Black lies matter

By HEATHER MAC DONALD
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/
September 3, 2016




49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, middle, kneels during the national anthem before a preseason game against the Chargers on Sept. 1, 2016, in San Diego. (Chris Carlson / Associated Press)

The Black Lives Matter movement has been feted repeatedly at the White House and honored at the Democratic National Convention. Hillary Clinton has incorporated its claims about racist, homicidal cops into her presidential campaign pitch.

The recent assassinations of police officers in the name of Black Lives Matter ideology have not slowed down the anti-cop demonstrations or diminished the virulent hatred directed at cops during those protests.

And more recently, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the National Anthem to protest the country's treatment of black people, while pop singer Beyonce has made the movement the focal point of her performances.

Yet the Black Lives Matter movement is based on a lie, and not just the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood by Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014.

The idea that the U.S. is experiencing an epidemic of racially driven police shootings is also false, and dangerously so. Several studies released this year show that police officers are less likely to shoot blacks than whites.

But just as Michael Brown continues to be venerated as a martyr to police brutality despite the Justice Department's evisceration of the "hands up, don't shoot" narrative, the media, activists and many politicians continue to traffic in demonstrable untruths about police shootings, race and crime.

The facts are these: Last year, the police shot 990 people, the vast majority armed or violently resisting arrest, according to the Washington Post's database of fatal police shootings. Whites made up 49.9 percent of those victims, blacks, 26 percent. That proportion of black victims is lower than what the black violent crime rate would predict.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the newly released "The War on Cops."

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/black-lives-matter-is-based-on-a-lie/article/2600164

Absolute, Categorical Lies

By STEPHEN F. HAYES

September 12th issue of The Weekly Standard

http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was investigating the events surrounding the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others died.

On March 10, 2015, Hillary Clinton told reporters at a rare press conference that she had “absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department."

No parsing required. Absolute confidence, she said. In any way connected to work.

On August 8, 2015, Clinton submitted a signed declaration to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., swearing "under penalty of perjury" that she'd directed all emails that "were or potentially were" work-related be turned over to the State Department.

Emphatic. Were or potentially were related to her time as secretary of state.

Then on October 22, 2015, Clinton testified under oath before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. "I provided the department, which has been providing you, with all of my work-related emails—all that I had."

Unqualified, absolute. All that I had.

In May of this year, Clinton told ABC News: "I have provided all of my work-related emails, and I've asked that they be made public, and I think that demonstrates that I wanted to make sure that this information was part of the official records."

Categorical. All of my work-related emails.

Clinton used such unequivocal language on purpose, of course. It was meant to convey certitude about her disclosure of work-related emails, to signal to voters (and reporters) that she was unafraid of being contradicted and, most important, that she had nothing at all to hide.

We know now that her claims were false.

A report by the State Department's inspector general concluded that Clinton had not turned over any of the work-related emails she sent in her first three-plus months on the job, between January 2009 and April 2009. The Defense Department found 19 emails Clinton and General David Petraeus exchanged that were not included in her production to the government. The Benghazi committee uncovered a batch of undisclosed work-related emails between Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton adviser who wrote to share privately sourced intelligence on Libya and other pressing State Department matters. (At the time of their correspondence, the Clinton Foundation was paying Blumenthal $10,000 per month to serve as a consultant.)

It was clear long ago that Hillary Clinton and her team did not, in fact, turn over all work-related emails to the State Department. And in July, we learned that the number of missing work-related emails was exponentially higher than previous reports had suggested. FBI director James Comey stunned even reporters who had long worked on the story when he disclosed just how many Clinton had failed to produce.

"The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related emails that were not among the group of 30,000 emails that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. .  .  . It's also likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere and that are now gone."

How could this happen? Comey concluded that Team Clinton did not intentionally withhold the emails and may well have just missed them because their search wasn't comprehensive enough.

We are skeptical. Is it possible that a search of 60,000 messages might somehow miss a few work-related emails? Sure. A few dozen? Plausible. But several thousand? In a search conducted shortly before Hillary Clinton would launch her presidential campaign and conducted by people employed to protect her interests? Dubious.

Then, this past week, we learned that there was yet another set of work-related emails Clinton had failed to produce. Up to 30 emails related to Benghazi were among those Clinton deleted from her private server. We haven't yet seen those latest emails. The Clinton campaign is downplaying their significance, arguing that they may well be duplicates of earlier emails posted by the State Department. Perhaps. But there's little reason to take their word for it. Given that the inquiry into Clinton's emails grew out of the investigation into the Benghazi attacks, one might expect that anyone searching for work-related emails would have included Benghazi as one of the most important search terms. Anyone searching for work-related emails whose goal was to find them, anyway.

It doesn't take much guesswork to understand why Hillary Clinton set up a private email server and why she has lied so aggressively ever since: She didn't want her emails available to the American people. In an email exchange back in 2010, Clinton herself cited that as the reason she did not want to use State Department email. When top aide Huma Abedin suggested "putting [Clinton] on state email" or providing her email address to State Department officials, Clinton wrote back to say: "Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible."

Clinton didn't provide that one. That email—with a top State Department official about State Department business and concerning the very email set-up that investigators were seeking to learn more about—was not included in the emails that Clinton considered "in any way connected to work."

She got away with it. And, as regards the latest revelations, she will get away with it again.

Article TagsEDITORIAL, EMAIL, HILLARY CLINTON, SCANDALS

Obama’s Iran Deal Is a Fraud on the American People

He and Kerry worked with Tehran to excuse and ‘exempt’ its flouting of its commitments.

By Andrew C. McCarthy — September 3, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

President Barack Obama answers questions about the Iran nuclear deal during a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington on July 15, 2015. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Iran “has fully implemented its required commitments.” That was the representation Obama secretary of state John Kerry made to the American people in announcing on January 16 — “Implementation Day” of President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (aka, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) — that international economic sanctions were consequently being lifted against Iran.

Secretary Kerry added that “Iran has undertaken significant steps that many, and I do mean many, people doubted would ever come to pass.” Still, Kerry promised, the Obama administration would continue watching the mullahs like a hawk, thus “assuring continued full compliance” with the regime’s JCPOA commitments.

The same day, President Obama signed an executive order lifting a number of U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. We now know he also set in motion a furtive $400 million cash transfer to the regime as a ransom (which the administration calls “leverage”) for the release of four American hostages — the first installment of a carefully structured $1.7 billion side payment to Iran (ostensibly in settlement of a failed 1970s arms deal), details about which the administration continues to withhold from Congress and the public.

All of this was based on this purported “full implementation” of Iran’s “required commitments” under the JCPOA touted by Obama and Kerry. And all of it was a deliberate, audacious, elaborately plotted lie.

The Institute for Science and International Security (hereafter, the Institute) reported on Thursday that Iran was not in full compliance with its JCPOA commitments on Implementation Day, as was required — we were led to believe — before Iran was to get sanctions relief. What’s more, the Obama administration not only well knew that Iran was not in compliance; it also colluded with Iran, through the secretive JCPOA device known as the “Joint Commission,” in order to exempt Iran’s multiple violations from compliance requirements.

Got it? As Obama and Kerry were telling you that Iran had “fully implemented its required commitments,” and that the administration would continue working energetically to ensure future continued “full compliance” with those commitments, Obama and Kerry were working with Iran to excuse its flouting of its commitments — and, it turns out, to lay the groundwork for future “exemptions” from compliance.

The Institute’s report outlines violations in connection with Iran’s commitment to a cap of 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium (LEU) and with some of the near–20 percent LEU that Iran was allowed to keep, as well as with the heavy-water cap and large “hot cells” that Iran was also permitted to retain.

It was known to the administration, in advance of Implementation Day, that these violations meant that Iran’s nuclear stocks and facilities would not be in compliance. But Obama feared calling Iran on its violations. That would have put pressure on him to deny sanctions relief, which would in turn have induced the jihadist regime to pull out of the JCPOA. So, to bury the mockery the mullahs were making of his signature “achievement,” Obama turned to the JCPOA-created farce known as the “Joint Commission,” a body composed of representatives of the deal’s six parties, whose machinations are shrouded in secrecy.

With Iran certain to be in violation, the Institute explains, the Joint Commission convened and quietly exempted the regime from its JCPOA commitments. Kerry and Obama then went out and told Americans and the world that Iran had met its commitments. It appears that this was yet another secret side arrangement that Congress has been kept in the dark about.

The conspiracy to depict a fraudulent “agreement” while ensuring that Iran gets the benefits without performing its obligations has been evident for months. As Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy reported here at National Review back in March, the administration furtively acceded to Iran’s demand that the International Atomic Energy Agency would no longer provide broad reporting on Iran’s nuclear program. The risible explanation? Thanks to the magnificent JCPOA and Iran’s purported compliance with it, exacting IAEA scrutiny was no longer necessary. It would be sufficient, the IAEA claimed, simply to monitor Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA terms.

If you feel like your intelligence has been insulted, it has: The IAEA knew, when it made this claim, that Iran’s non-compliance with the JCPOA was being “exempted” by the Obama administration. But what we now know goes a long way toward explaining a curious development that Fred highlighted in his March report: the IAEA’s omission of critical data in its JCPOA compliance reports. This rendered it impossible for independent experts to assess whether Iran was truly keeping its commitments and deserving of sanctions relief, as the Obama administration publicly insisted it was.

The reports were being kept vague because the administration’s representations, to repeat, were audacious lies.

But that’s not all. As the invaluable analyst Omri Ceren gleans from the Institute’s report, Obama is in discussions with other JCPOA parties to make the exemptions granted to Iran permanent — in other words, to let Iran rewrite the agreement so that its violations are no longer violations but entitlements. Not just that: Obama is also planning yet more exemptions, in anticipation of yet more Iranian violations.

All the while, of course, the president and his secretary of state will keep telling us Iran is keeping its commitments. And why shouldn’t they? After all, there really are no commitments when transgressions are agreed on and forgiven in advance — lest Iran walk away. That’s not an agreement. It’s an extortion racket.

To summarize, under the JCPOA, Iran gets paid, gets to keep materially supporting terrorism, gets to build its industrial-size nuclear program, gets to develop ballistic missiles in anticipation of loading nuclear payloads, gets to narrow the “breakout” time necessary to convert to weapons-grade the uranium that Obama is helping them enrich, and gets to run roughshod over any terms it finds too inconvenient.

What does the United States get? A devious, enemy-empowering, post-American president waving around his legacy “agreement” as the international press swoons, the armed forces of the jihadist regime menace the United States Navy, and the world edges closer to war.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is as senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

Daniel Silva: By the Book

Book Review
http://www.nytimes.com/
September 1, 2016



The author of the Gabriel Allon thrillers, including the latest, “The Black Widow,” loves F. Scott Fitzgerald and named his son Nicholas after Nick Carraway from “The Great Gatsby.” But his daughter is Lily — “not Daisy or Jordan or Myrtle.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

“Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro; “Zero K,” by Don DeLillo; “The Finkler Question,” by Howard Jacobson; “Sweet Tooth,” by Ian McEwan; “Pay Any Price,” by James Risen; “The Nightingale,” by Kristin Hannah; and “Undercover,” by Danielle Steel.

What was the last great book you read?

My truly “great” books have all been rereads. Recently, I reread “Lolita” and once again marveled at Nabokov’s amazing, feverish, riotous sentences. Only Nabokov could make the opening of a freezer door sound like poetry. I also reread Greene’s “The Quiet American” and “The End of the Affair.” Greene’s prose was cooler and more economical than Nabokov’s, but no less brilliant. Lately, I enjoyed “Mothering Sunday,” by Graham Swift; “Submission,” by Michel Houellebecq; and “The Truth and Other Lies,” by Sascha Arango. “The Other Side of Silence,” by Philip Kerr, was good company this summer during the many long flights of my book tour: the South of France, a sex scandal and the Cambridge spy ring. Oh, and did I mention that Somerset Maugham is a character in the story? What an entertaining combination!

Do you have an all-time favorite author?

Orwell’s “1984” is my favorite book, with “The Quiet American” and “The Sheltering Sky,” by Paul Bowles, a very close second and third. That said, were I only allowed two books to read for the rest of eternity, they would be “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night.” They are good books to be stuck with; one might never tire of such luminous, shimmering prose. My son is named Nicholas after Nick Carraway, and I’m afraid my daughter — her name is Lily, not Daisy or Jordan or Myrtle — loves Fitzgerald even more than I do. She rereads “Tender Is the Night” constantly and is forever calling me to recite passages aloud. I’m afraid it is all my doing.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

Mainly, I read literary fiction and the piles of nonfiction books I read as part of my research for the Gabriel Allon novels. I have never been drawn to science fiction or fantasy. In fact, I can say with some certainty that I have never read a fantasy novel. I love good crime, but procedure and forensics bore me. In my own work, I try to avoid technology to the degree possible. In today’s world that is getting harder and harder to do.

How do you organize your books?

They are arranged by subject matter, but within each block of books are subsections only I can see. For example, I have a large collection of books dealing with the history of Israel, Zionism and the Arab-Israeli conflict — hardly surprising, given the subject matter of my long-running series. But within that section are smaller subsets of books dealing with, say, Saudi Arabia or Egypt. The works of the Israeli historian Benny Morris are grouped together, as are books dealing with the history of Israel’s intelligence services. Other significant sections in my library include the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath; World War II — with a special focus on the German and Allied intelligence services; the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church; and the global war on terrorism and the Iraq war. I own a copy of every serious book ever written about British intelligence and the Kim Philby affair, and recently I reread them all as part of my preparation for a forthcoming novel. My collection of fiction is arranged by author — how else could it be? — but it has spilled from the shelves and is now encroaching slowly across the floor of my office. Soon I will have no more room left to work. I suppose I could read e-books, but I’ve never really cared for them. Is a book really a book if it’s not a book?

What might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Several hardcover copies of Sidney Sheldon’s novels, which are my guilty pleasure. Nearby is a complete hardcover collection of the works of the late, great Dominick Dunne. I know Dunne was an admirer of Fitzgerald, too, but something tells me he also counted Sidney Sheldon as one of his influences.

What’s the best book you ever received as a gift?

Marilyn Ducksworth, my former publicist at Putnam, gave me a first edition of “Our Man in Havana” that occupies a treasured spot on my shelf. I also have a signed copy of “Where the Wild Things Are” in which Maurice Sendak sketched one of his famous figures. Bob Woodward was kind enough to give me a signed collection of his remarkable “Bush at War” series. They are among my most prized possessions. I only wish there had been no need to write such books.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

My own hero, Gabriel Allon, is a rather strait-laced character who has no real personality flaws, other than the fact that he’s a bit of a loner and has killed a good many people, most of whom deserved to die. That said, in my own reading I relate to heroes and protagonists who are a bit more flawed and vulnerable. I adore Macon Leary, the wounded travel writer in Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Tourist”; Barley Blair, the boozy publisher-turned- spy in John le Carré’s “The Russia House”; and the adroitly named Grady Tripp, the marijuana-addled creative writing professor in Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys.” I much prefer antiheroes to true villains, especially when they are also narrators of the unreliable variety. Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, perhaps the most wretched legal guardian in Western literary history, is the gold standard. I also love the unnamed narrator in Josephine Hart’s “Damage,” who so beautifully describes his own destruction, and Barbara Covett, the poisonous London schoolteacher who narrates Zoë Heller’s “Notes on a Scandal.” And how can we leave out Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, one of the slyest villains ever created.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

My parents were both schoolteachers, so there were a great many books in our house. They were also both voracious readers. In fact, my enduring image of my mother is of her curled at the end of the couch with a book in her hands. I like to say that I was both well read and poorly read. By that I mean that I read both literature and rather trashy commercial fiction, which helped to influence my own style when it came time for me to write. My favorite childhood book was “Make Way for Ducklings,” by Robert McCloskey. When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher read “The Grapes of Wrath” aloud to my class each day after lunch recess. John Steinbeck made me want to become a writer.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, with William F. Buckley to serve as referee. I think I would set the table with paper plates and plastic utensils to avoid any undue bloodshed.

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful, and why?

It is a question I’m asked often at book signings, and my answer never varies. “A Death in Vienna,” the fourth novel in the Gabriel Allon series, will always be my personal favorite. It contains a fictitious Holocaust testimony, dictated by Gabriel’s mother, which describes her experiences on the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945. As part of my research for the novel, I spent many hours reviewing real testimonies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem — the original documents, flimsy onionskin pages, typed in Yiddish. To hold such memories in my hands was overwhelming. A professor of Holocaust studies at a prestigious university told me recently that “A Death in Vienna” was on his syllabus and that he used the novel’s climax, a walk through modern-day Treblinka, as a teaching tool. I have received no greater compliment as an author.

‘Don’t Breathe’: Prowlers become the prowled in solid horror film

Richard Roeper

http://chicago.suntimes.com/

August 25, 2016

What a nasty piece of work.

“Don’t Breathe” is an impressively photographed, well-acted, relentlessly paced horror film sure to sicken some and delight others with its twisted sense of humor — and its twisted sense of plot twists, come to think of it.

You know how some of the best thrillers are psychological puzzles that play tricks with your mind and feature a minimum of on-screen violence?

Yeah, that’s not this movie.

Among its other cringe-inducing but impressive feats, “Don’t Breathe” contains one of the 10 most disgusting scenes I’ve ever seen in a horror film, and I’m going all the way back to Linda Blair’s antics in “The Exorcist” as a reference point. I don’t even need to catalog the hundreds of gross-out, blood-curdling, stomach-churning scenes I’ve seen since the 1970s to be absolutely certain this particular moment would have a place in the Top (Bottom?) 10.

The premise of “Don’t Breathe” is a bit of twist on “Wait Until Dark,” the 1967 film (based on the 1966 play) starring Audrey Hepburn as a blind housewife terrorized by three thugs searching for missing heroin. Once again we have three criminals invading a house occupied by a blind individual; from there, the plots diverge wildly.

Here’s the deal. Three smug teenage burglars have been targeting upscale homes in the Detroit area. (As they wryly note, they’re quickly running out of nice houses to burgle.)

There’s Money (Daniel Zovatto), a trash-talking, quick-tempered wannabe thug; his girlfriend Rocky (Jane Levy), who dreams of a big score so she can escape with her little sister to California and get away from her abusive mother, and Alex (Dylan Minette), who is clearly in love with Rocky and is the one who provides the keys and the access codes to the houses, because his beloved and hapless pops is a security guard who makes it all too easy for Alex to access that material.

The volatile Money gets a tip about a potential six-figure score involving a blind Gulf War vet (Stephen Lang) who lives alone on an otherwise abandoned five-square-block stretch of Detroit. Turns out the seemingly feeble and crazy Blind Man (he’s never given a name) had a daughter who was run over and killed by a girl from a wealthy family, and the girl’s family paid the vet off with a handsome cash settlement.

Easy score, right? All the teens have to do is sedate the obligatory growling Rottweiler chained up in the backyard, release a little chloroform into the Blind Man’s bedroom while he’s sleeping, locate the safe and ta da! They’ll be rich!

Suffice to say things go horribly wrong from the get-go, or we wouldn’t have a movie called “Don’t Breathe,” would we?

Once Money, Rocky and Alex have figured out a way into the extremely well-secured house — a sign they should have heeded — they quickly realize they’re in for a long and possibly bloody night. Yes, they have the advantage of sight over the Blind Man, but he knows every inch of the house, he of course has superior senses of hearing and smell, and even though he looks old enough to be their grandfather, he’s a deeply disturbed and physically imposing war veteran with a taste for violence. Best not to creak a floorboard or leave anything lying around he can use as a clue to ascertain your hiding spot.

One of the intriguing elements of “Don’t Breathe” is the lack of a clear-cut hero to root for. The character of Money is the most thinly drawn; he’s just a jerk. But while we find room to sympathize with Alex and in particular with Rocky, their greed is what put them in this situation — and their greed is what escalates the madness as the night grows bloodier.

As for the Blind Man, well. He’s hardly a victim, and we’ll say no more.

Talented as they are and as clever as they are with some nifty mid-movie developments, director Fede Alvarez and screenwriter Rodo Sayagues make a mistake, I believe, with a pre-credits sequence that colors our expectations of just about everything that transpires for the remainder of the film, which is essentially one giant flashback.  And they traffic in a few too many horror-movie clichés — including the ending — for “Don’t Breathe” to ascend to the instant-classic status some have ascribed to it.

Still. In what is shaping up to a banner year for scary movies, this is another solid and memorable entry.

★★★

Screen Gems presents a film directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues. Rated R (for terror, violence, disturbing content, and language including sexual references). Running time: 88 minutes. Opens Friday at local theaters.

Today's Tune: Casi Joy and Woody James - Jackson

People Who live in High-Crime Areas Ask the Cops to Enforce No-Loitering Policies

What should the police to do when their constituents beg them to maintain order? Ignore them?

By Heather Mac Donald — August 31, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

(Getty Images)

It is starting to dawn on at least some members of the press that law-abiding residents of inner-city areas desperately want the police to maintain order in their neighborhoods.

“Please help me,” a gas station owner in West Baltimore begged his local police commander during a recent police-community meeting attended by a Washington Post reporter. The gas station’s parking lot had been overrun with loiterers and had been the site of a fatal gang shooting, following a Justice Department report that had accused the Baltimore Police Department of racism.

The Justice Department had singled out for particular opprobrium the police practice of trying to “clear corners” of loiterers and trespassers in high-crime areas. Such loitering enforcement merely oppresses minority communities, according to the federal lawyers. Black Lives Matter activists, academics, and the press have leveled that same charge repeatedly over the last two years. (See, for instance, an op-ed titled “Romanticizing Broken Windows Policing,” by New York Times columnist Charles Blow, or the New York Times editorial “Broken Window, Broken Lives.”) These critics have claimed  that corner-clearing and other forms of so-called broken-windows policing are invidiously intended to “control African-American and poor communities,” in the words of Columbia law professor Bernard Harcourt.

This critique of public-order enforcement ignores a fundamental truth: It’s the people who live in high-crime areas who petition for “corner-clearing.” The police are simply obeying their will. And when the police back off of such order-maintenance strategies under the accusation of racism, it is the law-abiding poor who pay the price.

The Post reporter, to his credit, accurately captured the demands of those vulnerable residents:

The 40 or so longtime residents who gathered in a West Baltimore church basement on this August night — many of whom were older black women afraid to walk to the store or leave their homes at night — had come to urge police to clear their corners of miscreants and restore order to their crime-plagued community.

A 67-year-old social worker worried that if the convenience stores in her neighborhood received permission to operate around the clock, they would become hangouts for youth. “We’ll need more police to watch it,” she told the commanders. When crowds of teens hang out on corners, she said, residents have no option but to call the police.

The Washington Post is not the only newspaper to belatedly notice the grassroots source of order-maintenance policing. The Baltimore Sun wrote a story on “corner-clearing” after the Justice Department report, and stumbled across the same inconvenient fact: It is locals who urge the police to enforce trespassing and loitering laws. A 54-year-old grandmother told the Sun why she had posted a “No Loitering” sign in her window: “If I come home from work, ain’t nobody supposed to be sitting on my steps,’ Sophia McMurray said. “I don’t even sit on my steps.” Ms. McMurray understands something that eludes the activists and academics: Out of street disorder grows more serious crime. She doesn’t want groups of teens hanging out, she said, because she wants her “grandkids to be in a safe environment.”

The Sun also heard from the beleaguered owner of a local copy store. After the Freddie Gray riots in April 2016, the Baltimore police virtually stopped enforcing drug laws and other low-level offenses. Shootings spiked, along with loitering and other street disorder. The scene outside the copy store got so threatening that the owner, June Crisp, painted the admonition “No loitering. No sitting on steps. Violators will be arrested” on the steps leading to his store and obtained an official No Loitering placard from his local councilman.

“After the riots, it got bad, like the drug dealers were having conventions on this block,” Crisp told the Sun. “All this drug activity, it scares people away. Legitimate people, honest people.” Crisp calls the police if the people hanging out in front of his store don’t leave. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” he told the paper. “I’m trying to make money. I’m trying to pay my bills.”

It is impossible to attend a police-community meeting in a high-crime area without hearing some variant on these heartfelt requests for public order. Through hard experience, the law-abiding residents of gang- and drug-plagued areas perceive large groups of people hanging out as a threat. In April 2016, a 17-year-old girl in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Ta’Jae Warner, tried to protect her brother from a group of girls gathered outside her apartment building who were threatening to kill him; one of the group knocked Ta’Jae unconscious, and she hit her head on the pavement. She was taken off life support four days later and died.

On March 25, 2016, two groups of youths were fighting on a street corner on Chicago’s West Side. One of the teens started shooting at his rivals, instead hitting 13-year-old Zarriel Trotter, an innocent bystander, in his back near his spine. The bullet punctured Zarriel’s intestines.

In a community-council meeting in the 41st precinct of the South Bronx in June 2015 that I attended, residents complained repeatedly about large groups of youth hanging out on corners. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There were 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? They’re perched there like birds.” A middle-aged man wondered: “Do truant officers exist anymore?”

At a meeting in the 23rd precinct in East Harlem in 2015 that I observed, residents asked why the police hadn’t stopped a recent stampede of youth down Third Avenue.

Several years ago, an elderly lady in the 32nd precinct in Harlem proudly reported to her precinct commander that her building had just gone co-op. But kids had colonized her stoop. “What ever happened to loitering laws?” she asked.

In 2013, I spoke with an elderly cancer amputee in the Mt. Hope section of the Bronx. She was terrified to go to her apartment lobby because of the loiterers hanging out around and in her building. If the loiterers gain access, she said, all hell breaks loose: “You can smell their stuff in the hallway; they’re cussing and urinating.” The only time she felt safe was when the police had cleared the area: “As long as you see the police, everything’s A-okay. . . . You can come down and get your mail and talk to decent people.”

This observed support for public-order enforcement is backed up by polling data. In a Quinnipiac poll from 2015, slightly more black than white voters in New York City said they want the police to “actively issue summonses or make arrests” in their neighborhood for quality-of-life offenses: 61 percent of black voters wanted such summons and arrests, with 33 percent opposed, versus 59 percent of white voters in support, with 37 percent opposed.

The wider public is clueless about the social breakdown in high-crime areas and its effect on street life. The drive-by shootings, the open-air drug-dealing, and the volatility and brutality of those large groups of uncontrolled kids are largely unknown outside of inner-city areas. Ideally, informal social controls, above all the family, preserve public order. But when the family disintegrates, the police are the second-best solution for protecting the law-abiding. (That family disintegration now frequently takes the form of the chaos that social scientists refer to as “multi-partner fertility,” in which females have children by several different males and males have children by several different females, dashing hopes for any straightforward reuniting of biological mothers and fathers.) 

This year in Chicago alone, through August 30, 12 people have been shot a day, for a tally of 2,870 shooting victims, 490 of them killed. (By contrast, the police shot 17 people through August 30, or 0.6 percent of the total.) The reason for this mayhem is that cops have backed off of public-order enforcement. Pedestrian stops are down 90 percent. “The streets are gone,” the head of Chicago’s police union, Dean Angelo, told me earlier in August. “The cops are driving by people on the drug corners, they’re not sweeping the corners anymore.”

“Police legitimacy” is a hot topic among academic critics of the police these days. Those critics have never answered the question: What should the police do when their constituents beg them to maintain order? Should the cops ignore them? There would be no surer way to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people who need them most.

— Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The War on Cops.

Mike Trout is better than ever. So why aren't enough people paying attention?

TOM VERDUCCI

http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/08/30/mike-trout-angels-stats

August 30, 2016

Angels centerfielder Mike Trout has no peers in baseball today. He is, by one measure, the best young hitter born in almost the last 100 years. As impressive as that fact is, it's not as meaningful as these: He keeps getting better, rarely misses a game, plays with abiding joy and hustle and is one of the most accommodating and gracious superstar players with fans.

Yet relative to other elite athletes, Trout has a ridiculously small cultural footprint. As Ben McGrath asked in The New Yorker, “When was the last time baseball’s reigning king was a cultural nonentity?” That question came two years ago, and it remains pertinent.

This is not Trout’s problem. It is not baseball’s “marketing” problem. It is our problem. We now live in a world in which we conflate infamy and fame, in which the word “notoriety” has lost its centuries-old implication of disrepute. The “disgraced” swimmer Ryan Lochte will probably be pitching cough drops and dancing on a television screen near you sometime soon. Failed NFL quarterback Tim Tebow announces he will hold a baseball workout and the sports media goes into spasms of glee. Our attention is guided by an internal decibel meter; those who self-promote the loudest win our gaze.

When it comes to national appeal, Trout was born at the wrong time. He is a great baseball player and a solid citizen at a time when those attributes don’t get you retweets or discussed on talk radio.

The low profile of a generational great will be an issue again in the coming month. Trout is the best player having the best season in the American League. But he is unlikely to win the Most Valuable Player award because his team is dreadful and he doesn’t have the narratives associated with guys like Astros second baseman Jose Altuve (5'6"!), Red Sox centerfielder Mookie Betts (a fresh face in a big market!) and Blue Jays third baseman Josh Donaldson (he could win back-to-back MVPs!), all of whom have the advantage of playing on teams in the pennant race. Whatever Trout does in September will get little notice.

In the next month you will hear so much more about Robert Griffin III, the Browns quarterback with a career record of 14–21 who has thrown 40 touchdowns in four years, than you will about the best young hitter since Ted Williams.

So it’s time to make time for Trout, before we miss his greatness. As odd as it would be in other eras, I'm compelled to point out the wonder of the best player in baseball.

Trout is better than the next best player by a margin greater than that of any other athlete in any major sport. Every so often, like the tides, stories will wash up about a player on a hot streak who is “in the conversation” about best player in baseball. Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper, Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, Orioles third baseman Manny Machado and others all have received this forced treatment from the media, eager as we are to wear the halo of having picked the next great stock. But one thing never changes: Trout is the gold standard.

The other day I was talking to Angels manager Mike Scioscia about his 25-year-old superstar. I told Scioscia I never had seen Trout take a game or an at-bat off, but I also recognized that Scioscia has seen all of Trout’s 731 games and all 3,427 of his plate appearances, so I deferred to his opinion.

“Never seen him take a pitch off,” Scioscia said. “Never. Not one. Mike is so driven. No matter what the score is, no matter what the standings are, he will always give you his best at-bat. He wants the best out of himself on every pitch, and he wants to run down everything in centerfield.”

Los Angeles has had a winning record for exactly one game this year—back when it improved to 5–4 by beating the A's on April 12. It is an awful team made worse by injuries and a thin farm system. You could not know any of that by watching Trout play on any night.

I asked bench coach Dino Ebel, another veteran Angels staffer, when was the last time he saw Trout frustrated?

“Never,” he said.

“Okay, wait. He’s had games where he’s struck out three times. Everybody gets frustrated.”

“Maybe he does, but I can tell you I’ve never seen it. Actually, it’s the opposite. If he strikes out the third time he’ll come back [to the dugout], give that little smile and go, ‘Okay. I’ve got it. Wait 'til I see him next time.’ I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened, where a pitcher gets Mike, he’ll go back in [the clubhouse] and look at the video and go, ‘I’ve got him.’ And you know what? Usually he does. He plays with such confidence every single day.”

Scioscia has been in professional baseball for 40 years. I asked him if he’d ever seen anybody this good.

“He was mostly in the other league so I didn’t get a chance to see him all the time, but Ken Griffey Jr. comes to mind,” said Scioscia, who was playing and working for the Dodgers when Griffey was in his prime with the Mariners in the 1990s. “He could do it all, like Mike.”

Griffey was elected to the Hall of Fame this year with 99.3% of the vote, the highest percentage in the history of the balloting. And yet at the same point in their careers, Trout is better than Griffey, and it’s not that close:

CATEGORY	GRIFFEY	TROUT
Home Runs	154	164
RBIs	498	481
Average	.305	.306
On-base percentage	.378	.403
Slugging percentage	.536	.558
OPS	.914	.961
Stolen Bases	80	134
Runs	473	577
OPS+	147	170

We have to go even further back in history to find anybody who was this good this young. The best and fastest method to do so is to use OPS+, or adjusted on-base plus slugging percentage, which adjusts for a player’s league and park. Here are the best hitters through their age-24 season, according to baseball-reference.com:

1. Ted Williams: 190
2. Ty Cobb: 176
3. Lou Gehrig: 171
4. Mike Trout: 170
5. Stan Musial: 169

Trout is in the company of some of the greatest ghosts in Cooperstown—guys who were born in 1918, 1886, 1903 and 1920, respectively. Among that group, only Cobb is in Trout’s class when defense and base running are factored in.

Impressively, the best keeps getting better. Here are six ways Trout keeps improving:

1. He has become more aggressive on first pitches.

In the minor leagues Trout would not swing until he had a strike. He wanted to see what the pitcher was throwing, and he wanted to force himself to be disciplined. He rarely swung at first pitches in the majors, leading to pitchers pounding the zone with a free first pitch to put him in an 0-and-1 hole. He told me that if he fouled off the next pitch, he was 0-and-2 before he knew it too often.

Finally this year, he stopped giving pitchers free strikes. He has almost doubled his swings on first pitches, from 10% last year to 18% this year. Take a look at the stunning results.

YEAR	HITS	AVERAGE
2012	13	.419
2013	11	.314
2014	7	.292
2015	5	.192
2016	16	.593

2. He has become even better at hitting the ball to the opposite field.

YEAR	HITS	AVERAGE
2012	24	.273
2013	33	.317
2014	13	.176
2015	35	.318
2016	34	.442

3. He is the best low-ball hitter in baseball.

Pitchers are taught to limit damage by keeping their pitches below the knees. On such pitches within the width of the plate, Trout is hitting .329 (26 for 79).

4. He has closed the hole in his swing on high pitches.

Pitchers used to have a safe zone against Trout by pounding the top of the strike zone and above. No more: On pitches there this year, Trout is hitting .290 (20 for 69).

5. He has improved his throwing.

One knock on Trout when he first came up was that he had a below-average arm. So he worked regularly in spring training over the past few years to improve his arm strength. With just seven career assists entering last year, Trout has had seven assists in each of the past two years.

6. He remains the best base runner in baseball.

He has advanced from first to third on a single more often than anybody in baseball (23 times), and he is tied with the Tigers' Ian Kinsler for the most times scoring from second on a single (17). With 21 steals in 25 attempts, Trout also has his most stolen bases in three years.

I get the usual knocks on why Trout isn’t more of a cultural icon. He plays for a bad team (that has little hope of being good any time soon), and he has been to the postseason just once, when the Angels were swept in the 2014 ALDS by Kansas City.

Griffey never played in a World Series. Like Trout, by the time he was 25 he had also been to the postseason just once: 1995, when Seattle beat the Yankees in the ALDS before getting bounced by the Indians in the ALCS. By then, however, Griffey had a much bigger cultural imprint than Trout does at the same age. By '95, Griffey already boasted the first of his four branded video games, had acted in a major TV sitcom (Fresh Prince of Bel Air) and a major motion picture (Little Big League), been featured in a primetime animated comedy (The Simpsons) and was about to become the first baseball player in history with his own shoe (courtesy of Nike).

Griffey wasn’t so popular because of his team's success or market size or because he was notorious. He was culturally relevant for very reason that Trout isn’t today: He was simply a great baseball player without attendant controversy. What happened in between? Sure, baseball became more of a regional sport than a national one, but there’s also a little thing called the Internet that came along and changed the volume and tone of public discourse. The term “hot takes” didn’t exist when Griffey was running down fly balls and swatting majestic home runs in his 20s.

There was a great video from before the Angels played the Tigers at Comerica Park on Sunday, showing the excited and then tearful reaction of a young boy, who was wearing a Trout jersey, after Trout signed a baseball for him. While the scene was extraordinary and moving—yes, baseball players, this is how much you can mean to children—the action of Trout accommodating fans was entirely ordinary. He does it every day with a smile. He might be the most gracious superstar in public since Cal Ripken Jr.

Last night, while you probably weren’t watching, Trout banged out three more hits, including a home run, and scored two more runs in the Angels' 9–2 in over the Reds in Anaheim. He leads the league in Wins Above Replacement, on-base percentage, walks, times on base and OPS+, and he is second in OPS, third in runs and fourth in stolen bases. With his home run last night, Trout just did something that’s never been done before in baseball history: five seasons with 25 homers and 100 runs through his age-24 season. To be this good this young ... well, we have a 100-year player in our midst. Is anybody paying attention?