Post-Defunding Crime Statistics
= "The effect of .. the falsehood that police more readily shoot black suspects has been the devastation of many low-income black communities: De-policing as a result of false anti-police rhetoric is causing a massive spike in homicides, mostly in predominantly black neighborhoods. [1]
Discussion
Calculating the Ferguson and Minneapolis Effects
What is the cost, in human lives, particularly in poor neighborhoods, of spreading misleading and false statistical information ?
A review by Isaac Krieger:
"The effect of .. the falsehood that police more readily shoot black suspects has been the devastation of many low-income black communities. In 2014, after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the BLM movement’s anti-police rhetoric and propaganda found a receptive audience. As police were demonized with falsehoods, their morale declined and their willingness to engage in proactive policing, such as street stops for suspicious behavior and other forms of policing designed to prevent firearms crimes, plummeted. Police officers reported that they were scared or unwilling to confront suspects because any confrontation could escalate into a situation where they would need to use force. Any such situation could turn into a media circus where they would be scapegoated, their careers would be ended, their friends and community would cut all ties with them, and possibly, where they would even be wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. Without community support, many police officers reduced or even eliminated entirely their proactive policing. Thousands simply quit. Fewer police stops led to more guns and more criminals on the street. Murder rates, especially murder rates in low income black neighborhoods—where the police were most reluctant to confront criminal suspects—spiked.
This pattern of false anti-police rhetoric followed by reductions in proactive policing and spiking rates of violent crime, especially in predominantly black neighborhoods, was termed “the Ferguson Effect”. Initially, researchers sympathetic to the BLM movement were skeptical of whether the effect existed, but there is now a growing consensus that the Ferguson Effect is both real and devastating.
Evidence and Magnitude
After completing his landmark study on police shootings, and absorbing the shock of his results, Roland Fryer, the star black Harvard economist who, initially, at least, supported BLM, undertook a second effort: to verify or debunk the Ferguson Effect, and quantify its magnitude. After an exhaustive statistical analysis, he concluded that not only was something like the Ferguson Effect real, but in just the five cities he examined, it caused a staggering 900 excess murders, and 34,000 excess felonies that would not have otherwise occurred—and it was expected to cause hundreds more murders in those cities in the following years. Extrapolated to other cities and time periods this result suggested thousands of additional murder victims nationwide.
Other researchers also studied the question. One of the field’s most prominent researchers, Richard Rosenfield, was initially skeptical, but after re-examining the data, ended up changing his mind. ‘“The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.’
Counter Evidence?
Incredibly, the study that I’ve seen most commonly cited to refute the Ferguson Effect states the following:
No evidence was found to support a systematic post-Ferguson change in overall, violent, and property crime trends; however, the disaggregated analyses revealed that robbery rates, declining before Ferguson, increased in the months after Ferguson. Also, there was much greater variation in crime trends in the post-Ferguson era, and select cities did experience increases in homicide. Overall, any Ferguson Effect is constrained largely to cities with historically high levels of violence, a large composition of black residents, and socioeconomic disadvantages. [Emphasis added.]
In other words, the Ferguson Effect has not been experienced broadly throughout our entire society. Instead, it’s been focused in exactly the cities you’d expect: those with large numbers of residents living in low income, predominantly black neighborhoods plagued by violent crime. Far from refuting the Ferguson Effect, this study actually bolsters the theory even further.
As an example of how this study is cited, a CNN article says the Ferguson Effect “has been challenged in academic research as anecdotal rather than data-driven and evidence-based”. In contrast, according to CNN, a data-driven approach found that “any Ferguson Effect is constrained largely to cities with historically high levels of violence, a large composition of black residents, and socioeconomic disadvantages.”
It’s hard to see how challenging the validity or importance of the Ferguson Effect because the devastation is only felt in low income black neighborhoods is not overtly racist. The direct implication seems to be that those neighborhoods don’t really matter. But, there are hardly any studies that challenge the Ferguson Effect, so CNN used the one that was available.
“The Minneapolis Effect”
In 2020, the theory was tested again when protests and riots swept across the country following George Floyd’s death while in police custody. The covid pandemic lockdowns had been underway for months by then, and many kinds of crime were predictably down as a result of fewer people being out and about. However, as anti-police rhetoric and propaganda increased after Floyd’s death, once again, police reduced proactive policing and murders spiked. This time, even more than in 2016. One top expert in the field estimates that the result of de-policing during June and July of 2020 alone resulted in an additional 1,520 murders.
He explains:
- “Crime rates are increasing only for a few specific categories—namely homicides and shootings. These crime categories are particularly responsive to reductions in proactive policing. The data also pinpoint the timing of the spikes to late May 2020, which corresponds with the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis and subsequent anti-police protests—protests that likely led to declines in law enforcement....police officers have scaled back on proactive or officer-initiated law enforcement, such as street stops and other forms of policing designed to prevent firearms crimes.”
Other top researchers in the field concur. De-policing as a result of false anti-police rhetoric is causing a massive spike in homicides, mostly in predominantly black neighborhoods. The graphic below shows that there was no spike in murders for three months after pandemic lockdowns started (shaded pink), but that murders suddenly spiked after protests following George Floyd’s death (the red line).
You can read more background and analysis exploring the spike in homicides following BLM’s politicization of Floyds death, now termed the “Minneapolis Effect”, here and here.
Putting Harm In Perspective
The growing consensus in the field of criminology that a decline in proactive policing is resulting in drastic increases in murders, is so substantial that even strongly left leaning media outlets, like CNN, which have typically been supportive of the BLM movement, are starting to acknowledge the role of de-policing.
Regardless of whether you call it the Ferguson Effect or the Minneapolis effect, if you add up the estimates of murders from the different studies in various cities and time periods, you get something in the neighborhood of 2,500 additional murders on the lowest end, but, possibly, well over 10,000 on the high end.
While it may be difficult to pin down an exact number, what’s clear is that thousands of black people have been murdered as a result of BLM’s falsehoods villainizing the police, and the resultant anti-police sentiment that makes police even more wary of confronting criminal suspects.
It’s worth taking a moment to put these numbers in perspective:
18 unarmed blacks shot by police annually
26 unarmed whites shot by police annually
2500 (at least, but possibly well over 10,000) additional murders—mostly black—as a result of the de-policing prompted by BLM falsehoods
8000 blacks murdered by criminals annually
It would take roughly 140 years for police to shoot as many unarmed black people as have been murdered as a result of BLM falsehoods in just the past few years. But, the thousands of additional black murder victims are just the tip of the iceberg of devastation that BLM falsehoods have inflicted on black communities. For each victim murdered by criminals there are dozens of lives derailed; hundreds of children traumatized.
Perhaps even greater than the deaths and trauma that result directly from BLM’s falsehoods, is the damage done by drawing attention away from the real solutions to the approximately 8,000 black people murdered annually. The tragedy of the BLM movement is not just the additional murders and devastation to low income black communities that its falsehoods have caused directly, but also how those falsehoods retard progress on tackling the violence which was already plaguing those communities before BLM even came along."
(https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods)
Statistics
Jason Johnson:
Defunding police departments are linked to higher crime statistics in the U.S.:
"In 2015, when an ACLU lawsuit reduced Chicago police’s ability to make stops and searches, Windy City killings jumped 58% as street stops fell 82% in 2016, according to University of Utah research.
Similarly, Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s 2015 weak case against the cops in the Freddie Gray incident (all charges were later dropped or ended in acquittal), and her hostility toward the cases police sent to her office, demoralized officers and deterred proactive policing.
Over the next 12 months, arrests fell 28% as shootings jumped and murder rose 55% to make Baltimore America’s murder capital that year. That violence has not abated as overall arrests continue to plummet each year as police further disengage.
Philadelphia hit a 30-year high with 500 homicide victims in 2020 and more than 100 in 2021 so far. As progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner has dropped 50% of both drug and illegal gun cases, police have reduced vehicle and pedestrian stops by 72%.
In 2020, overall arrests fell by a third, including a 20% drop for violent crimes. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw grudgingly admitted that public officials’ attacks demoralized police, encouraging de-policing.
Over the summer, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler “defunded” the Portland Police Bureau by $12 million and eliminated three police units. As chaos engulfed the city, shootings went up 173% and murders jumped an astounding 255%."