After two decades of the most remarkable crime drop in U.S. history, law enforcement has come to this: "I'm deliberately not getting involved in things I would have in the 1990s and 2000s," an emergency-services officer in New York City tells me. "I won't get out of my car for a reasonable-suspicion stop; I will if there's a violent felony committed in my presence."
A virulent antipolice campaign over the past year--initially fueled by a since-discredited narrative about a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo.--has made police officers reluctant to do their jobs. The Black Lives Matter movement proclaims that the police are a lethal threat to blacks and that the criminal-justice system is pervaded by racial bias. The media amplify that message on an almost daily basis. Officers now worry about becoming the latest racist cop of the week, losing their job or being indicted if a good-faith encounter with a suspect goes awry or is merely distorted by an incomplete cellphone video.
With police so discouraged, violent crime has surged in at least 35 American cities this year. The alarming murder increase prompted an emergency meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association last month. Homicides were up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St. Louis, and 56% in Baltimore through mid-August, compared with the same period in 2014; murder was up 47% in Minneapolis and 36% in Houston through mid-July.
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America's Legal Order Begins to Fray
Heather MacDonald has this op-ed in the WSJ, subtitled "Amid the escalation of violent crime are signs of a breakdown of basic respect for law enforcement."
It is a bitter and tragic irony that blacks will disproportionately be the victims of our loss of nerve in confronting crime.
As I pointed out in my last entry, the homicide spike in nearby Washington, DC, has victimized primarily, or perhaps exclusively, black people. Nearly all of it could have been prevented had we use imprisonment rather than the supposedly just-as-safe-as alternatives to imprisonment.
An interesting response to the reports of a nationwide crime wave:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/scare-headlines-exaggerated-the-u-s-crime-wave/
There has been a dramatic increase in homicides in certain cities (Milwaukee and Baltimore, for example). There has been a drop in others (like Boston, down 43 percent). I'm suspicious of the clickbaity claim that the "legal order is fraying" when, on the whole, crime remains at an all-time low. Homicides in Milwaukee and St. Louis were going up before Michael Brown's shooting and the launch of the BLM movement, so it's hard to say that's responsible.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/09/04/the-crime-wave-in-u-s-cities-doesnt-show-up-in-the-data/
Moreover, MacDonald's piece relies almost entirely on anecdotes to support her view that police protests have led to increased crime against police. There are incidents every year where police are attacked or killed, but so far 2015 is shaping up to have a historically low total of police deaths by firearms. I have no doubt that there have been attacks on police motivated by animus towards law enforcement, but it's a far cry from a few isolated incidents to some kind of breakdown in the social order, as MacDonald would apparently have us believe is occurring.
- Victor
Kent largely answered these points in his next entry, when he said:
"There is a lag between policy and effect, a further lag between effect and official statistics, and a yet another lag between the availability of data and studies that provide a solid basis for an inference of causation. So all we have for now is preliminary information. Yet what we do know is not good."
When violent crime is up in 30 to 35 cities coast-to-coast -- in a way that has not been the case for years -- that cannot just be waved away.
The crime spike took off in the spring, with the Freddie Gray and BLM riots in Baltimore. A spike that began four or five months ago OF COURSE is not going to show up yet in the annual data collections. But if the major chiefs across the country are concerned with it, which they are, then (a) it exits, and (b) we need to be concerned with it, too.
P.S. I would respectfully submit that the chiefs can take a better pulse of crime than Wonkblog.