actions—comparing them to population ratios—ignores the incidence of crime. Between 1991 and 2011 (the latest years for which such data are publicly available) blacks made up between 82 percent and 70 percent of all murder offenders. Whites made up between 3.5 percent and 5 percent of all murder offenders. Shooting and robbery disparities are likely greater. Drive-by shootings are simply not happening in white neighborhoods. If police want to save lives (and they do), they are going to be more heavily deployed in minority areas. Once there, they will more frequently interact with violent criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrest—all situations which can lead to officer use of force. And the more resistance that an officer encounters, the more likely he is to escalate his own use of force, even to the point of gunfire.

These are very inconvenient facts that are disturbing the Left's narrative, but never fear, facts are made to be ignored, according to their playbook.

Mac Donald agrees, as most of us do, that bad cops should be located and removed from duty. That's a no-brainer. But we should all reject falsified data that would imply there is a windfall of corrupt cops on the beat who are looking to destroy black lives, because that just isn't true:

"As the Task Force implies, there undoubtedly are Chicago police officers who drastically need an attitude tune-up in courtesy and respect; if they cannot shed their hardened, disrespectful demeanors, they shouldn’t be on patrol. But the report’s groundless denunciations of the department as “systemically racist,” coupled with the ACLU’s ignorant monitoring of the department’s stop activity, all but guarantee that officers will hesitate to engage with suspects. And as long as that hesitation continues, more black lives will be tragically lost.