The “Ferguson Effect” campaign has been determined by criminologists across the board to be at best a premature rendering of a small timeline of rising crime in a few cities, and at worst an overblown statistical fluke. The Brennan Center for Justice and The Sentencing Project have both provided data indicating that there are only a handful of cities that experienced a rise in violent crime over the past two years. Baltimore is one of those cities. Given that 2015 was a record-setting year for homicides there, the city can’t be overlooked in debates over whether violence is escalating. But can Baltimore’s homicides be attributed to the so-called “Ferguson Effect”?
The evidence for that kind of attribution is “very weak,” according to a study released Tuesday by the Johns Hopkins University sociologists Stephen L. Morgan and Joel A. Pally. Between August 2014 (when Brown was killed and the Ferguson riots erupted) and April 2015 (when Freddie Gray died in Baltimore while in police custody), most violent crime in Baltimore actually decreased, the researchers found.
What also dropped were arrests: Baltimore police made 19 percent fewer arrests during that time period than they did in the same period the prior year. This was mostly true for minor crimes like disorderly conduct and prostitution, where police can use discretion on whether to make arrests. Arrests for more serious crimes like homicide, however, barely changed during this time period, according to Morgan’s and Pally’s research
“People looking for a Ferguson effect tend to look in the wrong place,” said Morgan in a press statement for the study. “They look at crime rates, but if there is a Ferguson effect, it should be observed in the behavior of the police. People should have been looking at arrests all along.”
That’s definitely not been true of Heather Mac Donald, author of the book Are Cops Racist? and perhaps the loudest drum major for the “Ferguson Effect.” In a Wall St. Journal op-ed last May, Mac Donald wrote that, “The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments,” after the Ferguson protests. On January 13, Mac Donald wrote in an L.A. Times op-ed that, “The likeliest reason for the crime surge is what I and others call the Ferguson effect: Officers are backing off proactive policing, and criminals are emboldened.”