The Benefits of Proactive Policing:  One of the legacies of the Obama Administration has been a decline in proactive policing, particularly in larger cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Baltimore and New York.  Federal consent decrees, based on claims of racially biased policing, have forced many big city police departments to abandon stop-and-frisk, and other self-initiated police contacts and warned off police agencies in smaller cities with protests and threats of lawsuits.  Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald calls this the "Ferguson Effect,"  resulting from the nationally publicized riots and political response to a Ferguson, Missouri police officer shooting of an unarmed black man in the summer of 2014.  Although both state and federal investigations later found that the shooting was justified, the race-baiting of police has not declined and it vigorously continues today.  But in at least one city, where the police are not under a federal consent decree, proactive policing is being revived and the results are positive.  Last Summer, Josh Crawford of the Pegasus Institute released a study of shootings and homicides in Louisville, Kentucky, as what he calls self-initiated policing was abandoned in 2013 and then restored in 2017.   In one year, shootings and homicides were down well over 50% in the city's three highest crime districts.  An update released on March 4 shows that this positive trend is continuing.  This percipitous drop in major crime is similar to what happened in the early 1990s when New York Transit Police Chief Bill Bratton cracked down on fair beating, vagrancy and petty offenses in the city's crime-ridden subways.