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A fascinating recent example of what I call cops retreating to the doughnut shop began in July 2023 when the New Jersey State Police largely stopped issuing traffic tickets for six to eight months after being accused once again of racial profiling, with the result that, surprise, surprise, car crashes went up.

That the police are highly political in the sense of paying close attention to trends in thought among civilian leaders and influencers is a point I’ve made repeatedly over the past decade.

This is, on the whole, a good thing. We give cops guns and badges, so it’s better if they pay attention to what nonpolice leaders say they want.

But it also means that civilians need to think hard about the realities of policing. The Establishment utterly failed at that in 2020 and evidently hadn’t learned their lesson by 2023 in New Jersey.

You can’t expect the police to just do less of what you don’t want and more of what you want. Their job entails trade-offs.

So, if you tell the cops to stop hassling blacks as much, they’ll do it…by pulling everybody over less. After all, they mostly can’t see who is in the car, especially not at night. So, what else can they do?

During the past couple of years, as the disaster of the post–George Floyd anti-police mania has become more obvious, elite opinion has backed off from denouncing law and order as racist as vociferously as in 2015–16 and 2020–21.

But there had been no reckoning with the proponents of the racial reckoning, at least until last month’s election.

You can’t expect DEI candidate Kamala Harris to know much, but as an old district attorney, she ought to have known something about crime. Yet she utterly failed in the crucible of 2019–2020. (Here’s her 2019 tweet in support of Jussie Smollett’s palpable hate hoax.)

Hearteningly, her otherwise fabulous career was derailed in sizable measure over the George Floyd disorder. So it could be that other ambitious Democrats are finally ready to learn.

Still, it’s not clear how much elites understand how the Ferguson-Floyd Effects work, which raises the concern that we could just do this all over as soon as current memories fade.

So, I’m going to articulate once again what I’ve figured out over the years. With the election done, there might possibly be a window of time in which liberals are open to learning.

An article in The New York Times on Sunday about the New Jersey highway patrol over the past two years shows some improvement in comprehension:

The drastically reduced levels of enforcement began the week after the release of a report that found glaring racial disparities in road safety enforcement.

An academic found that blacks were 9 percent more likely than whites to be stopped, and when searched were 10 percent less likely to be found with contraband.

Whether those were “glaring disparities” is left as an exercise for the reader.

What’s not mentioned in the report is warrants for arrest nor the type of contraband found when searched, whether a joint or a loaded illegal handgun. That seems important and very well might differ by race, but it goes unanalyzed. My concept that Point of Use gun control might be more useful than Point of Sale gun control is almost unknown.

The analysis evaluated more than a decade’s worth of State Police traffic stops and reopened a stubborn wound in a department that spent a decade under the control of a federal consent decree because of similar patterns of bias.

This consent decree dates back to the Clinton Administration in 1999 and was a landmark in the jihad against racial profiling.

Troopers who believed that they had been closely adhering to strict rules adopted as a result of the consent decree said the report left them concerned that even small missteps might derail their careers….

Cops seem to be like that: extremely pension-oriented. They aren’t loose-cannon antiheroes like the heroes of action movies. They watch the TV news and react accordingly.

The next month, citations for speeding, drunken driving, cellphone use, and other violations plummeted by 81 percent across the state compared with the year before….

If you ask cops to be nicer to black criminals, well, they’ll be nicer to everybody, which will of course lead to more crime and car crashes. If that’s what you want, swell. If that’s not what you want, you know, you should have thought of that earlier.

On the turnpike and the parkway, the state’s main highways, crashes increased by 27 percent in August 2023 as tickets for speeding dropped to 437, down from 2,066 the year before.

Traffic fatalities, however, didn’t go up much in New Jersey in 2023, when they were plateauing nationally as the George Floyd era faded. But in 2024, the New Jersey death toll began:

Traffic deaths during the first six months of the year climbed by 23 percent, even as fatalities fell by 3 percent across the country—progress that the U.S. transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has hailed as a sign that roadway safety is slowly returning to prepandemic norms.

Now that the election is over, can we finally drop the news media’s dogma that everything bad that happened after George Floyd’s death, such as sharp increases in Deaths of Depolicing (traffic fatalities and homicides), could only have been caused by the pandemic rather than the anti-police surge?

I suspect that because the 2023–24 New Jersey job action by the cops union was largely kept on the down-low while it was happening (the New Jersey attorney general is now investigating whether he can bring indictments), the impact on motorists’ behavior was more gradual. They didn’t hear about it on TV, but over time, more and more drivers became aware that you just don’t see as many speeders pulled over anymore. So why not drive a little faster?

Or a lot faster?

In contrast, the chastening of the police in the late spring of 2020 was so immensely celebrated in the media that black homicide deaths shot up the first weekend after George Floyd’s death, and black traffic fatalities were up dramatically by mid-June. (The kind of people likely to shoot other people are extremely sensitive to police presence, while extremely bad drivers tend to be more regular folks, but still ones who have had numerous encounters with the cops.)

As I’ve been pointing out for years, America is one of the few countries in the wealthy world where traffic fatalities went up over the past decade. Heck, Russia, which was the home of hilariously terrifying dash-cam videos in the first decade and a half of the 2000s, dropped to a lower road death rate per capita than America by 2021.

There are no doubt multiple reasons for this, but the most obvious is the same reason that homicides also soared from 2014 through 2021: the rise of anti-police sentiment among elites and some of the masses during the Black Lives Matter age after Michael Brown’s death at Ferguson in August 2014.

At some point during 2022, the Democrats and their allies in the press seemed to start to figure out that unleashing disorder on the streets and highways wasn’t going to be a winning electoral strategy in the long term, so they tried to memory-hole the entire history.

Will they get away with it?

Not if I have a say.