The Ferguson effect is undoubtedly being downplayed by the left. Heather Mac Donald has this piece in the City Journal addressing the way researchers have tried to obscure its existence. The subject of the piece is a recent paper published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and authored by four University of Colorado Boulder researchers and sociologist David Pyrooz, in which they "created a complex econometric model that analyzed monthly rates of change in crime rates in 81 U.S. cities with populations of 200,000 or more." Some of the their findings:
Mac Donald clarifies:The researchers found that in the 12 months before Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri--the event that catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement--major felony crime, averaged across all 81 cities, was going down. In the 12 months after Brown was shot, that aggregate drop in crime slowed down considerably. But that deceleration of the crime drop was not large enough to be deemed statistically significant, say the criminologists. Therefore, they conclude, "there is no systematic evidence of a Ferguson Effect on aggregate crime rates throughout the large U.S. cities . . . in this study."
[T]he existence of a Ferguson effect does not depend on its operating uniformly across the country in cities with very different demographics. When the researchers disaggregated crime trends by city, they found that the variance among those individual city trends had tripled after Ferguson. That is, before the Brown shooting, individual cities' crime rates tended to move downward together; after Ferguson, their crime rates were all over the map. Some cities had sharp increases in aggregate crime, while others continued their downward trajectory. The variance in homicide trends was even greater--nearly six times as large after Ferguson. And what cities had the largest post-Ferguson homicide surges? Precisely those that the Ferguson effect would predict: cities with high black populations, low white populations, and high preexisting rates of violent crime.
Even when the researchers admit that "the data offer preliminary support
for a Ferguson Effect on homicide rates in a few select cities in the
United States,"they refuse to accept the implications of those findings, claiming instead that those particular cities "had much higher
crime rates before Ferguson," which "in turn may have primed [those
cities] for increases in crime."
Mac Donald concludes:
Mac Donald concludes:
The Pyrooz article will undoubtedly become a standard artillery piece on the activist and academic left. You would think that the fact that the Ferguson effect has been most pronounced in black areas would be cause for concern among those who claim to represent black interests against a sea of racism and oppression. In 2015, homicides in the 50 largest cities rose nearly 17 percent, "the greatest increase in lethal violence in a quarter century," according to the Washington Post. The overwhelming majority of those additional victims were black. But the furious attempt to deny the Ferguson effect shows yet again that black lives seem to matter only when they are taken by police officers.
Leave a comment