Looking at Baltimore, Morgan and Pally stitched together their own working definition of “Ferguson Effect,” which they based their research on:
A Ferguson effect on crime in Baltimore would exist, by our reasoning, if the number of crime incidents recorded after the beginning of the Ferguson period differs from the number that would have been recorded if the events in Ferguson had not set off a shift in the national dialogue on policing.
Morgan and Pally found no such thing. They did find that:
Demarcating the post-Ferguson, pre-Gray period as the interval from August 11, 2014, through April 19, 2015, many categories of crime decreased slightly relative to the expected seasonal trend, such as homicide (down 3%), automobile theft (down 7%), common assault (down 13%), and larceny (down 12%). Other categories of crime were unchanged, such as street robbery and burglary.
Overall, it is unlikely that the full profile of change in recorded crime in this period reflects any substantial response to protest events in Ferguson, or a reaction to any other police conduct that received national press coverage before the arrest of Freddie Gray.”
That violent crime escalated after Gray’s arrest, death, and the subsequent riots is irrefutable, and Morgan and Pally explain that a “Gray Effect” may have overcome Baltimore. Crime did not drop in the months after the April 2015 Baltimore Uprising until a new acting police commissioner, Kevin Davis, was installed in August of that year, at which point Baltimore police began making arrests again. Still, the sociologists say that the dropoff in arrests in Baltimore after Gray’s death could have been caused by other things, such as police taking time off after working overtime during the uprising.
The Ferguson protests and the Baltimore uprising are important bookend events in Mac Donald’s worldview, as well. She sees them as the births of a movement that only has its heart set on ending police lives. As she wrote in her Wall St. Journal op-ed last May:
A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.
The U.S. Department of Justice urges caution about conducting this kind of criminal epidemiology in a report released just this week. Reads the Justice Department report, “Understanding Firearms Assaults against Law Enforcement Officers in the United States”:
To the extent that officers are already working in high crime areas, proactively focusing on highly prolific and violent offenders, and minimally engaging communities that are already distrustful, it follows that officers will be at increased risk of citizen-initiated violence against them. However, our study controlled for these factors and matched high- and low-risk agencies on population and homicide data over five years. We still find that firearms assaults [against police officers] are substantially higher in some cities, regardless of these contextual factors.