How much do black lives matter to @BlackLivesMatter, anyway? (Pt. 2)
Disregard of the "Ferguson Effect" has cost many black lives.
The thesis of this series of articles is that @BlackLivesMatter knowingly embarked on a course of action that they had every reason to believe would cost more black lives than what they were protesting against. In Part One, I argued that @BlackLivesMatter had every reason to believe that mass protest gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic would cost far more lives of black Americans than those that are taken by the wrongful actions of the police.
But that is only one way that @BlackLivesMatter unnecessarily invited death upon the very black Americans that they purport to defend and protect. In this installment, I will talk about another way: a very significant rise in violent crime, especially homicide.
According to the CDC homicide is currently the leading cause of death for black males of ages 1-44. In 2019 7,485 black Americans were murdered. By way of comparison, 5,787 white Americans were murdered — and blacks make up only about 13.4% of the U.S. population. So that’s where we are starting from: that’s what passes in America for “a good year”, as far as black lives are concerned.
The homicide numbers have, I believe, been dropping slowly and steadily for many years. It is not necessarily clear that this is entirely due to a decrease in violent crime. Some of it is probably due to the advance of medical technology, and especially advances in the medical technology available to first responders. In other words, gunshot wounds and other trauma are simply not as lethal as they were, say, thirty years ago. I’m not sure anyone has done a really good job of figuring out how much of the gradual decline in homicides can be chalked up to this, versus an actual decline in violent behavior.
That said, the rate of homicide has been slowly and steadily dropping for many years, and it dropped further in many US cities in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as cities across the country imposed stay-at-home orders.
For example, in the first quarter of 2020 New York City reported a 10.7% year-over-year drop in homicides. Los Angeles reported a 9.73% drop in violent crime and a 21% drop in homicides between mid-March and mid-April. Washington and Baltimore both saw an 8% drop in violent crime.
These drops were not universal. Chicago, for example, already had a 13% increase in homicide in the first quarter. Austin and Nashville saw small rises in violent crime. But in most places in the first few months of the 2020 the rate of violent crime was lower than in 2019.
Then, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, @BlackLivesMatter protests turned into the worst riots seen since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. (The Los Angeles riots were probably worse in terms of direct property damage and certainly were worse in terms of loss of life; on the other hand the @BlackLivesMatter riots were not confined to Los Angeles County.) There were calls to defund and even abolish police. In a number of cities these calls were welcomed by local politicians: the Minneapolis City Council resolved to disband the city’s police department entirely (though this effort eventually collapsed).
Many warned of what is known as the “Ferguson effect”, which is a hypothesis named for the increase in violence in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. It “refers to an increase in violent crime rates in a community caused by reduced proactive policing due to the community's distrust and hostility towards police.”
A lot of ink was spent in July and August of 2020 in attempts to minimize, debunk, or reinterpret the Ferguson Effect. But just as the hypothesis predicts, when faced with nationwide protests and media criticism, the police pulled back. Criminals became emboldened, and crime rates immediately jumped. This includes especially violent crime rates and rates of homicide.
New York City (which had reported a 10.7% drop in homicides in the first quarter of the year) reported a 130% year-to-year increase in the number of shootings in June. Los Angeles reported homicides up 250% in the first week of June. Chicago went from a first-quarter increase of 13% to an increase of 78% in June 2020. On August 6th, the US News and World Report reported that an allegedly non-partisan thin tank, the Council of Criminal Justice, “found that homicides increased by 37% in 20 large cities from late May through the end of June.” Over a month before, on July 11 the Wall Street Journal reported:
Law-enforcement officials in several large U.S. cities are wrestling with a sharp rise in violent crime amid a national debate over the role of police, calls to reduce police-department budgets and growing fiscal troubles.
The main takeaway here is that violent crime and homicides were generally lower before the @BlackLivesMatter protests, and that both massively increased in the month of June, the first full month after the protests began. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, perhaps. But what else was going on in June that could possibly explain such a sudden jump? It is well known that crime rates rise in summer - but we are talking about a usual increase of around 12%. It is hard to see this explaining the massive leaps in June 2020.
So where are we now?
As of December 20th, 2020 there were 80 homicides in Minneapolis, a 63% increase from the previous year in which there were 49. As of December 24th, 2020 there were 272 homicides in Miami, a 31% increase over 2019. Chicago ended the year with 769 homicides, a 55% increase. New York City saw a 40% increase before year’s end. Houston saw at least a 42% increase.
Now, since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests aimed to address the wrongful killing of black Americans by the police, let’s revisit what I wrote in Part One:
How many unarmed black people are killed by police in a given year? It’s basically impossible to be exact. I believe the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings indicates the number of such shootings is usually around 10-20 per year. Of course, not all police killings are shootings. But I think it is reasonable to assume that the number of unarmed black people killed by police per year in the United States is in the tens, not the hundreds.
Further, many if not most of these are not clear-cut cases of wrongful death. In many cases the person is violently resisting arrest, and there is no surefire, 100% non-lethal way of subduing a person who is actively resisting. There can also be legitimate uncertainty about whether a suspect is armed, and just like the rest of us the police may justifiably kill in self-defense.
Hence, I think it would be generous to assume an average of twenty cases a year of wrongful death by police against unarmed black Americans.
In 2019, 7,485 black Americans were murdered. A one percent increase in homicide of black Americans means 75 more black Americans are killed. A ten percent increase means 750 more black Americans are killed. In other words a ten percent increase is probably 37.5 times the number of unarmed black Americans killed by the police. National homicide numbers probably will not be available for a while yet, but given the numbers coming out of major cities in the U.S., I am confident that a ten percent increase is a lower bound. It’s probably a lot worse.
The leadership of @BlackLivesMatter surely knew about the “Ferguson Effect”. After all, Black Lives Matter achieved national prominence in the aftermath of the shooting death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson Missouri. It’s easy enough to “do the math” (i.e. a one percent increase in homicide of black Americans means 75 more black Americans are killed). So what is the moral calculus behind a full-on attack on the police?
@BlackLivesMatter did not content themselves with calls for specific police reforms. Instead they consistently called for “defunding” or even “abolishing” the police. "ACAB” (“All Cops Are Bastards”) was their graffiti de rigeur. At every turn, the movement characterized cops as racist monsters. Throughout six months of protests they tried to provoke the police into overreaction; they continually invited police brutality, hoping to catch it on video that they could upload to the Internet.
Now, I do not want to be entirely unfair. I have seen a few instances where some @BlackLivesMatter protesters acted to restrain those in their midst who were behaving badly. This is why I am willing to believe that many people who attended these protests were acting in good faith; that they generally wanted good outcomes for black Americans — hell, for all Americans.
But the leaders of the @BlackLivesMatter movement should damn well have been sensitive to the Pandora’s Box that they were opening.
They should have targeted specific police reforms, instead of demonizing the entire profession. They should have discouraged the “ACAB” graffiti, and the chants of “Pigs must die!”. They should not have tolerated absurd calls for the abolition of the police. They should have followed Martin Luther King in not holding protests at night. (This rough-cut measure prevents a lot of violence and criminal activity.) They should have called off protests once they turned violent.
In most places they did none of these things.
In some places local organizers did better. A friend of mine pointed out that the @BlackLivesMatter organizers in Raleigh, North Carolina did a pretty decent job of minimizing protest violence. Fair enough. But in most major cities they did a terrible job.
In the end, @BlackLivesMatter protests triggered a huge increase in the number of homicides nationwide. I am supremely confident that the number of black lives to increased homicides is far greater than the number that are lost due to what @BlackLivesMatter protests against.
We have already talked about the black lives that are likely lost to COVID-19 as a result of the @BlackLivesMatter protests. But we are still not done with the ways that @BlackLivesMatter undermined their own nominal goals. Next we will talk about the likely economic impact on black Americans.
Until then . . .
Be seeing you,
Gideon Fell