Many progressives don’t seem to share that view, and are quick to downplay what’s happening in the United States today. A reported piece in The Guardian warns that “police and politicians routinely share misleading, out-of-context crime statistics to advance their agendas,” while telling the reader that “Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s.”

This may be true, but it’s just as true that violent crime is a real crisis in certain places—harming certain communities—right now. Violent crime is not equally distributed across the United States. It’s not even equally distributed across the average city. In New York City, 96 percent of shooting victims last year were Black or Hispanic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, polling conducted in June found that the New Yorkers who lived in the Bronx, which is predominantly Black and Latino, were significantly more likely than Manhattanites, who are majority white, to believe that the number of uniformed cops in the subways should be increased (81 percent among those in the Bronx, compared with 62 percent of those in Manhattan). One-third of white New Yorkers disapproved of increasing police in the subways; 14 percent of Black residents disapproved.

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who today teaches criminal justice at John Jay College, in New York City, worries that many of the city’s anti-police progressives live in safe, upper-middle-class neighborhoods that will never have to experience the consequences of serious crime surges. “Stop telling other people how they should be policed,” he told me, “especially when the data we do have says that Blacks want more policing more than whites want more policing.”