Baltimore is now paying for its criticisms of law enforcement

Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves in order to curry favor with local voters.

Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.

Various other communities across the country are experiencing similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of antipolice mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as “protests.”

None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, Are Cops Racist? Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after antipolice campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.

If all this has been known for years, why do the same mistakes keep getting made?

Mainly because it is not a mistake for those people who are looking out for their own political careers. Critics who accuse the mayor of Baltimore and the Maryland prosecutor of incompetence, for their irresponsible words and actions, are ignoring the possibility that these two elected officials are protecting and promoting their own chances of remaining in office or of moving on up to higher offices. Racial demagoguery gains votes for politicians, money for race-hustling lawyers and a combination of money, power and notoriety for armies of professional activists, ideologues and shakedown artists.

Of course, all these benefits have costs. But the costs are paid by others, including men, women and children who are paying with their lives in ghettos around the country, as politicians think of ever more ways they can restrict or scapegoat the police.

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice has been leading the charge, when it comes to presuming the police to be guilty — not only until proved innocent, but even after grand juries have gone over all the facts and acquitted the police.

Not only former Attorney General Eric Holder, but President Barack Obama himself has repeatedly come out with public statements against the police in racial cases, long before the full facts were known. Nor have they confined their intervention to inflammatory words.

The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government’s ideas about how police work should be done.

The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department’s demands.

By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice.

It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach also was tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies — which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins.

Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York’s current mayor is moving back in the direction of Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do.

And innocent men, women and children — most of them black — will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere.

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.