The 'Ferguson Effect' is Back
The 'Ferguson Effect' is Back
The riots and police-hating rhetoric are killing black people, again.
Predictably, Friday's police shooting of a black man in Atlanta has already begun to amplify the police-hating rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and its allies. And that rhetoric, coupled with widespread demands for the defunding of police departments nationwide, will most definitely result in a massive increase in violent crime throughout urban America over the course of the next year or more. You can bet your life on that. How do we know this? We know it, with full certainty, because of the very clear and obvious precedent that was set just a few years back, under similar circumstances.
Between 2013 and 2015, a number of black criminal suspects who died in the course of highly publicized altercations with police officers joined the late Trayvon Martin as the latest martyred icons of the BLM movement. Prominent among these were Eric Garner (New York), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), Tamir Rice (Cleveland), Timothy Russell (Cleveland), Malissa Williams (Cleveland), and Freddie Gray (Baltimore). High-profile political leaders such as President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the mayors of the cities where the aforementioned deaths took place, routinely depicted race as a major underlying factor in those deaths.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for instance – explicitly exhorting New Yorkers to remember that “black lives matter” – lamented the “centuries of racism” whose legacy was, in his view, still influencing the actions of too many police officers. And in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, citing her desire “to reform my [police] department,” willfully “gave those [rioters] who wished to destroy, space to do that.”
In New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere in urban America, law-enforcement officers responded to the anti-police climate by becoming less proactive in apprehending criminals, particularly for low-level offenses. The Washington Post, for one, reported that by late 2015: “Arrests, summonses and pedestrian stops were dropping in many cities.... 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.”
First-hand accounts by police officers told the same story. As one officer in South Central Los Angeles explained, his colleagues were routinely “saying to each other: ‘If you get out of your [police] car, you’re crazy, unless there’s a radio call.’” And in Chicago, then-mayor Rahm Emanuel lamented that the members of his police force had gone “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.”
A 97-page Pew Research Center report titled “Behind the Badge” – which tabulated the results of a questionnaire that had been sent to nearly 8,000 officers in more than 100 police departments nationwide – confirmed the fact that police officers had become extremely reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary. For instance, the survey found that 95 percent of officers in large police departments, and 88 percent of those in smaller ones, were more worried about being harmed in the course of duty than they had been in the past; 85 percent of officers in large departments, and 63 percent of those in smaller ones, had become more reluctant to use force against criminal suspects when appropriate; and 86 percent of officers in large departments, and 54 percent of those in smaller ones, had become less likely to stop and question people who seemed suspicious.
These changes in policing practices led directly to a dramatic spike in urban violence – a phenomenon that Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald dubbed “The Ferguson Effect,” whose name derived from the August 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Some real-world examples of the Ferguson Effect included the following:
Between 2013 and 2015, a number of black criminal suspects who died in the course of highly publicized altercations with police officers joined the late Trayvon Martin as the latest martyred icons of the BLM movement. Prominent among these were Eric Garner (New York), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), Tamir Rice (Cleveland), Timothy Russell (Cleveland), Malissa Williams (Cleveland), and Freddie Gray (Baltimore). High-profile political leaders such as President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and the mayors of the cities where the aforementioned deaths took place, routinely depicted race as a major underlying factor in those deaths.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for instance – explicitly exhorting New Yorkers to remember that “black lives matter” – lamented the “centuries of racism” whose legacy was, in his view, still influencing the actions of too many police officers. And in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, citing her desire “to reform my [police] department,” willfully “gave those [rioters] who wished to destroy, space to do that.”
In New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere in urban America, law-enforcement officers responded to the anti-police climate by becoming less proactive in apprehending criminals, particularly for low-level offenses. The Washington Post, for one, reported that by late 2015: “Arrests, summonses and pedestrian stops were dropping in many cities.... 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.”
First-hand accounts by police officers told the same story. As one officer in South Central Los Angeles explained, his colleagues were routinely “saying to each other: ‘If you get out of your [police] car, you’re crazy, unless there’s a radio call.’” And in Chicago, then-mayor Rahm Emanuel lamented that the members of his police force had gone “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.”
A 97-page Pew Research Center report titled “Behind the Badge” – which tabulated the results of a questionnaire that had been sent to nearly 8,000 officers in more than 100 police departments nationwide – confirmed the fact that police officers had become extremely reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary. For instance, the survey found that 95 percent of officers in large police departments, and 88 percent of those in smaller ones, were more worried about being harmed in the course of duty than they had been in the past; 85 percent of officers in large departments, and 63 percent of those in smaller ones, had become more reluctant to use force against criminal suspects when appropriate; and 86 percent of officers in large departments, and 54 percent of those in smaller ones, had become less likely to stop and question people who seemed suspicious.
These changes in policing practices led directly to a dramatic spike in urban violence – a phenomenon that Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald dubbed “The Ferguson Effect,” whose name derived from the August 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Some real-world examples of the Ferguson Effect included the following:
- During the three months that immediately followed August 2014, homicides in St. Louis city, located just 12 miles from Ferguson, rose by 47%. Robberies in St. Louis County, meanwhile, increased by 82%.
- From January through May of 2015 in New York City, the incidence of murder was 20% higher than it had been during the first five months of 2014, and shooting incidents were up 9% as well. During those same five months in Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% compared to the same period in 2014. The corresponding figures for Los Angeles were a 23% rise in shootings and a 25% upturn in other violent crimes. And in Chicago, shootings were up 25% and homicides were up 18%.
- From January through March of 2015 in Houston, murders were up nearly 100% compared to the same period in 2014.
- Following the protests and riots sparked by the April 12, 2015 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, shootings in that city increased by more than 60% compared to the same period a year earlier. In May 2015, Baltimore recorded 43 murders—the most in any month since August 1972.
In 2015 overall, America’s 56 largest cities experienced a 17% rise in homicides. Twelve cities with large black populations saw their murder totals rise still more dramatically – e.g., by 54% in D.C., 60% in Newark, 72% in Milwaukee, 83% in Nashville, and 90% in Cleveland. “Robberies also surged in the 81 largest cities in the 12 months after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson,” reported the Washington Post. A report for the Justice Department characterized these broad trends as “nearly unprecedented.”
The nationwide spike in urban violence continued into 2016. During the first quarter of that year, homicides in America's 63 largest cities increased by 9%, while nonfatal shootings were up 21%. The situation in Chicago was particularly bad: From January through March of 2016, stops by police were down nearly 90% from a comparable time period in 2015, while shootings by civilians were up 50% over 2015, and up 87% compared with 2014. By the end of 2016, civilian-committed homicides had increased in 16 of the nation's 20 largest police departments, and most of the victims of those homicides were black.
After an 8-year period during which annual homicide totals for the U.S. as a whole had declined steeply and steadily from 17,309 in 2006 to 14,164 in 2014, the total suddenly skyrocketed to 15,883 in 2015 and 17,413 in 2016 – a 23% increase in just two years.
And now, as a result of the riots that have struck so many U.S. cities over the past two weeks – coupled with the relentless, incendiary denunciations directed toward police officers – we are already seeing exactly the same ominous trends in cities across America. As pastor Michael Pfleger observed in Chicago last Monday: “On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing.’ I sat and watched a store looted for over an hour. No police came. I got in my car and drove around to some other places getting looted [and] didn’t see police anywhere.” On another recent day, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot lamented: “The number of sites that have been up and run over by looters today is in the hundreds. Hundreds.... I’ve been on calls and text messages with people all day today who fought hard to bring economic development to areas of the city only to see the Walgreens, the CVS, the grocery store, everything vanished in an eyeblink.… It’s going to take a herculean effort to convince businesses not to disappear.”
On Sunday, May 31, the Chicago Police Department responded to 18 separate homicides, breaking the city's previous one-day record of 13, set 29 years ago. According to an ABC News report: “Between 6 p.m. on May 29 and 11:59 p.m. on May 31, Chicago police responded to at least 73 incidents in which 92 people were shot, including 27 who were killed.”
Similarly, in St. Louis during the weekend of June 6-7, no fewer than 21 people were shot, six fatally. Meanwhile, during the first week of June, homicides in Los Angeles were up 250% compared to the previous week, and the total number of gunshot victims was up 56%. And in New York City, there were 13 murders from June 1 through June 7 – as compared to just 5 during that same week last year.
As was the case when we saw the Ferguson Effect take its deadly toll on America's cities in 2015-16, a very large percentage of the current victims of ramped-up urban violence are, once again, black people. In other words, the very same people in whose name Black Lives Matter claims to be acting, are the ones who typically pay with their lives. This leaves us with only one very obvious conclusion: Black Lives Matter doesn't give a damn about black lives; it only cares about advancing its America-hating, revolutionary Marxist agenda. Period.
After an 8-year period during which annual homicide totals for the U.S. as a whole had declined steeply and steadily from 17,309 in 2006 to 14,164 in 2014, the total suddenly skyrocketed to 15,883 in 2015 and 17,413 in 2016 – a 23% increase in just two years.
And now, as a result of the riots that have struck so many U.S. cities over the past two weeks – coupled with the relentless, incendiary denunciations directed toward police officers – we are already seeing exactly the same ominous trends in cities across America. As pastor Michael Pfleger observed in Chicago last Monday: “On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing.’ I sat and watched a store looted for over an hour. No police came. I got in my car and drove around to some other places getting looted [and] didn’t see police anywhere.” On another recent day, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot lamented: “The number of sites that have been up and run over by looters today is in the hundreds. Hundreds.... I’ve been on calls and text messages with people all day today who fought hard to bring economic development to areas of the city only to see the Walgreens, the CVS, the grocery store, everything vanished in an eyeblink.… It’s going to take a herculean effort to convince businesses not to disappear.”
On Sunday, May 31, the Chicago Police Department responded to 18 separate homicides, breaking the city's previous one-day record of 13, set 29 years ago. According to an ABC News report: “Between 6 p.m. on May 29 and 11:59 p.m. on May 31, Chicago police responded to at least 73 incidents in which 92 people were shot, including 27 who were killed.”
Similarly, in St. Louis during the weekend of June 6-7, no fewer than 21 people were shot, six fatally. Meanwhile, during the first week of June, homicides in Los Angeles were up 250% compared to the previous week, and the total number of gunshot victims was up 56%. And in New York City, there were 13 murders from June 1 through June 7 – as compared to just 5 during that same week last year.
As was the case when we saw the Ferguson Effect take its deadly toll on America's cities in 2015-16, a very large percentage of the current victims of ramped-up urban violence are, once again, black people. In other words, the very same people in whose name Black Lives Matter claims to be acting, are the ones who typically pay with their lives. This leaves us with only one very obvious conclusion: Black Lives Matter doesn't give a damn about black lives; it only cares about advancing its America-hating, revolutionary Marxist agenda. Period.
Here Are the Heroes Whose Statues Black Lives Matter Has Attacked
Here Are the Heroes Whose Statues Black Lives Matter Has Attacked
War heroes, Founding Fathers, explorers, abolitionists, and a Scottish king.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, stands at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles. When the racist mobs swept through the area, looting Jewish stores and defacing synagogues with "BLM" and "Free Palestine" graffiti, the statue of a man who risked his life to resist fascism and bigotry was one of their targets.
The racists and leftists vandalizing statues across the world claim that they’re fighting hate, but their targets have often been the men and women who courageously stood up to racism and hatred.
When the statue of Churchill was vandalized in London, the thugs who did it went after the one man who had done the most to wake up the world to the threat of fascism. In Philadelphia, the thugs scrawled “murderer” and “colonizer” on a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist Matthias Baldwin and in Boston, they vandalized the ‘Glory’ monument of the African-American 54th Regiment.
In Washington D.C., the Lincoln Memorial and the National WW2 Memorial were both defaced.
This is not the work of anti-racists, but of racists. It’s not the work of anti-fascists, but of fascists.
While the media has upheld the racist narrative justifying the Taliban campaign against America by focusing on confederate memorials, the vandalism has been extensive, targeting both sides in the Civil War, and spilling over to vandalize statues that have absolutely no relevance to contemporary politics.
In Louisville, the statue of Louis XVI lost a hand and then was graffitied. Despite the French monarch having absolutely nothing to do with Floyd’s death, the statue was spray painted with "BLM", "We Will Win", and "George Floyde". If the ghost of the executed king had been hanging around Louisville, he would have been outraged and confused at being blamed for a dead man in Minneapolis.
But nobody ever accused Black Lives Matter of knowing any history beyond the 1619 Project.
In Scotland, a statue of Robert the Bruce was vandalized with the epithets “Racist King”, “BLM”, and “Robert was a racist bring down the statue”. Robert lived in the 13th century. He no doubt was very racist toward the Saxons, but It is unlikely that he had ever met a black person in Medieval Scotland.
Even more randomly, the ‘Waiting’ Statue in Harrisburg of a man reading a newspaper while waiting for a bus was covered in the red paint that the racist and leftist mobs have been using on statues. Apart from being a depiction of a fictional white man, it’s not at all clear what the statue did to deserve that.
Much like Nile Kinnick, the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner, who died in WW2, but was still vandalized.
Even minority statues didn't get a pass.
A memorial to three lynched black men was defaced in Duluth, Minnesota, to the outrage of the NAACP.
Statues of Gandhi were vandalized in New York City, Washington D.C., and London, in Bristol, England, a statue of a Jamaican playwright was covered in bleach, and in El Paso, Texas, a statue of Don Juan de Onate, a Spanish conquistador, was defaced with the message, "Your god is not my god."
The El Paso vandalism was one of a number of defacements that appeared to be motivated by religious bigotry which led to the targeting of primarily Catholic churches and Orthodox Jewish synagogues.
That included at least one statue.
In Wasco, California, St. John the Evangelist church, a mostly Latino congregation, announced on Facebook that, "Sadly somebody destroyed the statue of Sacred Heart last night."
The statue had been beheaded and had its arms chopped off.
The BLM attacks on the statues were not about fighting hate, but spreading it, defacing and defiling the values and memories that people hold dear in order to force them to kneel to its racial supremacism.
In Birmingham, Alabama, the racist thugs didn’t just go after confederate memorials, but the WW1 Doughboy memorial to the Birmingham boys who had gone off to fight in the fields of France and never returned which had been dedicated by the city’s Greek-American community. Another statue commemorating the American soldiers who had fought in the Spanish-American War was also defaced.
A statue honoring Thomas Jefferson was set on fire as the radical mob hooted and held up smartphones, but while a flame burned at the base, the great man appeared to be untouched.
In Missoula, Montana, a statue of a WW1 Doughboy was vandalized. In Pittsburgh, a WW1 memorial was defaced with a hammer and sickle to commemorate the deaths of Communist terrorists. The choice of message strongly suggests that this particular memorial vandalism had been carried out by Antifa.
Griffin's Veteran Memorial Park monuments in Atlanta were vandalized with "BLM" and "People over Property" slogans, and the Colorado Soldiers Monument was defaced in Denver.
Christopher Columbus, the bold explorer who paved the way for the settlement of the New World, was a particular target with statues of the great man vandalized in cities across the United States.
In Houston, a Columbus statue donated by the Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Greater Houston to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America had a hand chopped off, a noose placed around its neck, and the message, "Rip the head from your oppressor" taped to it.
In Miami, statues of Columbus and Ponce De Leon were defaced with "BLM", "George Floyd" and the hammer and sickle. Columbus statues were beheaded in Boston, spray painted in Pittsburgh, thrown into a lake in Richmond, and torn down in St. Paul. Camden and Wilmington, among other Democrat cities, took down statues of the great explorer on their own. Boston is likely to follow suit.
Wilmington also took down a statue of Caesar Rodney, one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A statue of General Philip Schuyler, a member of the Continental Congress, the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, was removed by Albany's Democrat mayor.
The monument to General Kosciuszko, a Polish national hero who had served as a colonel in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was vandalized with BLM graffiti in Washington D.C.
The statue of General Casimir Pulaski, who had fought for American independence, was also defaced.
In Boston, a statue of Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, was vandalized. Abigail had been a fervent opponent of slavery.
But it’s not just the American heroes of the past whom the un-American radicals and racists hate.
In Dover, Delaware, a memorial to fallen law enforcement officers was viciously vandalized. The statue of an officer kneeling before the list of the names of the fallen was attacked with an axe, and the state flags flying over their names were soaked in urine.
Memorials to fallen police officers were vandalized in Richmond, Virginia Beach, and Fort Worth.
"F__ the Police" was spray-painted on the California Peace Officers’ Memorial in Sacramento.
A memorial to Officer Robert Kozminski in Grand Rapids, Michigan who was killed while responding to a domestic dispute was defaced with the word, "Pig". And in Pittsburgh, a police memorial was defiled. The memorial is commemorated with the poem, "He answered the call, of himself he gave all, and a part of America died."
As every statue falls, is defiled, and disgraced, a part of America dies. When Democrats and even Republicans collude in the desecration and stand aside for the mob, a part of America dies.
The soul of a nation lies with its heroes. The radicals and racists tearing down our statues are out to destroy that soul. They want our heroes to be Karl Marx and Angela Davis, they want terrorists, totalitarians and criminals celebrated, and heroes, explorers, founders, officers and soldiers condemned.
They aren’t just coming for the “controversial” statues as the media likes to tell us.
They are coming for all the statues, for our entire history, for every great man and woman who sacrificed, strove, and struggled to move the course of human history forward by even one inch.
They are coming for America. And they intend to destroy it, one statue and one city after another.
When the history of this period is written, we will learn whether we had any heroes in our time.
Photo: PA Wire
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