This article was published at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, June 5, 2015:
Deputy Matt, a pseudonym for a beat cop in a city 1,600 miles away from Ferguson, Missouri, told how he learned about the “Ferguson Effect”:
I’m a cop. A few weeks ago, two of my beat partners and I were called to an apartment in a fairly nice complex to help a mother and father with their 16-year-old son.
The son had no criminal history, and by all accounts was a decent kid. But he was having some problems at home — breaking things and making threats with a knife — and the parents needed our help.
When we finally located the son … he instantly began cussing and yelling at us. He took a fighting stance and said he was not going to do anything we told him.
Luckily, we were able to calm him down and get him into handcuffs without any blows being thrown.
We asked why he was so hostile toward us. His response? Ferguson.
Ferguson is now being used, not only by the criminal element but by an increasing number of middle class agitators, as justification for attacks on police officers. Wrote Deputy Matt:
“Ferguson” has become the latest defense for committing crime, often invoked by people we arrest and their loved ones. Sadly, this feeling has not only infected the normal criminal element that I expect that behavior from, but even seems to be affecting middle-class families.
He thought he knew the cause: the media taking every shooting of a black male by a white police officer and turning it into a circus, declaring judgment before all the facts were known. Wrote Matt: “What does it say about the media who make a victim out of a criminal, and ignore the good guys being injured and killed trying to keep society safe?”
Last November, when St. Louis city police chief Sam Dotson decried the huge spike in violent crime following the death of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in nearby Ferguson on August 9, 2014, he called it the “Ferguson Effect”: the neutering of police morale and the consequent reduction in their effectiveness in doing their job of keeping the peace, while at the same time encouraging criminals to seize the opportunity to wreak havoc in their neighborhoods. As Dotson put it, the “Ferguson Effect … [can be seen] not only on the law enforcement side, but the criminal element is feeling empowered by the [new] environment [as well].”
Since November the results are in: crime is up in nearly every big city in the country, in some cases catastrophically so. As Heather Mac Donald, author of “Are Cops Racist?” and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, noted in the Wall Street Journal last week, there’s a “new nationwide crime wave” now infecting most of the nation’s 10 largest cities:
- Baltimore: gun violence up more than 60 percent compared with this time last year;
- Milwaukee: homicides up more than 180 percent by the middle of May compared to the same period last year;
- Louis: shootings up 39 percent, robberies up 43 percent, homicides up 25%;
- Atlanta: murders up 32 percent as of mid-May;
- Chicago: shootings up 25 percent, homicides up 17 percent;
- Los Angeles: violent felonies up 25 percent;
- New York City: murders up 13 percent, gun violence up 7 percent.
She too blames it on the media:
The airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest … have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police.
Murders of officers jumped 89 percent in 2014….
She was unrelenting in her attack on the White House’s propaganda arm:
The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force.
And when there is such an incident the media blows it all out of proportion, in accordance with its agenda:
Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice.
All of which is consistent with the goals of the Cloward-Piven strategy: to bring the joys of total government to the once-free United States of America. Largely dismissed by Wikipedia as merely an attempt to overload the welfare system in order to instigate change, it is better explained as “a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis”:
The crisis: White police beating up on blacks without cause.
The solution: Remove peace-keeping responsibilities from local police and turn them over to the federal government.
The means: a friendly media all too happy to provide the daily grist.
That is why police morale has resulted in “work slowdowns” where “window breaking” by thugs is ignored, to avoid a confrontation that might cost a peace officer his job, his career, perhaps even his life. In the months following the death in Baltimore in April of Freddie Gray while in police custody, arrests dropped by one-third, giving criminals the opportunity to expand their behaviors without consequence.
According to Deputy Matt, the change in attitude towards him and his fellows on the beat is palpable:
The same people whom we used to count on for support, the good, law-abiding general public, are now reluctant to trust us. We, the local cops they’ve seen and contacted in the past, haven’t changed. We’ve done nothing differently.
What’s changed is the public’s perception of us, created by the reckless reporting by nearly every news outlet….
Deputy Matt gives the media an undeserved pass for their behavior:
The rush to be first with the story over the desire to be correct is having dire consequences nationwide, and quite honestly has made my job more difficult and more dangerous.
The result is as intended, nevertheless: local police cannot be trusted. The job of public safety must be turned over to the federal government. The media are just helping to set the stage with its biased reporting.
——————————
Sources:
The Wall Street Journal: The New Nationwide Crime Wave
Breitbart.com: ‘Ferguson Effect’: New Crime Wave Hits Democrat-Run Cities
British Daily Mail: ‘Ferguson Effect’: Commentators claim ‘criminals are feeling empowered’ as police back off after months of protest and violent crime rises
NBC News: As Violence Spikes in Some Cities, Is ‘Ferguson Effect’ to Blame?
The New York Post: The Ferguson effect: A cop’s-eye view from Deputy Matt
Crime up after Ferguson and more police needed, top St. Louis area chiefs say
Simplistic background on the Cloward-Piven strategy
More accurate and complete background on the Cloward-Piven strategy
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