How Black Lives Matter Took Lives That Better Policing Could Save, and How to Do Better

BY ROBERT MARANTO & WILFRED REILLY

Effective, accountable policing can save lives, especially in Black communities. Reform, rather than de-policing, is crucial.

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Black Lives Matter activists and police unions are two houses both alike in indignity. Neither truly wants to improve policing in the most necessary ways: the former because it could undermine their view of the world and reduce revenue streams, including billions in donations; the latter for a more mundane reason. Cops, like other street-level bureaucrats, don’t want to change their standard operating procedures and face accountability for screwups. Unfortunately, with Black Lives Matter groups receiving billions in donations and helping increase progressive turnout, media and academia failing to provide accurate information to voters, and police unions enjoying iconic status among conservatives when they are better viewed as armed but equally inefficient teachers’ unions, we don’t see the political incentives for reform any time soon, despite some recent local level successes.

Injustice—How Progressives (and Some Conservatives) Got Us Into This Mess

Professors and other respectables rail against “deplorables,”1 but missing in political discourse is that mass rule, AKA populism, is not a mass pathological delusion. Rather, its appearance is for solid economic and social reasons. When problems that affect regular citizens get ignored by their leaders, people in democratic systems can get revenge at the ballot box. From inflation and foreign policy debacles, to COVID-19 school shutdowns that went on far longer in the U.S. than in Europe at immense and immensely unequal social cost,2 ordinary people sense that the wealthy, bureaucrats, professionals, and professors often advance their own interests and fetishes at the expense of regular folks, and then use mainstream “knowledge producing” institutions, particularly academia and the mainstream news media, to cover up their failings.

Indeed, as Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon shows in her brilliant book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, the mainstream media now stand forthrightly behind the plutocrats. This can be documented empirically: the Center for Public Integrity points out that, during the 2016 presidential race, identified mainstream media journalists made 96 percent of their financial donations to one political party (the Democrats) and to the more mainstream of the candidates running.3 That basic instinct to hold the respectables accountable for their failings may have been the only thing keeping the Trump 2024 presidential candidacy viable despite his many and well-documented failings and debate loss against Kamala Harris.4

Perhaps nowhere is popular anger more justifiable than regarding crime, a trend best captured in the saga of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The roots of that failure go deep, and implicate multiple sacred cows in contemporary elite politics. As Anglo-Canadian political scientist Eric P. Kaufmann writes in his landmark work The Third Awokening,5 critical theory and other postmodern ideologies (AKA woke) have been evolving for over a century. To his credit, and unlike most conservatives, Kaufmann does not paint wokeism as entirely wrong—like populism, it too came about as a result of grievances experienced by the wider society. Rather, he describes it as needing moderating influences because, as with all other ideologies, it is not entirely (or in this case even mainly) correct. This is all the more so since so many among the woke, who are vastly overrepresented in the political class, lack experience with people from different walks of life. Their insulation, which Democratic commentator and political consultant James Carville—who coined the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid” that was key to then-Governor Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory over President George H.W. Bush—derides as “faculty lounge politics,”6 promotes fanaticism, declaring formerly extreme ideas not merely contestable or even mainstream, but off limits to criticism.

The nonnegotiable assumptions of late-stage woke include reflexively disparaging the achievements of Western civilization, while anointing non-Western or traditionally marginalized peoples and ideas as sacred. This deep script makes those (particularly wealthy Whites)7 with advanced degrees susceptible to believing the worst about White police officers, leaving influential segments of the political class subject to exploitation by grifters, with disastrous results. As one of us shows, many Americans believe that police pose a near genocidal threat to Black people, when in fact in a typical year fewer than 20 unarmed Black people (some of whom were attacking the police) are killed by nearly a half million White police officers, a lot lower than one would expect given that the Black crime rate is more than double that of other cohorts.8 Likewise, The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and many other activists claim that police departments evolved from racist slave-catching patrols, which is simply not true.9