Cause and Effect

Jack Dunphy wrote a follow up to the article we covered the other day in this post. In it, he takes on the "Ferguson Effect:"

• Do you still think there’s no such thing as the “Ferguson effect”? What about the “war on cops”--is that a myth, too? Crime is going down, we are reassured by Politifact, which gave Donald Trump’s assertion to the contrary earlier this month the “Pants on Fire” classification, its lowest rating. “Donald Trump said, ‘Crime is rising,’” said the Politifact headline. “It’s not (and hasn’t been for decades.” And just above that headline was the Politifact logo, which everywhere it appears boasts, “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.”
  
  Yes, says Politifact, we have won journalism’s most prestigious award (whatever that’s worth these days), while Donald Trump is . . . Donald Trump, so only a fool would give credence to his claims over ours.
  
  Or maybe not. Our friends at the American Enterprise Institute took the trouble to practice a bit of journalism and give those Pulitzer Prize winners some schooling. “There’s a big problem with their conclusion,” says AEI, “Politifact just stopped looking at data in 2014.”

Gee, what happened in 2014 that might have caused crime to rise?

• So let’s look back to that year. Did something happen that might have influenced crime? Was there some event or series of events that caused America’s police officers to lose heart and slow down their efforts in combatting crime? On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in Staten Island after struggling with NYPD officers trying to arrest him for selling cigarettes. Less than a month later, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo., after committing a robbery and attempting to disarm a police officer. And out of those deaths arose the Black Lives Matter movement, whose members have since been peddling the lie that the ills of America’s inner cities can be blamed on a racist criminal justice system and the “prison-industrial complex,” which depends on racist police officers to feed helpless and blameless blacks into its gaping, insatiable maw.
  
  The media bought it, over-educated elites bought it, and of course politicians bought it, from local rabble-rousers right up to the Rabble-Rouser in Chief. All of them engaged in a shameful campaign of disinformation intended to distract from the genuine problem of black crime. And as a result, more black lives have been and will continue to be lost before this trend is reversed.

Go read the entire article - we've borrowed enough here to pique your interest. He does a helluva number on the state of policing under the "progressive" agenda.