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Thursday, July 21, 2016
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This piece is the third installment of a guest-blog series by Heather Mac Donald for the Washington Post's The Volokh Conspiracy
The most controversial aspect of my new book, “The War on Cops,” is my claim that violent crime is up in many American cities because officers are backing off of proactive policing. I have dubbed this double phenomenon of de-policing and the resulting crime increase the “Ferguson effect,” picking up on a phrase first used by St. Louis’s police chief.
Acknowledging the connection between de-policing and crime is unacceptable... to those who reject the idea that data-driven, proactive policing can lower crime.
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Violence began increasing in the second half of 2014, after two decades of decline. The Major Cities Chiefs Association convened an emergency session in August 2015 to discuss the double-digit surge in violent felonies besetting its member police departments.
The violence continued into fall 2015, prompting Attorney General Loretta Lynch to summon more than 100 police chiefs, mayors and federal prosecutors in another emergency meeting to strategize over the rising homicide rates.
Arrests, summonses and pedestrian stops were dropping in many cities, where data on such police activity were available. Arrests in St. Louis City and County, for example, fell by a third after the shooting of Michael Brown. Misdemeanor drug arrests fell by two-thirds in Baltimore through November 2015.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Lynch that his officers were going “fetal”: “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict,” he said. “They don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”
2015 closed with a 17 percent increase in homicides in the 56 largest cities, a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. Twelve cities with large black populations saw murders rise anywhere from 54 percent in the case of the District to 90 percent in Cleveland. Baltimore’s per capita murder rate was the highest in its history in 2015.
Robberies also surged in the 81 largest cities in the 12 months after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
In the first quarter of 2016, homicides were up 9 percent and non-fatal shootings up 21 percent in 63 large cities, according to a Major Cities Chiefs Association survey.
Chicago is a prime example of the Ferguson effect. Stops were down nearly 90 percent in the first part of this year compared with last year. Shootings citywide through July 17 were up 50 percent compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 87 percent compared with the same period in 2014. In Austin, on the West Side, shootings are up 220 percent compared with 2014. Through July 19, 2,234 people have been shot in the city, averaging one an hour during some weekends. Yesterday, a 6-year-old girl was seriously wounded in her abdomen while sitting on her porch, when a violent shoot-out between three cars broke out; she is one of at least 21 children younger than 13 shot so far this year, including a 3-year-old boy shot on Father’s Day who is now paralyzed for life.
The crime increase is real, driven by officer disengagement, and is resulting in more black lives being lost.
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(One would have assumed, pursuant to the Black Lives Matter narrative, that racist cops were responsible for a significant portion of those shootings, given that their victims have been overwhelmingly black. In fact, Chicago cops shot 11 people, all armed and dangerous, through July 19, comprising 0.5 percent of all shootings.)
This crime increase, I argue, is due to officers’ reluctance to engage in precisely the proactive policing that has come under relentless attack as racist. For the past two years...
Read the entire piece here at the Washington Post blog, The Volokh Conspiracy
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal.
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