Since the summer of 2014, America has been convulsed with a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter. That movement holds that police officers are among the greatest threats—if not the greatest threat—facing young black males today. Policing and the rest of the criminal justice system—from prosecutors to drug laws—single out minority communities for gratuitous and heavy-handed enforcement, the charge goes, resulting in an epidemic of “mass incarceration” that falls most heavily on blacks.

This book challenges that narrative. Through vivid, street-level reporting, it gives voice to the many residents of high-crime neighborhoods, rarely heard in the media, who support proactive policing and want more of it. The book will argue that there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that Black Lives Matter than today’s data-driven, accountable police department. In New York City alone, over ten thousand minority males are alive who would have been killed had the New York Police Department not brought homicide in the city down 80% from its early 1990’s level. The intelligence-led policing revolution that began in New York and spread nationally has transformed urban neighborhoods, freeing their residents from the thrall of daily fear.

Other topics include such contested tactics as stop, question, and frisk and “broken windows” policing. The book will refute the argument that racist drug statutes and enforcement lie behind the black incarceration rate. It will take the reader inside prisons and jails. And it will argue that proactive policing has been the greatest public policy success story of the last quarter century, resulting in a record-breaking national crime drop that no criminologist or even police chief foresaw.

That crime drop is now at risk, however, thanks to the nonstop agitation against the police led by the Black Lives Matter movement. The book is a call for a more honest and informed debate about policing, crime, and race, before the public safety gains of the last twenty years are lost.