Muslim Americans have been treated unfairly by NYPD policing too. Two years ago, I wrote about how the NYPD's ethnic profiling and undercover surveillance of innocents in that community violated their civil liberties and did serious harm to their well-being. Was the effort nevertheless necessary to thwart terrorist attacks? Hardly. "In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques," the Associated Press reported, "the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation." In fact, New York City attorneys later acknowledged, in court testimony, that the program generated zero leads. NYPD apologists can't explain this away as policing where the crime was.

The examples I've cited all occurred in the years since Mac Donald offered her rosy portrait of what black officers think of the NYPD. Yet her latest assessment of the NYPD, published last month, neither acknowledges nor grapples with the new information. "Hatred of the police among blacks stems in part from police brutality during this country’s shameful era of Jim Crow-laws and widespread discrimination," she writes. "But it is naïve not to recognize that criminal members of the black underclass despise the police because law enforcement interferes with their way of life. The elites are oblivious both to the extent of lawlessness in the black inner city and to its effect on attitudes toward the cops. Any expression of contempt for the police, in their view, must be a sincere expression of a wrong."

In this telling, recent NYPD misconduct is not even a factor! Mac Donald is right that the NYPD is less racist than it once was, that there are plenty of non-racist NYPD cops, that there are black criminals (along with criminals of other races) whose hatred of the NYPD is driven by a lawless subculture, and that there is irresponsible commentary that exaggerates NYPD racism and understates NYPD progress.

But the 90 percent of black voters who say that police brutality is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem, the 59 percent of black New Yorkers who disapprove of the way the NYPD is doing its job, and the 81 percent of black New Yorkers who believe the NYPD is tougher on blacks than whites cannot be explained away by gesturing at a criminal mindset. Millions of law abiding people share these critiques. Is all contempt for police a sincere expression of a wrong? Of course not. There are, however, lots of credible accounts of wrongdoing. It takes a selective eye indeed to set forth an account of black sentiment toward the NYPD that does not acknowledge any examples found in this article.

And despite the evidence of racial bias in New York City policing, the majority of people who disapprove of how the NYPD is doing its job don't actually "hate" or "despise" the NYPD. They just desperately want it to be reformed so that bad policing is documented and punished rather than being ignored or covered up. Conservatives could argue that race isn't actually the core of the problem, that the culture of unpunished misbehavior in the NYPD is driven by, say, the tribal mindset documented by Frank Serpico much more than any deliberate desire to disadvantage blacks. But too many NYPD defenders refuse to acknowledge widespread misbehavior of any kind. (If they saw Anthony Balonga pepper-spray innocent women for no reason you'd never know.) Even as police engage in blatant insubordination at the behest of a powerful public employee union that frequently misrepresents the truth, City Journal's Matthew Hennessey writes as if the urgent issue is hypocrisy by NYPD critics. It is unthinkable that the publication would portray a similar controversy involving any other public employee union in this way. Its tribal affiliations in the culture war are clouding its judgment.