Ferguson effect

Not to be confused with Ferguson reflex.

The Ferguson effect is a term referring to what its proponents claim is a causal link to increases in crime rates in a number of major U.S. cities, due to police forces being subject to heightened levels of scrutiny. The term has been criticized by some academics and politicians, including President Barack Obama.

Origin

The term was coined by Sam Dotson, the chief of the St. Louis Police Department, in a 2014 column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dotson said in the column that, after the protests in Ferguson caused by the shooting of Michael Brown that August, his officers had been hesitant to enforce the law due to fears of being charged, and that "the criminal element is feeling empowered" as a result.

Promotion

The term "Ferguson effect" became popular after Heather Mac Donald used it in a May 29, 2015, Wall Street Journal op-ed. The op-ed claimed that the rise in crime rates in some U.S. cities was due to "agitation" against police forces. She further stated that "Unless the demonisation of law enforcement ends, the liberating gains in urban safety will be lost," and quoted a number of police officers as saying police morale was at an all-time low. The term has also been used by James Comey, director of the FBI, and Chuck Rosenberg, director of the DEA. In 2015, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, suggested that nationwide backlash against police brutality had led to officers disengaging, which, in turn, had led to violent crime increasing.

In May of 2016, The Director of the FBI, James Comey used the term "viral video effect" when commenting on significant increases in homicide rates in many large US cities in the first half of the year. Comey specifically singled out the cities of Chicago and Las Vegas. In Chicago, murders were up 54 percent from 2015 and shootings were up by 70 percent.

Professor of Criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and past President of the American Society of Criminology, Richard Rosenfeld's research was formerly used as a primary tool for debunking of the Ferguson Effect. In May of 2016, Rosenfeld conceded that after a deeper analysis of the data from 2015 that "some version" of the Ferguson Effect may be real. Rosenfeld further commented that “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase. We need to figure out why it happened. The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.

Criticism

Law enforcement and politicians

William Bratton, the New York City Police Commissioner, has said he has seen no evidence of a "Ferguson effect" in his city. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch testified before Congress on November 17, 2015, that there was "no data" to support claims that the Ferguson effect existed. According to Slate, Ronald L. Davis, a former police chief and the executive director of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, testified at the same hearing that the notion that police would fail to do their jobs because they were scared was "an insult to the profession". President Obama also said in a 2015 speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police that although gun violence and homicides had spiked in some U.S. cities, "so far at least across the nation, the data shows that we are still enjoying historically low rates of violent crime", and "What we can’t do is cherry-pick data or use anecdotal evidence to drive policy or to feed political agendas." In December 2015, Edward A. Flynn, police chief of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said that although police were unnerved due to anti-police protests, this was not solely responsible for the increase in violent crime observed in his city recently, because rates of such crimes there started increasing before Michael Brown was shot.

Academia

Some researchers have said that there is little evidence of a crime wave in the United States; for example, law professor Franklin Zimring told NBC News in 2015 that "I don't think there's a trend" in recent nationwide crime rates. Jeffery Ulmer, associate head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Penn State University, has said that although the Ferguson effect is possible, he does not consider it likely nationwide. George Ciccariello-Maher, a political scientist at Drexel University, has said that the Ferguson effect consists of two components: people challenging and publicly confronting police, and the notion that "when people know their rights, they become dangerous criminals.” Although he acknowledges that the first component has been observed in recent years, he says the second component is "utterly absurd".

Reports and studies

A June 2015 report by the Sentencing Project on the Ferguson effect found that "there is no credible and comprehensive evidence about any such effect." A November 2015 report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that although killings and overall lawlessness were increasing in some U.S. cities, nationwide crime rates were still decreasing, and predicted that crime rates would decrease by 1.5% from 2014 to 2015.

A 2015 study looked at a possible "Ferguson effect" not on crime, but on police willingness to partner with communities. The study found that officers who felt their agency was fair or were confident of their own authority were more likely to partner with their communities, "regardless of the effects of negative publicity".

A February 2016 University of Colorado Boulder study looked at crime statistics from 81 U.S. cities and found no evidence of a Ferguson effect with respect to overall, violent, or property crime, but did identify an increase in robbery rates after the shooting of Michael Brown (while these rates had been decreasing before this shooting). A March 2016 study by Johns Hopkins University researchers Stephen L. Morgan and Joel Pally found that after Brown was shot, rates of many types of crimes in Baltimore decreased relative to what had been expected, while others (such as robbery and burglary) remained unchanged.