[Heather Mac Donald] More on the ‘Ferguson Effect,’ and responses to critics

My advocacy of what I have called the “Ferguson Effect” has proved to be the most controversial and contested aspect of my new book, “The War on Cops.” When I first proposed the theory in a May 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the policy arm of the American Society of Criminology immediately sent out an alert seeking rebuttals to my hypothesis. The opposition has hardly abated since then.

Yet virtually every police officer working in an urban area in the post-Ferguson era tells the same tale: He or she is backing off of discretionary, proactive policing. Officers operate today under the presumption that they are racist, even homicidal; their stop and arrest activity is measured against population benchmarks, rather than crime benchmarks, and thus deemed racially biased; they worry that any use of force against a black civilian, no matter how justified, could be interpreted as a race-based assault and could put their career at risk.

Finally, they encounter virulent hostility and resistance to their lawful authority on a regular basis when they get out of their squad cars to make a stop or arrest. As a result, officers are reluctant to engage in the type of policing that contributed so significantly to the nation’s two-decades-long crime decline. In consequence, criminals have become emboldened. Officers report more guns on the street; people who were borderline before and not carrying are now packing heat, officers say, because their chances of getting stopped have fallen. Officers are not intervening in the low-level criminal activity and public order offenses that can quickly ripen into more serious felonies.

Bottom line: Crime in cities with large black populations rose at alarming rates last year. Nashville had an 83 percent increase in homicides; Milwaukee was up 72 percent; and Cleveland, over 90 percent. Baltimore had its highest per capita homicide rate in its history. Overall, in the 56 largest cities, homicides were up 17 percent, a nearly unprecedented one-year increase.

Last year’s crime increase is continuing this year, with Chicago being perhaps the prime example of the Ferguson Effect: a 90 percent drop in pedestrian stops, and people being shot on a daily basis — more than 2,200 so far this year, nearly all black and nearly all shot by other blacks, not by police officers, who have committed 0.5 percent of all shootings.

Here are the main arguments that have been directed against the Ferguson effect and why I think they are wrong.

• “Crime levels are still far lower than they were in the 1990s, so there is nothing to worry about.”

The first part of this statement is true; the second is not. Crime nationally dropped 50 percent from 1994 through the first half of 2014, thanks to the CompStat policing revolution that began in the New York Police Department and that spread nationally. The likelihood that a crime decline that took 20 years to accomplish will be reversed in one or two years is remote. But if 17 percent annual increases in homicide continue, it will not take very long to return to the high crime era of the early 1990s.

• “Crime has not risen in every city, so the Ferguson Effect does not exist.”

The first part of this statement is also true; the second, not. Some cities have, in fact, seen stable or even declining crime rates since the rise of the Michael Brown “hands-up-don’t shoot” hoax and the Black Lives Matter movement. Cities with already low crime rates and low minority populations are not going to be affected by a politically and racially driven de-policing phenomenon. The Ferguson Effect would predict that it is going to be in high-crime, high-minority areas where officers are most hesitant about engaging, and where a drop-off in proactive policing will have its more dire consequences. And that is exactly what the data shows. A complex regression analysis of crime rate changes in the 12 months after the Michael Brown shooting found that homicides rose most in high-crime, high-black population cities.

• “The crime increase is trivial.”

The Brennan Center and the data site