#ferguson effect

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: Feb 14, 2022

The Black Lives Matter movement has raised billions of dollars over the past several years. But no one seems to know how most of that money has been spent.

On 20 December 2020, The Economist noted that $10.6 billion had been pledged to causes and organisations affiliated with BLM. According to that article and further reporting from the right-leaning Daily Signal, BLM’s corporate donors included Amazon, Gatorade, Microsoft, 23andMe and Tinder, while recipients ranged from the small-scale Unicorn Riot guerilla media firm to the sizeable Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF).

As far as I can tell, no comprehensive or even partial audit of what happened to this staggering sum of money has ever taken place. Indeed, given the sheer number of corporate and NGO players involved, conducting one would be incredibly difficult. However, taking a look at the experience of just one BLM-affiliated organisation – BLMGNF – could give us an insight into what went on more broadly. The foundation’s story is truly remarkable.

BLMGNF received more than $90million in 2020, the year George Floyd was killed. According to the New York Post, by the end of 2020 the group had ‘an approximate balance of $60million’ after spending $8.4million on undefined expenses and costs, and committing ‘$21.7million to local chapters’.

This is where the picture gets complicated. A group of 10 Black Lives Matter chapters known as the #BLM10, which includes the organisation’s sizeable New Jersey and Hudson Valley branches, publicly criticised BLMGNF in November 2020 over ‘financial transparency, decision making and accountability’. ‘To the best of our knowledge’, a spokesperson for #BLM10 stated in an open letter, ‘most chapters have received little to no financial support from BLMGNF since the launch in 2013’.

The 2020 impact report for Black Lives Matter, which covers BLMGNF, BLM PAC and BLM Grassroots, does mention funding given to local chapters, but it only lists 11 chapters as recipients of its funding out of dozens of them.

Interestingly, BLM’s impact report lists far more transgender-advocacy organisations as its recipients than organisations promoting black civil rights. The list of organisations to which BLMGNF pledged at least a six-figure grant includes: Trans United, the Audrey Lorde Project (Trans Justice), Black Trans Circles, the Transgender District, the Black Trans Travel Fund, the Okra Project, For the Gworls, the Trans Justice Funding Project, the Trans Housing Coalition’s Homeless Black Trans Women Fund, Black Trans Media and Black Trans Femmes in the Arts.

Questions have also been raised about what is going on at the top of BLMGNF. The organisation appears not to have had a chief executive for almost a year now. According to the Washington Examiner, former CEO Patrisse Cullors stepped down in May 2021 following criticism of her personal finances. However, two respected activists whom she appointed to lead the organisation after her resignation never actually took office, ‘because of disagreements with BLM’. This appears to have only been made public last September. While BLMGNF has now opted to suspend its online fundraising operations, tens of millions of dollars were almost certainly raised during a period when the organisation had no upper leadership team.

And then, there were the houses. One of the main reasons Cullors stepped down was due to the controversy over her ‘real estate buying binge’, during which she purchased four homes valued at $3.2million. Cullors signed off on the deeds for a house in Inglewood, California worth $510,000, a ‘custom ranch’ property located in rural Georgia, which was equipped with an airplane runway, and a $1.4million mansion in ritzy Topanga Canyon, a short drive from Malibu, California.

You’d think that all of this might make more people want to know what happened to the billions pledged to BLM, or the millions given to BLMGNF specifically. Yet most media outlets have not raised any questions at all.

This seems to me to be a product of the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ that is becoming increasingly prevalent on the woke left. For me, this is why asking questions about the missing money is so important. It’s not because, as some would have it, I ‘hate black people’ or ‘want to make women of colour look bad’. The left’s bigotry of low expectations is just as racist as anything you can find on the hard fringes of the right, and it must be opposed.

A remarkable recent study showed the soft bigotry of low expectations in action. According to the Washington Post, the study found that white liberals dumb down their language when they talk to black people, losing multiple grade levels of word complexity. Surely, the same sort of quiet contempt, combined with an equally unspoken fear of false allegations of racism, explains the widespread reluctance to ask searching questions of Black Lives Matter’s finances. One more than suspects that if similar amounts of money had been raised by, say, the Tea Party and there were more than a few questions about how it had been spent, then a lot of strangely dressed patriots would be in deep trouble right now. These sorts of double standards do no good for black people.

Besides, it would be difficult, speaking frankly, to think of a single positive change in the American black community which has resulted from the Black Lives Matter movement. A few studies have found that cities where BLM marches took place in the past several years witnessed slight reductions in police homicides. However, these same communities endured a sharp rise in ‘regular’ murders in the wake of reduced police activity. Largely as a result of police forces retreating, there were more than 4,000 homicides in the US in 2020 compared with 2019, with homicides surpassing 20,000 for the first time since 1995.

Even for those who support the saner goals of BLM, it should be obvious that giving up money when it is either not clear how it has been spent or is spent on largely tangential causes does no good for communities of colour.

Here’s a tip for you: if and when you give to a black charity, don’t be racist enough to assume it’s normal for the organisation to have problems like those BLM is currently embroiled in. You should treat it like any other charitable donation, and make sure the organisation has transparent finances, a definite address and a CEO. Far more deserving causes do exist.

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A recent Washington Post column highlighting the rise in murders sanctimoniously noted that “attacking the police in the name of racial justice … ends up harming the same people that police reform efforts intend to help.” In other words: Look what happens when you tell cops to stop killing you! More people die!

One thing is true: The protests in reaction to George Floyd’s murder made police officers all over America throw tantrums in unison. In 2020, police went beyond work slowdowns and acted out their retaliatory rage in the streets. Philadelphia cops tear-gassed a crowd of protesters trapped on a highway; New York City cops arrested hundreds of protesters and even targeted legal observers. At least eight people were blinded by “nonlethal” police projectiles in May 2020. (Is it surprising that people don’t trust cops after this?)

How is it possible that people who watched these tantrums on the news could still come away thinking that police should receive an enormous share of local public funds, wield weapons, enjoy legal immunity for their violence, and be (ostensibly) entrusted with maintaining public safety? What other profession could behave like this and come away unscathed? (Prosecutors, maybe?)

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: Jan 21, 2024

Serious crime, particularly murder, soared while everyone was supposed to be locked indoors. Between 2019—by no means a famously peaceful year—and 2020, homicides alone surged by 42 percent during the summer and 34 percent during the fall. Many politically acceptable explanations have been advanced for this, with left-leaning publications like Vox preferring to focus on the undeniable economic devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, an alternative explanation fits the data far better: crime increased because major police departments had their budgets slashed and reeled in their stops dramatically—and similar chaos has followed such “woke” policy moves nearly every time they have been implemented.

The plain fact of the crime surge is a matter of little if any dispute. According to a serious 20-plus page report from the Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice (CCCJ), “homicides, aggravated assaults, and gun assaults rose significantly beginning in late May and June of 2020.” As just noted, murder rates jumped more than 30 percent fall-over-fall and more than 40 percent summer-over-summer from 2019 to 2020. Across just the 21 core cities providing data to the CCCJ project, homicides increased by an astounding 610 between the two years. Further, most other serious crimes of violence were up as well: “Aggravated assaults went up by 15 percent in the summer and 13 percent in the fall of 2020; gun assaults increased by 15 percent and 16 percent.”

Data like these are even more striking when analyzed at the level of each individual city, as can be done via this excellent spreadsheet from Criminologist Jeffrey Asher. In Louisville, the nearest “big” city to my new Kentucky home, homicides had jumped 78 percent when this was recorded by Asher—from 78 in 2019 to 139 in 2020—and his confirmed data for the city dates only to the end of October. Nor was this leap particularly unusual. A scroll through the major urban centers in the Midwestern US reveals surges from 194 to 264 in St. Louis (35 percent) and from 98 to 191 (95 percent) in Milwaukee. Larger American cities followed the same pattern, with famously well-policed New York City seeing an increase from 314 to 437 and my hometown of Chicago witnessing a larger rise from 481 to 748. This last grim tally led all American cities, and seems to have been the second highest total in Chicago during the past two decades.

Multiple theories have been advanced to explain this depressing phenomenon. A December 2020 Vox article from German Lopez headlined “The rise in murders in the US, explained” provides a solid outline of many of them. In it, Lopez presents no less than seven potential explanations for the violence, including chaos caused by COVID-19 (“the pandemic has really messed things up”), secondary medical effects of the bug (“overwhelmed hospitals [could have] led to more death”),1 and the struggling economy. Some of Lopez’s theories are truly innovative: he speculates at one point that “trust in police” could have plunged after high-profile incidents of brutality such as the killing of George Floyd, leading to more “street justice”—and speculates at another that pandemic-purchased guns in the hands of citizens may simply have resulted in “more gun violence.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps something simpler is going on. One of the most robust findings in social science is that reductions in effective policing correlate with increases in crime. And 2020, a year which included the New York Times running a Sunday op ed headlined “Yes: We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” featured probably the most consistent and sustained attack on the Boys in Blue in the modern era. In New York City, roughly $1,000,000,000 was slashed from the annual police budget, with much of this money shifted to “youth and social services programs,” according to USA Today. Despite noting that these cuts directly caused the cancellation of a 1,200-person class of new officers, scheduled to enter the Police Academy in August 2020, the USA Today piece pointed out that “many say” they were not large enough.

In Los Angeles, similarly, the police budget was reduced by $150,000,000 “following calls to defund the police after George Floyd’s May 25 death.” By November 12th of the past year, these cuts had already resulted in the dissolution of the department’s entire Animal Cruelty Task Force, and more notably of the Sexual Assault/Special Victims unit “that investigated disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein.” Future LA cuts to “Air Support, the Metropolitan Division, Gangs and Narcotics, and Commercial Crimes” are possible or probable.

Along with axe-cuts to police budgets, 2020 also saw significant and measurable declines in police stops. In Minneapolis, which seriously discussed defunding police and slashed the police budget by millions, Bloomberg noted that the MPD “has been making an average of 80 percent fewer traffic stops each week since May 25.” May 25th, 2020, was the exact date of George Floyd’s death. In addition to routine automobile stops, stops specifically of suspicious vehicles—defined as those thought to have been involved in a crime—were down 24 percent since the same date. Similarly, suspicious person stops “were down 39 percent since May 25.” The Bloomberg piece pointed out that one obvious explanation for this could be “pullback—police reducing their proactive activity in the wake of public criticism of their performance.” Surely so: and data from Chicago and other cities indicate that Minneapolis officers hardly pulled back alone.

Alongside budget cuts and at least city-wide declines in stops came perhaps the ultimate empirical validation of Broken Windows Theory. BWT, the controversial if oft-validated criminological theory originally proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, argues that visible signs of crime, chaos, and disorder create urban environments that serve as breeding grounds for further and more extreme misbehavior. Throughout 2020, massive and widely tolerated urban riots swept the country. In Minneapolis, where George Floyd died, rioters destroyed much of a famous and heavily minority business district, and set an active police station on fire with the cops initially inside. In Seattle, Black Bloc and Black Lives Matter activists set up a literal city-state known as CHAZ (or CHOP), within which six people were eventually shot. In Portland (OR), the well-known federal courthouse was attacked for roughly 100 days running, often with M-80 fireworks used as home-made mortars.

It is no exaggeration to say that the huge majority of rioters were essentially given the unpunished “room to destroy” originally suggested by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake during her city’s 2015 riots. Empirical articles from sources such as Court-House News and Pamplin Media Group have pointed out that roughly 91 percent of arrested Portland rioters were never prosecuted for anything, and these figures frankly seem similar across other major cities like Chicago. It seems logically obvious that even crimes as serious as murder could occur with relative impunity in this environment: the majority of the attackers of the six people seriously or fatally shot inside CHAZ are still at large.

“Common sense” aside, considerable statistical evidence indicates that the chaos-and-pullback explanation for the 2020 American totentanz fits the data better than alternative hypotheses such as our economic downturn. First, the relationship between crime and poverty (if that even is the proper causal direction) is far trickier than often supposed, and rates of serious crime such as murder frequently do not increase during recessions and depressions. During the recent Great Recession, murders totaled 16,422 in 2008, 15,399 in 2009, 14,772 in 2010, and 14,661 in 2011—declining by 1,761 between the start of the crisis and the commonly used end date for it.

Data specific to 2020 provide further support for non-economic explanations for the murder surge. While homicides, aggravated assaults, and gun crimes all increased dramatically, crimes focused purely on obtaining money all decreased in frequency during a heavily locked-down year. The CCCJ authors note that: “Residential burglary, larceny, and drug offense rates dropped by 24 percent, 24 percent, and 32 percent from the same period in 2019.” Perhaps most significantly, crime data is tracked on a monthly as well as annual basis, and—as previously cited Minneapolis figures indicated—the largest 2020 increases in violent crime trace directly to the Riot Summer following the death of George Floyd, rather than to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Again as per the CCCJ report: “Homicides… rose significantly beginning in late May and June of 2020.”

This finding gels perfectly with recent history. The increase in murders from roughly 14,000 in 2014 to 17,294 in 2017, following the first wave of Black Lives Matter-associated riots and the resulting police pullback, gained international attention as the “Ferguson Effect.” More broadly, US murders jumped from 8,530 in 1962 to 24,700 in 1991, following a generation or two of criminal justice reforms including the Miranda and Escobedo protocols, the Fruit of the Poisoned Tree doctrine, and a general liberalization of sentencing policies. Other serious violent crimes jumped proportionately, as detailed by Mona Charen in the unfashionable but essential book Do-Gooders. In a sentence so obviously true that only an academic social scientist could deny it, more police policing more effectively decreases crime.

And crimes have victims. While I mourn for dead fellow citizens of any color, a sad and absurd reality of both post-Ferguson and summer 2020 violence is that a great many of those killed unnecessarily were black Americans. In Chicago, 81.8 percent of those murdered in 2020 were African Americans, while 3.9 percent of victims were white. The simplest possible sort of number-crunching shows us that, assuming consistent rates of homicide by race, the Windy City’s vertical move from 481 to 748 deaths by violence cost 218 black lives inside one year. Assuming that murders nationwide increased only by 35 percent from 2019’s total of 16,425 and that only 50 percent of these new victims were black, the equivalent toll country-wide would be 2,874 dead black folks, including horrifying victims such as hero cop David Dorn and little eight-year-old Secoriea Turner.

The numbers speak for themselves. The ideas advanced by Black Lives Matter may be popular and “woke,” but they are also very often the worst possible policies for those of us who actually want to preserve black, and other, American lives.

Note: 1 Additional content in parentheses here is mine.

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https://archive.today/o22sO

In the end, the homicide rate in the CHAZ turned out to be 1,216 per 100,000—nearly 50 times greater than Chicago’s. Though that’s obviously not a strict apples-to-apples comparison—the small sample size of the CHAZ creates an exaggerated statistical effect—it’s instructive nonetheless, as it invalidates the entire premise of the autonomous zone. By instituting a “police-free zone,” the CHAZ didn’t become peaceable; it became lawless, brutish, and violent.

People think we forgot that the "police-free zone" had a body-count.

[ Source: NYPD CompStat 2.0 ]

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Willing to bet a decent proportion of the excess deaths were black people. Which BLM didn't give a shit about.

By: Wilfred Reilly and Robert Cherry

Published: Feb 14, 2023

The senseless murder of Tyre Nichols, by five black Memphis police officers, was an undisputed tragedy. But it’s important to judge it in context.

For many on the American political left, the explanation for what happened was simple: white supremacy. Despite the officers involved being black, this was still held up as evidence of the continued victimisation of black men by police officers who too often resort to violence whenever they interact with ‘people of colour’. Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd and other BLM martyrs, of varying degrees of actual innocence, have been cited in support of these claims, and have been used to fuel the ‘Defund the Police’ narrative.

This take is wrong. We shouldn’t demonise policing and policemen simply because the annual number of problematic killings is above zero. According to the Washington Post’s excellent database, about 25 unarmed black Americans were killed by police gunfire annually from 2015 to 2018. The figure is only at 25 because of an atypical 37 killings in 2015. Over the past four years, in fact, the number of unarmed black Americans killed annually by police gunfire stands at 12. In contrast, far more police officers are shot and killed in the line of duty each year – 314 police officers were shot and 58 were killed in 2021 alone.

While the left highlights the fact that black Americans are killed by police at two-to-three times the rate that would be expected from their share of the population, it neglects to mention the most glaringly obvious reason for this. Black Americans are a far younger, more urban and more working-class population than are white Americans. Largely as a result of this, they are disproportionately perpetrators of violent crimes. They therefore come into contact with the law more often than other sections of US society. According to recent figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black Americans are at least five times as likely as whites to commit murders and nearly three times as likely to commit violent crimes overall.

Moreover, the homicide problem in specifically black communities has grown significantly since the killing of George Floyd in 2020 – with the annual number of murders surging to over 20,000 and black-perpetrator homicides passing the 10,000 mark in both 2020 and 2021. There are now significantly more black (60 per cent) than ‘white and other’ (40 per cent) homicide victims annually, despite the fact that black Americans make up only 12 to 13 per cent of the US population. This entirely new level of blood-letting is the true crisis faced by black American citizens living in struggling neighbourhoods – not the phoney risk of ‘genocide’ at police hands, as BLM claims.

None of this excuses terrible police work, such as that which cost Tyre Nichols his life. However, as Bob Maranto and I have noted, perhaps the most serious problem with the BLM-inspired ‘defund the police’ narratives is that they utterly ignore potential changes to policing that might actually work. Over the past two decades, well-documented police-community coordination in major cities has been effective at reducing the number of black men killed by police, and even the share of black men engaged in violent behaviours.

Over the past decade, many police forces have begun to dramatically revamp their use of force and rethink citizen-interaction policies. Sometimes this has been prodded by federal intervention – particularly after the 2015 Department of Justice investigation into policing techniques in the troubled city of Ferguson, Missouri. As leading criminologists like David Kennedy and Thomas Abt have pointed out, police forces working with community groups have had success targeting a small number of the most ‘at risk’ men in high-crime neighbourhoods. The technique is simplicity itself: offer these potential offenders (and potential victims) strong positive incentives if they begin to turn their lives around, but harsh penalties if they do not.

Memorably, in the summer of 2020, the defunding movement proposed replacing police officers with social workers and community ‘violence disruptor’ groups. It was not entirely wrong about the role social workers can play as part of an anti-crime strategy. However, the activists failed to recognise that these groups cannot act independently of the police. Social workers, in particular, cannot effectively respond to serious situations of domestic or family violence alone – since most are young untrained women and these troubling cases often involve serious criminals armed with guns or knives. Independent ‘peace-makers’ are just tax-paying citizens – they have no access to the databases that police officers use to proactively interact with high-risk men, or any real ‘sticks’ to use to force compliance with the law. Social work and community activism can work only as an addition to better-funded and more proactive police departments, not as an alternative to them.

Other practical strategies for improving policing can work, too. As Maranto and I note, New York City – perhaps surprisingly one of the US’s very top police departments – simply fires all officers who pick up more than two or three verified citizen complaints, or demotes them to hated jobs, such as in the departmental motor pool. Maintaining a strong, well-funded Internal Affairs division, and even requiring officers to fill out an awkward 40-plus page report every time they unholster a firearm, have proven to be effective violence-reduction strategies as well. The prospect of bureaucratic tedium really can keep officers in check.

It is also clear what does not work to improve policing – the BLM-promoted strategy of reduced stop rates by lower-funded police departments. As Jason Johnson of the Law Enforcement Legal Defence Fund notes, when arrests recently plunged by 38 per cent in New York City, homicides rose 58 per cent – by more than 100. In Chicago, the equivalent figures were 53 per cent and 65 per cent. In Louisville, Kentucky, stops dropped by 35 per cent, arrests dropped by 42 per cent and murders rose 87 per cent. As Travis Campbell of the University of Massachusetts observes, the response of cities to major Black Lives Matter marches does appear to correlate with a slight decline in police shootings, but also with a remarkable surge of 1,000 to 6,000 more annual homicides nationally.

Given all this, what the horrific Tyre Nichols case reveals is not ‘black white supremacy’ but the flaws in the currently popular woke model of how to fix policing. Race doesn’t seem to have played a huge role in Nichols’ killing one way or another. More significant is the fact that the ‘hired from the hometown’ officers who allegedly beat Nichols to death were recruited under ‘dangerously lowered’ standards – two of those involved in Nichols’ death were sworn in back in August 2020, after Memphis Police Department had decided to attract more minorities by lowering education requirements. These lawmen were assigned to an almost irrationally aggressive anti-crime unit (called ‘SCORPION’), which was established precisely because crime had surged so much in Memphis – and everywhere else – following George Floyd’s killing and the Great Police Pullback. A decent man lost his life as a result.

We know what might save 10 or so ‘black lives’ every year from police shootings. And we know that these approaches might also protect a great many citizens from being knocked over the head with a brick by muggers. Yet too many on the left are happy to mouth inane ‘defund’ slogans and push dangerous policies. In doing so, they are harming the very people on whose behalf they claim to speak.

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The uptick in violence and deaths as a result of police pullback is also known as the "Ferguson Effect," and has been studied.

"BLM" is a brand name, not a mission statement. They don't own concern for black people any more than Xianity owns morality.

BLM's aims are ideological (and financial), not social. Defending what they do - and maybe even more importantly, what they don't do - with "what, you don't think black lives matter?" is as asinine and dishonest as saying, "what, you don't want to make America great again?" or "but it's a religion of peace!" The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is neither democratic nor for the people.

For the record, this is a bait-and-switch equivocaton and deception called the Motte and Bailey.

If black lives mattered to BLM, they'd be talking about things that matter to altering the trajectory of black lives that would benefit from those things: literacy and education, neighborhood crime (esp. black-on-black), young parenthood, fatherlessness, and vocational opportunities, especially those that aren't dependent on college.

There's no organization that cares more about black lives than police departments. They are putting themselves on the line every single day to try and protect the thousands of law-abiding, hard-working black residents of high-crime neighborhoods. And when the police back off, very predictably – we've seen this again and again after moments of mass hysteria about phony police racism – crime goes through the roof.

In 2020, after the George Floyd riots, you had the largest single increase in homicide in this nation's history: 29%. Everybody's celebrating now that crime is coming down, but it's coming down from an unprecedented high. So it's a little early to celebrate, as far as I'm concerned, when you still have these completely grotesque assaults that are going on in cities by drug-addicted, mentally ill people who should be in prison or in mental institutions.

But nevertheless, though crime remains at a completely unacceptable rate, the property crime, the assaults, there have been baby steps towards giving secret permission to the cops to try and be a little bit more proactive, to do a little bit more of the essential broken windows policfing. Nevertheless, there's a lot more that could be done.

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The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 – and possibly ever, according to provisional data from the CDC. (Final data is not expected to differ much from the provisional data.) There were 7.8 homicides for every 100,000 people in the United States in 2020, up from six homicides per 100,000 people the year before. The rise in the nation’s murder rate last year far exceeded the 20% increase measured in 2001, which was driven by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

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https://grokipedia.com/page/Broken_windows_theory

The broken windows theory is a criminological framework positing that visible cues of minor disorder—such as unrepaired vandalism, loitering, or public intoxication—erode community norms of order, signaling vulnerability and thereby fostering escalation to more serious criminal acts if left unaddressed. Formulated by political scientist James Q. Wilson and consultant George L. Kelling, the theory draws on an analogy: a building with one broken window, if not fixed, invites further breakage and neglect, ultimately leading to broader decay and opportunistic crime. It emphasizes proactive policing of low-level infractions to restore informal social controls, rather than reactive responses solely to felonies, arguing that disorder undermines residents' willingness to intervene and perpetuates a cycle of antisocial behavior.

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https://grokipedia.com/page/Ferguson_effect

Analyses of FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data by Heather Mac Donald documented sharp homicide increases in major cities following the 2014 Ferguson unrest and subsequent scrutiny of policing practices. In 2015, murders rose by over 50% in several cities with large black populations, including a 63% increase in Baltimore after the Freddie Gray incident amid broader de-policing, and significant upticks in Chicago and St. Louis, correlating temporally with reduced proactive enforcement inspired by Ferguson-related protests. These patterns persisted into 2016, with Chicago experiencing a 58% homicide surge, which Mac Donald attributed to officers' risk aversion under heightened public and media scrutiny rather than socioeconomic factors.

Empirical studies have drawn causal links between post-Ferguson scrutiny and crime via reduced police activity. A 2021 study by Cheng and Long examined St. Louis policing data, finding that after Michael Brown's 2014 death, self-initiated arrests fell 62%, foot patrols dropped 82%, and pedestrian checks declined 76%, persisting for over two years; this coincided with significant rises in homicides and aggravated assaults, particularly in high-minority neighborhoods reliant on prior proactive strategies. Across 60 large U.S. cities, the analysis showed that areas with higher black populations experienced steeper misdemeanor arrest declines and a 10% homicide increase, supporting deterrence-based mechanisms where de-policing disrupts crime prevention in vulnerable precincts.

Further causal evidence comes from Premkumar's 2020 analysis of 52 cities with high-profile police shootings versus controls, revealing that intense media scrutiny led to up to 33% drops in arrests for low-level offenses like marijuana possession, without declines in serious crime arrests, followed by 10-17% increases in murders and robberies. Effects were amplified in communities with greater awareness of incidents, yielding straightforward inferences of scrutiny-induced officer pullback driving violent crime upticks, distinct from unrelated trends. Disaggregated findings across these studies indicate the strongest impacts in high-minority districts with histories of intensive stop-and-frisk or broken-windows enforcement, where reduced discretionary policing removed key deterrents without socioeconomic confounders fully explaining the rises.

A 2020 NBER working paper by Tanaya Devi and Roland G. Fryer Jr. examined the impact of Department of Justice "pattern-or-practice" investigations following high-profile police incidents in five cities. The analysis found reductions in police arrests by approximately 5-10% and increases in violent crime by similar margins, attributing these outcomes to decreased proactive policing under heightened scrutiny.

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https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w27324.pdf

Abstract

This paper provides the first empirical examination of the impact of federal and state "Pattern-orPractice" investigations on crime and policing. For investigations that were not preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force, investigations, on average, led to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime. In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%. Other theories we test such as changes in community trust or the aggressiveness of consent decrees associated with investigations -- all contradict the data in important ways.

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