By Jack Dunphy
Monday, May 16, 2016
The murder rate is going up in many cities across the country,
the New York Times informs us, and
the experts are baffled. “Experts cannot agree on what to call a recent rise in
homicides,” says the Times, “much
less its cause, but new data on Friday that showed a sharp spike in homicide
rates in more than 20 cities rekindled debate over whether it was time for
alarm.”
One presumes these “experts” are a later generation of
those who told us, some 25 years ago, that the police were powerless to bring
down the appalling levels of violent crime seen in the country in the late
1980s and early ’90s. Crime is a function of the economy, they instructed, and
better policing will not change it. They were at a loss to explain how
committed, data-driven police work cut the violent crime numbers by 50 percent
or more since those grim years. In 1990, New York City saw a horrifying 2,245
murders; in 2014 the number was 328. Los Angeles hit the high-water mark for
murders in 1992, with 1,092; in 2014 there were 260.
Experts were unwilling to credit good police work with
these startling decreases. Now they are similarly blind to the fact that a
retreat by police is now leading to rising murder rates. The Times cited several possible
explanations for the increase in murders, including “the heroin epidemic, a
resurgence in gang violence, and economic factors in some cities,” but only FBI
director James Comey was willing to name the contributing factor that is
obvious to any cop working America’s inner cities: the “Ferguson effect.”
“There’s a perception,” Comey told reporters, “that
police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses
crime — the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group
of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’”
Predictably, the Obama administration pushed back. “The
White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said that the increase in homicides in
some cities was a concern,” reported the Times,
“and that the administration had already taken steps to address it, including a
roundup by the Marshals Service last year of some 8,000 fugitives.” And good
for the Marshals Service, but even as those fugitives are taken into custody,
the president is no less committed to releasing thousands of convicted felons
from prison.
It’s all really quite simple. Cops and criminals alike
are rational actors, weighing the potential risks and rewards of any
contemplated action. When police officers on the street spot someone whose
behavior is indicative of possible lawbreaking, they know that initiating a
stop carries the risk of an altercation that may not unfold in a manner
approved by cowardly superiors, rabble-rousing “community activists,” craven
politicians, or perhaps even the president. Against that risk he weighs the
benefits of driving on by and finishing his shift on time and in one piece, and
without having played the villain in some new YouTube sensation.
And as for that possible lawbreaker, he feels the
officer’s eyes on him as the police car slows in the street. But rather than
stop, it drives on by, allowing him to continue on his way and complete
whatever misdeeds he may have been considering. Multiply that scenario by the
hundreds and thousands across the country and you have the conditions we see
today in many cities: Crime is up, arrests are down.
The Ferguson effect is real. How many more people will
have to die before the “experts” come to realize it?
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