The problem is hashtags man. Hashtags!
CNN wants you to know that, according to
Wolf Blitzer:
Cities across the country are reeling from a dramatic spike in crime...
Also, the director of the FBI, James Comey has a theory about this. It's the racist theory that's been sloshing around conservative and law enforcement circles, trying to undermine the #blacklivesmatter movement and the public's general call for accountability on the part of our country's law enforcement. It's called the "Ferguson Effect." If you don't know what it is, the theory goes like this—it's black people's fault.
The crime spike is showing up in a variety of cities big and small, while others have avoided the same. Cleveland and Milwaukee have blown past the number of murders reported in 2014, with more than two months left in the year. Dallas and Tampa in recent weeks were on pace to surpass 2014 murder totals. Meanwhile, other cities, including New York, haven't seen similar increases.
At the same time, a number of high-profile police shooting incidents, many caught on ubiquitous camera phones, have given rise to protests over policing tactics that critics call heavy-handed. In some cities, police officers privately report holding back on making stops for fear of ending up the next YouTube "bad cop" sensation. They call it the Ferguson effect.
Oh, my fault, the theory is more ... police can't do their job when people hold them accountable for doing their job. Totally makes sense. Bernard Harcourt over at the Guardian said it best—
four months ago:
The causal link underlying the “Ferguson effect” is unfounded, as any honest social scientist will tell you. Given the complexity of identifying short-term crime trends and of determining reliable causal antecedents – even with decades of hindsight and troves of big data, which is certainly not the case here – the idea that we could observe a “Ferguson effect” on crime today is preposterous. One need only glance at the voluminous scientific controversy surrounding the massive crime drop since the early 1990s in the United States and Canada to understand this perfectly.
The point of the “Ferguson effect,” though, is not to be accurate. It is instead to distract us from the growing evidence about the magnitude and extent of police use of lethal violence in the United States – as powerfully documented just this week by The Guardian and the Washington Post – and to besmirch the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
James Comey spoke at his alma mater, the University of Chicago,
late last week:
"In today's YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns?" he asked in his Friday remarks. "I don't know whether this explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year. And that wind is surely changing behavior."
That was a stupid thing to say and clearly the Obama administration told him as much as he tried to be more ambiguous with his bewilderment as to why everyone was so angry with law enforcement.
He urged police chiefs to help the FBI gather better data about of officer-involved shootings and other use-of-force incidents.
"We need to figure out what's happening," Comey said, adding that he also wants data on assaults on cops.
I have some data from Comey's own website that can help him with the latter. It comes up with the Google search
"assaults on cops stats." It was tough to find. Interesting story—when you try to Google "police assaults on citizens stats" you know what you get? The same fucking link to the FBI's page on statistics of police officers being assaulted. Everything about the concept "Ferguson effect" is
drenched in bullshit:
Applying the “Ferguson Effect” to New York City is hard to do, for example, since the police slowdown following Eric Garner protests did not have a negative impact on the city’s crime rate, according to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. After two officers were killed during the weeks of demonstrations, the NYPD staged its own protest by refusing to arrest people for petty crimes. Many thought the move would prompt chaos, but crime actually dropped in every borough.
Let's call that the "reality effect." You can watch FBI Director James Comey stretch the boundaries of reason below the fold.