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This week, in response to the FBI’s latest release of crime data showing that murders spiked across the country last year, many national news outletspublished articles and opinion pieces suggesting the uptick was due, in part, to backlash over last summer’s protests against police violence.
There’s a name for this line of thinking: the Ferguson effect. It’s a criminological theory with a nasty half-life. After Michael Brown was killed by the Ferguson Police Department in 2014, law enforcement and criminologists falsely claimed that homicide rate increases could be attributed to police withdrawing from their duties after receiving public criticism and policy pushback for their brutal violence. Years after the theory was debunked, the idea persists under different names: “de-policing” or “police pullback.” Apply some light scrutiny to this widely cited theory, and it quickly falls apart.
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