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Is there anyone better at chronicling the poisonous relationship between crime and race in the Big Apple than Heather MacDonald? Not that I know of:

The Times's editors and its columnist Bob Herbert fit this episode of sound preventive policing [the arrest of members of the Pretty Boy Family gang] into the usual story line about racist officers preying on innocent minority youth. In article after article, they portrayed the gang members as law-abiding paragons, taking their description of the events as unimpeachable and even giving them a large photo spread, suitable for framing.

Then it was on to the next alleged police atrocity. Herbert generated a series of columns from a New York Civil Liberties Union report claiming that police officers assigned to city schools routinely abused students and arrested them for innocuous high jinks. No reporting, of course, on the 192 robberies, 5 rapes, 247 felony assaults, 138 burglaries, and 580 grand larcenies that students committed in school in 2006-07-a fearsome total, but 26 percent smaller than six years ago, thanks in part to the NYPD. The Times's writers cribbed an editorial off Herbert's columns, repeating his charges and calling for the New York City Council-that esteemed body of public-safety experts-to scrutinize all student arrests and convictions for misuse of police power.

Read it all.

topics:
Law