A Year After Ferguson Burned
When police do their jobs, the country is safer for everyone.
Ed. note: Please welcome our newest columnist, Kayleigh McEnany, who will be writing about law and politics from a conservative perspective.
“When the shootings are viewed, as they must be, in light of all the surrounding circumstances… as established by the credible physical evidence and eyewitness testimony, it was not unreasonable for Wilson to fire on Brown….”
With these words, President Obama’s Justice Department cleared Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But the clearance came four months too late. The consequences of summary justice had already been rendered: Ferguson burned, Wilson’s life ruined, and racial animosity stoked.
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This quiet absolution from the Justice Department proved too little too late. For the same Justice Department that cleared Wilson months earlier had hastily sent Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson, Missouri to “investigate” in the wake of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson. In hindsight, this hasty “investigation” into the Brown case was baseless, serving only to interfere in a state court’s jurisdiction and incriminate a police officer whose only transgression was lawful self-defense.
But this outcome was entirely predictable. Former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Andrew McCarthy had called this outcome three months prior to the Justice Department’s report:
Here is how the game works. Holder streams in behind a tragedy that [Al] Sharpton and [President] Obama have demagogued. He announces a civil-rights investigation. Eventually, he backs down from the threat of an indictment in the individual case… But, the attorney general is pleased to add, the original civil-rights probe of the non-crime has metastasized into a thoroughgoing civil-rights probe of the state or local police department’s training, practices, and . . . drumroll . . . institutional racism.
In other words, a grand jury’s decision with regard to an individual is used as a coy pretext for a wider investigation into a police department with little regard for the repercussions for the officer. In Ferguson, the consequence was clear: Summary justice and Obama’s Justice Department had rendered Wilson guilty in the court of public opinion. But hasty injustice was not the only consequence of Ferguson; the long-term repercussions or the so-called “Ferguson effect” would be evident only in hindsight.
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In August of this year, ten months after Ferguson, a New York Times front-page story reported on murder rates rising sharply in many cities. More than 30 cities have witnessed increased violence in 2015; Milwaukee, for instance, has seen a 76% increase in homicide from this time last year. “Urban bloodshed” has spilled across the nation from New York City to Baltimore to St. Louis and beyond.
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly had a simple explanation: “That’s the so-called Ferguson effect where cops are less reluctant to engage in proactive policing.”
Kelly was not alone in this assessment. FBI Director James Comey echoed Kelly in saying, “Far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year… and let’s be clear: far more people of color are being killed in America’s cities this year. And it’s not the cops doing the killing… 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….”
In September, Chicago saw its deadliest month since 2002, and Chicago Mayor and former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had a similar explanation: “Officers themselves were telling me about how the news over the last 15 months have impacted their instincts — do they stop, or do they keep driving? When I stop here, is it going to be my career on the line?… It is having an impact on the safety we want to see throughout the city of Chicago.”
Despite its former White House colleague acknowledging the lack of proactive police, the Obama administration continues to dismiss the Ferguson effect. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday, “While certainly there might be anecdotal evidence there… there’s no data to support” the Ferguson effect.
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On the contrary, there is ample statistical evidence to back the Ferguson effect. Arrests in St. Louis, not far from the events of Ferguson, dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown; accordingly, homicides rose by 47%. Likewise, in Baltimore, where the prosecution of officers in the Freddie Gray case was widely reported and preceded by protests, arrests fell by 56%; in mirror-image fashion, the murder rate rose by 56%.
In addition to the correlation between decreasing arrests and climbing murder rates is the volume of cities experiencing rising murder rates across the country. For years, the murder rate had been in decline in cities across the nation. In a startling reversal, only this year did dozens of cities begin to see a reverse trend—a sudden climb in murder rates.
Echoing the FBI Director, Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Chuck Rosenberg agrees that “there’s something to the Ferguson effect… I rely on the chiefs and the sheriffs who are saying that they have seen or heard behavioral changes among the men and women of their forces. The manifestation of it may be a reluctance to engage” with suspects.
And one can hardly blame police for being “reluctant to engage.” A Black Lives Matter group in Minnesota chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” hours after Texas Sherriff Deputy Darren Goforth was assassinated while filling up at a gas station. And a group in New York yelled “What do we want? Dead cops” just one week before two NYPD officers were executed in their patrol car.
Rather than shouting these provocations, perhaps the Black Lives Matter movement should heed the words of Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald: “Contrary to the claims of the ‘black lives matter’ movement, no government policy in the past quarter century has done more for urban reclamation than proactive policing.”
The fact is simple: when police do their jobs, the country is safer for everyone. It’s time to end the bloodthirsty quest to find and demonize the next Darren Wilson and start according police officers the respect they deserve.
Kayleigh McEnany is a conservative writer and commentator who appears regularly on Fox and CNN. She is currently in the third year of pursuing her J.D. at Harvard Law School. Kayleigh graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and also studied politics at Oxford University. You can reach her by email at Kayleigh@PoliticalProspect.com or follow her on Twitter: @kayleighmcenany.
