Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has canvassed a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing and “racial” profiling, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Mac Donald’s newest book, The War on Cops (2016), warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk.
In Are Cops Racist?(2010), Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby’s harmful effects on black Americans. A nonpracticing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has testified before numerous U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York.
The campaign greatly respects all of her work and particularly finds valuable her work on race, policing, and urban issues.