[Heather Mac Donald] An urgent desire for more policing

As I discuss in my new book, “The War on Cops,” the Black Lives Matter movement has been a stunningly successful exercise in changing the topic. While the nation has been focused on the non-existent epidemic of racist killings by police, the routine drive-by shootings in urban areas are taking their usual toll, to no national notice.

In 2015, three children ages five and younger were killed in September alone in Cleveland; five children there were shot over the 2015 Fourth of July weekend. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago that same Independence Day holiday by a bullet intended for his father. In November, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father of the murdered nine-year-old refused to cooperate with the police in identifying his son’s killers.

In August last year, a nine-year-old girl was doing her homework on her mother’s bed in Ferguson, Mo., when gunfire aimed at her house killed her. In Cincinnati in July 2015, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings.

A six-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting on West Florissant Avenue in March in St. Louis, as protesters were again converging on the Ferguson Police Department to demand the resignation of the entire department.

Ten children under the age of 10 were killed in Baltimore in 2015.

On Father’s Day this year in Chicago, a three-year-old boy was shot in the back and left paralyzed for life.

While the world can tell you who Michael Brown is, few people outside these children’s immediate communities know their names. There have been no Black Lives Matter protests against their assailants.

Expect the death toll to rise further as officers continue to back off of discretionary policing under the relentless charge that they are racist. But the consequences of that fall-off in enforcement go beyond the loss of life. When officers retreat to a purely reactive form of policing, they ignore the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who beg for surcease from public disorder.

Go to any police-community meeting in high crime areas and you will hear an urgent desire for more policing, not less. Above all, residents ask for the enforcement of public-order laws, known as “Broken Windows” policing, routinely denounced by academics and the media as race-based oppression. The following comments from a June 2015 police-community council meeting in the South Bronx are typical of those I have encountered again and again over the years:

“Oh, how lovely when we see the police!” an elderly woman from Hunts Point spontaneously exclaimed. “They are my friends.”

During the public Q-and-A with the precinct’s commander, residents complained repeatedly about large groups of youth hanging out on corners. “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?” (Last night in St. Paul, someone in a group of more than 50 teens brawling in the middle of an intersection pepper-sprayed five officers in the face and chest; the officers were responding to a 911 complaint about the fight.)

Back in the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct, the president of a local mentoring program begged for a police watchtower in his neighborhood, a plea he has been making for 10 years, he said. Whenever he hears gunfire, he runs toward the shooting, terrified that one of his three children has been struck.

The precinct’s commanding officer promised that there would be “zero tolerance” for outdoor barbecuing, loud car stereos and other broken-windows offenses during the upcoming Puerto Rican Day parade. “With public drinking comes fighting, and knives and guns,” she said, to widespread approbation.

Before the meeting, the superintendent and two residents of a subsidized senior-housing building complained among themselves about a fellow tenant who was allowing teens to use his apartment for drug dealing. “For this to be happening