Heather MacDonald

So it's a little early to celebrate, as far as I'm concerned, when you still have these completely grotesque assaults that are going on in cities by drug-addicted, mentally ill

people who should be in prison or in mental institutions.

But nevertheless, though crime remains at a completely unacceptable rate, the property crime, the assaults, there has been baby steps towards giving secret permission to the cops to try and be a little bit more proactive, to do a little bit more of the essential broken windows policing.

Nevertheless, there's a lot more that could be done.

Yeah, I think places like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton, they have given some cover to their officers.

But front and center are the Brandon Johnsons.

You know, we've heard about a pretextual stop is a stop that has stopped a black or Hispanic person and found drugs or weapons.

The cops are going where the crime is.

They're going where...

They're getting the 9-11 calls.

They're using their powers of observation to try and suss out suspicious behavior.

Those are legitimate stops.

A very left-wing criminal law professor of mine at Stanford Law School once, in an unguarded moment, said there's nothing more important that the police can do to lower gun crime than these types of...

investigative stops, as they're called in Los Angeles.

It's alleged for Washington, D.C.

It's been alleged for New York.

That is probably going on.

This is one of the drawbacks of the fantastic accountability revolution that began under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton, which put

rightful pressure on police commanders to lower crime in their precincts and to show results.

And a certain percentage of managers in that situation are going to feel under such pressure that they are going to massage things and figure out ways to reclassify felonies as misdemeanors.