© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2016. This is the author accepted 

version of the following book review:  

McGregor, R. (2016), The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law 

and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe Heather Mac Donald, 2016 New 

York: Encounter Books 248 pp., $23.99 (hb), Journal of Applied 

Philosophy. 

Published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/japp.12244. This 

article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with 

Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. 



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The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe 

Heather Mac Donald 

2016 

New York: Encounter Books 

248pp 9781594038754 

 

The War on Cops is a collection of previously-published essays by Heather Mac Donald, a 

public intellectual in the United States who belongs to the ‘small faction’ of secular 

conservatives (Mark Oppenheimer, “A Place on the Right for a Few Godless Conservatives”, 

New York Times, February 18, 2011).  The essays are journalistic rather than academic, 

having appeared in the City Journal, National Review, New York Daily News, InsideSources, 

Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard, but the volume is nonetheless significant to 

contemporary philosophers due to both its form and content.  First, Mac Donald presents a 

logical argument for her position and makes explicit use of philosophical devices such as 

thought experiments.  Second, this argument concerns the controversy surrounding the killing 

of African American males by police officers in the last three years and she provides the first 

sustained criticism of the rationale for the Black Lives Matter movement.  Mac Donald’s 

argument proceeds as follows: 

 (1) The activism of BLM has changed policing strategy from proactive to  

  reactive. 

 (2) The change in policing strategy from proactive to reactive has caused the  

  current crime surge in the US. 

 (3) The negative impact of the crime surge on the quality of life in African  

  American communities is higher than the negative impact of discriminatory 

  policing practices. 



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 (4) Therefore BLM has had a net negative impact on the quality of life in African 

  American communities. 

(1) and (2) combine to create ‘the Ferguson effect’ (p.70).  In addition to her criticisms of 

BLM, President Obama, and liberal academics, Mac Donald offers a positive thesis, claiming 

that the breakdown of the African American family is the cause of the disproportionate crime 

rate in African American communities and that the solution to the crime problem is ‘to 

rebuild the family – above all, the black family’ (p.233). 

 

There are times when Mac Donald brings a refreshing rigour to issues that have become 

supercharged with opacity, hyperbole, and emotion.  She argues, for example, that the 

statistics on stop-and-frisk are no more evidence of racism than they are sexism (p.97).  

African American men commit a disproportionate number of gun crimes and are therefore 

more likely to be stopped by police and also more likely to shoot at – and be shot by – police.  

Mac Donald is correct that statistics need to be both analysed and contextualised before they 

can be offered as evidence, but she employs the very same rhetorical devices that she 

criticises in her opponents in making her own case.  The use to which she puts the 

proactive/reactive dichotomy and her selection of examples are paradigmatic.  Mac Donald 

follows many contemporary criminologists in dividing policing strategy into two value-laden 

and mutually-exclusive categories, proactive and reactive.  She regards the former as positive 

– tellingly referred to as ‘Broken Windows policing’ (p.31) rather than the more accurate and 

aggressive-sounding Zero Tolerance Policing – and the latter as negative.  Reactive policing 

is an essential part of police work just as it is for the other two emergency services and 

proactive policing can be positive (in reducing crime) or negative (in straining police and 

community relations), depending upon the tactics used.  Second, Mac Donald exploits a 

technique that is used by both sides of the debate, the focus on examples at the expense of 



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counter-examples.  She concentrates on those cases where there may have been justification 

for the use of deadly force rather than the cases where police officers have shot unarmed 

African American suspects in circumstances where the force used was either avoidable (such 

as Ezell Ford and, subsequent to her writing, Alton Sterling) or inexplicable (Walter Scott 

and, subsequently, Philando Castile).  Each one of these regrettable incidents needs to be 

assessed in isolation on a case-by-case basis and Mac Donald’s attempts to gloss over 

unjustified homicides on the principle that some of the homicides have been justified is every 

bit as misleading as attempts to exaggerate police culpability by means such as using Trayvon 

Martin’s death as an example of police aggression.  Mac Donald accuses both President 

Obama and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio of irresponsibility in speaking out against the 

police, but she is no less irresponsible in her blanket defence of the police. 

 

This irresponsibility is perhaps most flagrant in the lack of evidence offered by Mac Donald 

for her argument.  There has been a recent surge in violent crime and although James Comey, 

the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, supports the idea of the Ferguson effect, 

the cause of the crime wave remains highly disputed (Eric Lichtblau & Monica Davey, 

“Homicide Rates Jump in Many Major U.S. Cities, New Data Shows,” New York Times, May 

13, 2016).  Similarly, the efficacy of Zero Tolerance Policing is the subject of much debate 

rather than the received wisdom that Mac Donald takes for granted.  She assumes, for 

example, that stop-and-frisk is a successful police tactic without quoting the statistics.  In the 

United Kingdom, stop and search has drawn a great deal of criticism, not only because of the 

potential for racial profiling and the negative consequences for community policing, but 

because it is claimed to be, in the words of Theresa May in an address to parliament on 30 

April 2014, ‘an enormous waste of police time’.  The stop to arrest ratio in the UK was 

extremely low – and the costs thus believed to outweigh the benefits – but Mac Donald 



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makes no such analysis of the situation in the US.  There is thus no convincing evidence for 

the Ferguson effect, premises (1) and (2) above, nor is any offered for (3) beyond reports of a 

handful of interviews with African Americans who have the misfortune to live in high crime 

areas and have a preference for a large and active police presence in their neighbourhoods.  In 

consequence, her conclusion – that BLM has done more harm than good to African 

Americans – is groundless.  The same criticism applies to her positive thesis.  Family 

breakdown and concomitant problems like the absence of role models for adolescent males 

are indeed contributing factors to criminal behaviour, but Mac Donald offers no evidence for 

the prioritisation of this one cause above the many others that are advanced beyond a few 

examples of career criminals with dysfunctional family backgrounds.  She betrays the full 

extent of her conservatism at times with the use of phrases such as the need for the police to 

‘stop crime before it happens’ (p.35) and African Americans being ‘born out of wedlock’ 

(p.123).  The result is more rhetoric along the lines of BLM versus ALM (All Lives Matter) 

rather than a methodical scrutiny of policing and race in the US.     

 

RAFE MCGREGOR 

Bishop Burton College