If a republican writer with a history of lying says something I agree with, should I cite her as an authority?

By N.S.

For years, An Old Friend would send me links to work by Heather Mac Donald. He stopped when he saw that I wasn’t posting them, but I have changed my mind. I am going to post links to her work, but with the caveat, that the writer in question has become influential through years of lying on behalf of the nypd.

I have no idea whether Mac Donald has been telling the truth about higher ed over the past several years, but I have no reason to trust her, and every reason to distrust her.

Mac Donald became famous through writing a long series of articles which lauded the nypd, beginning under commissioner William Bratton, as having achieved miraculous reductions in crime. Now, I believe, or at least I hope that the nypd did dramatically reduce murders in nyc through the stop-question-frisk tactic, which got thousands of guns off the street, although I also know that judges and prosecutors alike sabotaged Bratton’s “broken windows” policing, from the get-go.

Already in 1995, a series of scandals were exposed, in which the nypd was caught lying about crime stats. I wrote the first national exposé of said scandals in 1996, for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Mac Donald ignored the scandals. However, An Old Friend did find one piece of hers years ago, in which she admitted to some methods cops engage in, in order to fudge crime stats.

Stix:

“‘Everyone Knows’ that Crime Went Down for over 20 Years—Everyone but Me.”

“Medical Education: White Guy Loses His Job for Asking if Low-Rated Minority Students were ‘Just Less Good at Being Residents?’”