Still, the term “Ferguson Effect” has become a sort of Keyser Söze of criminology—a spook story that law-and-order authoritarians tell the white, working-class, downtrodden: Let these Black Lives Matter kids run amok, and the Ferguson Effect will take over your city. Pundits like Mac Donald want people to fear the “Ferguson Effect” whether it can be proven through facts or not.
And the facts are bountiful, even beyond Baltimore. Last month, in the Journal of Criminal Justice, another group of sociologists published results from their probe of 81 U.S. cities in search of the fabled “Ferguson Effect.” Looking at the time period since Brown’s killing in Ferguson, the only increase in serious crime they found was in robberies—a monthly increase of 0.12 robberies per capita. These aren’t crime waves. These are tiny, sporadic ripples.
“The finding that crime rates are essentially unchanged means that a ‘Ferguson effect’ cannot be be singled out as the driving factor of any increase in crime,“ said the study’s lead author David Pyrooz of the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Barry Latzer, an emeritus professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY and author of The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America (perhaps the most comprehensive book on the topic), addressed this last month on The Diane Rehm Show. Latzer is by no means a pure, left-leaning liberal. Yet, when he was asked about the “Ferguson Effect” on the show he said, “I’ve seen no evidence of this at all.”
I looked at violent crime in the 10 biggest cities in the United States, homicide in particular, from 2010 to 2015, and I looked at all the data for 2015. The FBI only has the first half of the year. I did not find any increase. The total homicides for the top 10 cities were about 2,229 in 2010, and in 2015, they were 1,878. So there’s no trend upward in violent crime. However, in some cities, obviously there is an uptick, and those cities could be a harbinger and may not be. We don’t have enough data for a trend yet.
… There was a study that just showed that crime rose —was low before the Ferguson incident and then rose afterwards. That’s not sufficient to prove that there’s a Ferguson effect.
If the word “Ferguson” was permanently and exclusively attached back to its original meaning, we might find evidence of an “effect” when it comes to a number of recent, inspiring events: the bringing down of Confederate monuments, the ousting of Chicago’s police chief, or the recent Chicago protests that forced Donald Trump to cancel a rally. Such events are more fitting of the “Ferguson Effect” tag, and they’re things that Black Lives Matter activists actually had a hand in. Anyone who tries to steal “Ferguson” to tie its meaning to rising crime is simply trying to distract people from the real, progressive effect that organizing since Ferguson has had on society.
Article Appeared @http://www.citylab.com/crime/2016/03/study-there-has-been-no-ferguson-effect-in-baltimore/473781/