AT- Ferguson Affect

AT- Macdonald
High Levels of Crimes in cities like Baltimore are due minorities
pre-existing relationship with police officers
Friedersdorf 15 [Conor Friedersdorf, 6-27-2015, "'It's Time for Good Cops to Do Something About Bad
Cops'," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/its-time-for-good-cops-to-do-something-aboutbad-cops/396890/
Heres an alternative theory. Todays relationship between the Baltimore police department and the citys black
residents was determined by neither Obama Administration statements nor New York Times editorials nor liberal
hashtag activists. Rather, it was determined by years of interactions between residents of black neighborhoodsthe
law-abiding majority and a criminal minority alikeand Baltimore police officers, including many who behaved like
thugs (and many more forced into the impossible position of being asked to wage an unwinnablewar on drugs).

conservatives are happy to acknowledge Baltimores criminals

but ignore the part of local police culture that is thuggish,brutal and lawless
because it is incompatible with how they want people to think of authority.
Yet their silence is not hiding anything. Local mistrust of and antagonism toward Baltimore
Law-and-order

police isnt rooted in the national conversation. It is rooted in the fact that Baltimore police officers unlawfully
stopped and arrested a 25-year-old black man from the neighborhood, tossed him in the back of a van, failed to belt
him, and killed him with allegedly felonious acts. Actually, its much more than that. Had the treatment of Freddie
Gray been unusual, his killing at the hands of Baltimore police officers most likely wouldnt have sparked a day and

Baltimore cops had been abusing residents in just that way for
years. In Baltimore police culture, cops practiced rough rides, failing to put seat
belts on arrestees and then deliberately driving in a way intended to
injure them. And many others within the police department failed to stop their colleagues for doing so.
Rough rides were far from the only kind of abuse. Ten days before the riot, hundreds of
Baltimore residents gathered to air grievances over years of harassment,
beatings and other mistreatment they say they have endured from city police,
night of riots. But many

the Baltimore Sun reported. They turned out for a meeting convened by the Department of Justice to investigate,

When a former San Jose, California,

police chief hired to lead the meeting told the crowd he wanted to know whether they
trust the city's police, a woman shouted No. From that point on, dozens of residents
at the city's request, complaints about Baltimore's Police Department.

most of them blackinundated federal officials with their assertions that city police have been brutalizing residents
with impunity. Why do law-and-order conservatives almost totally ignore this key factor ?

Hundreds of
black people gathered to beg help from federal law enforcement,
complaining that local police are brutalizing them with impunity, and prominent
law-and-order conservatives want to blame antagonism toward cops on Al Sharpton? That is myopia. Over
the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or
settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil-rights violations,
the Baltimore Sun reported in a 2014 article that went on to detail some of the victims of brutality: ...a 15-year-old
boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling
church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her
wounded grandson. Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who
suffered broken bones jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming
during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.

Baltimore is a city where, in the recent past, the FBI caught 51 municipal police
officers in a scheme that resulted in at least 12 extortion convictions. And
law-and-order conservatives fault police reformers for the low esteem in which cops are held? Just this week,

Michael

A. Wood, a 14-year veteran of the Baltimore police department who

retired as a sergeant in 2014, took to Twitter to post several alarming examples of corrupt policing that, he

wrote, I've seen & participated in. They include the following: A detective
slapping a completely innocent female in the face for bumping into him,
coming out of a corner chicken store. Kicking a handcuffed, face down, suspect in the face,
after a foot chase. CCTV cameras turning off as soon as a suspect is close to
caught. Urinating and defecating inside suspects homes during raids, on
their beds and clothes. Summonsing officers who weren't there so they could collect the overtime. Targeting
16-24 year old black males essentially because they have been arrested in
the past, perpetrating the circle of arresting them more. This is not a description of a few
bad apples in a mostly lawful police departmentit describes a rotten
culture that cannot help but touch even good cops within it, who excuse
rottenness just to get along. And it doesnt take much empathy or imagination to understand that word of Baltimore
police defecating in the beds of residents during raids must poison attitudes toward cops in the parts of the city

Everyone knew it, Wood said in a subsequent interview. Any cop who
has worked in Baltimore knows about it. You definitely wont find a cop who has done the
that they shit on.

raids who hasnt heard about it. They usually blame it on the dog. But everyone knows it goes on. Obviously, this
context does not excuse riots, or gun violence, or attempts to kill police officers, who come in all varieties and
deserve to be treated as individuals as much as anyonemany are doing an almost impossible job in dysfunctional

bad cops and abusive policing

subcultures are a crucial part of the narrative that Heather Mac Donald
leaves out when talking about one of the only cities where there is a clear
relationship between rising hostility toward police and an increase in
violent crime.
bureaucracies they didnt create and are trying to improve. But

Focus is needed on reforming the police culture

Friedersdorf 15 [Conor Friedersdorf, 6-27-2015, "'It's Time for Good Cops to Do Something About Bad
Cops'," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/its-time-for-good-cops-to-do-something-aboutbad-cops/396890/

Baltimore residents need good cops. They need protection from violent criminals.
They need a healthy relationship with their police department. But when she calls for a
She is correct that

return to the style of policing used in the decade prior to Freddie Grays death, and to a president, an attorney
general, a national media, and a liberal-activist base that spends no more time scrutinizing or criticizing cops than
they did before Ferguson, she is urging the same conditions that ended in a dead 25-year-old and a riot after a
decade in which grave policing abuses were ignored even as they became epidemic. Even if it were possible to go
back to the pre-Ferguson status quo, why would we expect the replay to go better for Baltimore than what
unfolded? Law-and-order conservatives talk about a Ferguson effect, with protests of aggressive policing leading

There is a Ferguson effect, but

rather than describing a spike in violence after undue criticism of police,
the term should denote an erosion of respect for police authority caused
by years and years of abhorrent behavior by cops and enabling political
to meeker cops and a corresponding uptick in violent crime.

officials who incentivize and then all but ignore blue-on-black crime. It is
no accident that the cities to experience the most intense unrest after
police killings of unarmed black men, Ferguson and Baltimore, were ones
where even cursory scrutiny reveals severe law enforcement abuses. Circa
1992, one could have as easily called it an LAPD effect, when decades of egregious abuses supplied the gasoline
and the Rodney King verdict the spark. The federal consent decree that significantly improved policing here may
not have directly caused the subsequent decline in crime, but certainly did not appear to impede it. Perhaps

aggressive federal intervention is needed to reduce abuses in Baltimore.

Writing in the Washington Post, Radley Balko says Heather Mac Donald implies that people
should just keep quiet in the face of what they perceive to be brutality and
injustice, lest it embolden violence against the police, and that shes
effectively telling residents of a city like Baltimore, where misconduct is
well documented, either live with harassment and abuse from the police,
or live in fear of crime. I dont think shed ever present that choiceI trust that she would see the
injustice in itbut I agree that the arguments that she makes logically lead in that direction. A better way
forward, for Mac Donald and other law-and-order conservatives, is to start grappling with how
to fix the glaring flaws of the policing culture in cities like Ferguson and
Baltimore, rather than ignoring them or sweeping them under the rug. What would City Journal have
Baltimore policymakers do in response to a former police officer alleging that his fellow officers urinated and
defecated in the beds of people on raids? How would the Wall Street Journal editorial board counsel responding to
scores of police brutality judgments totaling more than $5 million in payouts? On policing, Rich Lowry, editor of
National Review, wrote, We dont know all the facts surrounding Freddie Grays tragic death. But as a general
matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable because most
of the Baltimore government is that way. This was notable partly because it was a relief to see a prominent
conservative applying skepticism to cops; and it was notable partly because Lowry didnt actually know that
Baltimore police are corruptthough thats been true for years and knowable to anyone with the slightest interest
and also didnt feel interested enough to actually find out for the column. But it was mostly notable because, having
declared that the police department of a major city may well be corrupt, Lowry didnt spend the next sentence (or a
subsequent column) musing on how the corrupt bureaucracy with lethal force at its disposal could be made
accountable. Instead, he wrote, ...it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and
unaccountable because most of the Baltimore government is that way, only to continue, This is a failure
exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimores troubles are to be traced to its last Republican
mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967.

Comey warrant is based on pure emotion not facts

Friedman 16 [Barry Friedman, 6-27-2016, "The Problem With Modern Policing, as Seen From the Right and
From the Left," New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/books/review/the-war-on-cops-by-heathermac-donald-and-handcuffed-by-malcolm-sparrow.html?_r=0]

Mac Donalds most authoritative source is James Comey,

the respected director of the F.B.I., who confirmed it in a speech at the University of Chicago. Yet this is the
same Comey who has bemoaned and rightly so the lack of good data about
crime and policing. The studies that have looked for the Ferguson effect cannot say that it exists.
Comey himself conceded his was only a strong sense of what is
happening. Which is why Mac Donald can only say, It is not too early to
flag what might be going on. (The emphasis is mine.)
Is the Ferguson effect real?

Friedman 16 [Barry Friedman, 6-27-2016, "The Problem With Modern Policing, as Seen From the Right and
From the Left," New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/books/review/the-war-on-cops-by-heathermac-donald-and-handcuffed-by-malcolm-sparrow.html?_r=0]
As is often the case,

Mac Donald is too quick to ignore facts that dont favor her

argument.

At trial Peart described being stopped four times. Once, the officers handcuffed him, took his keys
and tried to get into the apartment where his disabled and terrified sister had bolted the door. The trial judge in the
case found this stop had violated Pearts rights, and found the same about the stop on Pearts birthday. It is just this
sort of rough treatment of innocent people that has caused anger in minority communities to boil over, and Mac

[she] favors zero-tolerance policing

i.e., arresting people for the most minor of crimes (like turnstile jumping). Sparrow [she] will have none
of it, telling us: There is no convincing research that demonstrates a link
between aggressive enforcement of minor offenses and subsequent
impact on serious crime rates. Indeed, Sparrow believes the relentless push to drive down crime
Donald would do better to acknowledge it. Mac Donald

rates already at historically low levels may be self-defeating: Continuing to demand reductions at that point is
like failing to set the torque control on a power screwdriver. First you drive the screw, which is useful work; but then
you rip everything to shreds and even undo the value of your initial tightening.
While Sparrow surely is right to condemn policing directed only at crime rates rather than community satisfaction,
one must recognize that talk of crime rates invariably drives much of policy-making in the United States. The sort of
reform that Sparrow seeks wont happen until we are candid about, and tackle, the politics of policing and crime.
Sparrow seeks a global audience, and thus largely puts aside what he sees as the uniquely American problems of
race and police violence. But that is a little like talking about breakfast without discussing eggs. And race in policing
is hardly an American problem alone. Certainty is out of place in policing: We know remarkably little of what works

As Mac Donald herself affirms, when the facts are uncertain

theres the danger we will substitute our own preconceptions for truth:
Whether one trusts officer accounts more than bystander accounts or
vice versa will depend on ones prior assumptions. Whats needed in the absence of
and what does not.

certainty is a willingness to acknowledge what Comey has called the hard truths on both sides. Thus, it is
heartening that Mac Donald writes, There are plenty of officers who treat civilians rudely, that she calls Eric
Garners death a heartbreaking tragedy and Walter Scotts wholly unjustified. It would be equally heartening if
those who deplore her argument and there will be many nonetheless recognize that she surely is right that
gun violence is a tragedy we should be seeking to eliminate root and branch; that many people in minority
communities welcome the police in the face of too much violent crime; even that there are plenty of good cops
trying hard to serve the public who find the current debate deeply discouraging.

Macdonald is wrong about the new wave of crime

Washington Post, 6-8-2015, "Theres no evidence of a new nationwide crime wave," https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/thewatch/wp/2015/06/08/theres-no-evidence-of-a-new-nationwide-crime-wave/?utm_term=.de357fc05ef4

Mac Donalds recital of frightening statistics plays special attention to the problems in New York
City and Los Angeles, Americas two largest cities and most prominent urban success stories in
crime reduction in the past two decades. Bill Bratton, now in his second stint in New York, has
served as commissioner of both departments. We are told shootings are up in both Los Angeles
and New York, and that the most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is
the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months. Is there a
nationwide crime wave? On current evidence, probably not, and a careful analysis of official
statistics in New York and Los Angeles provides reason for reassurance rather than
alarm. Zimring starts with New York.
Lets start with the uptick in violence in New York City. The most recent official crime statistics
indicate that so far in 2015, the city has experienced significant declines from 2014s ultra-

low levels in burglary, robbery and larceny. At the same time, total homicides for the first five months of the
year at 135 are higher than in 2014 but quite close to the pace of 2013 and around 30% lower than in 2010. At their current rate,

killings in New York City would end 2015 as either the third or fourth lowest year in the
citys modern history. This is similar to the posturing we see about the killing of police officers
(more on that in a minute.) Crime stats cant just keep falling forever. And in places like New
York, crime rates have reached astonishing depths. Inching back upward to levels that would
be historic lows just a few years ago isnt indicative of a coming national crime wave. It may
just be statistical noise, or a leveling off. And as Zimring points out, the rate of some crimes is
actually still falling in New York. As Zimring writes, [I]f [the Ferguson Effect"] has indeed
increased the New York homicide total, should it also get credit for the 223 fewer
robberies so far in 2015 when compared to the previous year? How about the 974 fewer
burglaries in five months? Zimring also notes that despite Mac Donalds fears about Los
Angeles, homicides in that city are actually down from 2015. Mac Donalds points about
violence against cops are also misguided. For example, she writes that the killings of Eric
Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014
and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last monthhave led to riots, violent protests and attacks
on the police. She then adds, Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27. But
that jump in 2014 was after a historic low in 2013. That low came after a 20-year decline in
homicides of police officers. Even the 2014 figure is 51 murders of cops out of a police force
of 600,000 to 800,000 (depending on what source youre consulting). In terms of raw data
(compiled from the FBI and the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund), its still the
sixth safest year for cops since the 1950s, and below the average over the last 10 years, a
period in which the number each year trended downward. If you look at the rate of murder of
cops, the relative safety of cops today is even more impressive. But Mac Donald is also sly
with her cutoff points. She cites the increase in homicides of cops from 2014 over 2013
to support her contention that the reaction to the deaths of Brown, Garner, and Gray are
[as] driving violence against police. But while there were a couple smaller protests in July
shortly after Garner was killed, the protests didnt really heat up until December, after a grand
jury declined to indict the cop that killed him. It was during the December protests that police
and law-and-order pundits began to complain about the anti-police rhetoric. Its hard to blame
protests held in December 2014 for an increase in killings of police that took place over the
course of the entire year. Mac Donald also mentions the Freddie Gray protests. But Gray was
killed this year, not last year. Its misleading to cite either of these cases for an increase in police
fatalities in 2014.
The Ferguson protests of course did occur in 2014, in August. But if those protests were indeed
why the police fatality figures went up last year, then we should have seen a surge in police
killings in response to them. If the homicides of cops in 2014 had been disbursed evenly over
the course of the year, wed have expected to see about 21 killings of cops from August 9th
through the end of the year. Yet of the 51 murders of police officers last year,just 19 occurred
after the death of Michael Brown on August 9th. Of course, crime isnt evenly distributed over
the course of the year. But if Mac Donald is right, we should have seen at least a bump in
killings of cops after August 9th. That just didnt happen. By Mac Donalds reasoning, we should
also be seeing a continuation of last years upward trend in murders of police. But homicides of
cops are down so far this year. As of today, the number of cops murdered by firearms in 2015 is
down 27 percent from last year.

The argument Mac Donald is making today is the same argument many were making in 2011,
when there was also a slight uptick in homicides of cops. Critics then warned that anti-police
and anti-government sentiment was making cops afraid to do their jobs, and that efforts to hold
rogue cops more accountable were empowering criminals. The next year, we saw the second
lowest number of murders of cops to date. The year after, we saw a record low. Its worth noting
that assaults on police officers are also trending downward. The general drop in officer fatalities
is almost certainly do in part to better equipment like bulletproof vests, and other technological
advances, like better emergency medical care. But that assaults are also in decline cuts against
Mac Donalds argument. Even as developments like citizen-shot video give rise to more
skepticism and criticism of police, that skepticism and cynicism is playing out in the form
of protest, activism, and calls for reform, not violence.The murder of NYPD officers Wenjian
Liu and Rafael Ramos last year was awful and horrific. But what data we have strongly
suggests it was an anomaly, and not part of some larger trend of anti-cop violence driven by
police critics and anti-brutality protests. Mac Donalds argument also relies on the
assumption that successful crime control is only achieved through broken windows
policing, dehumanizing polices like stop-and-frisk, and giving cops wide latitude when it
comes to using force. There are enough studies out there on these policies to find impressivesounding support for whatever position you want to take on them. But in a free society, we
should want the police to employ the least amount of force to achieve the best possible results.
Or to put it another way, if we see similar drops in crime with aggressive policing that we see
with more community-oriented policing, we should opt for the less aggressive, more communityoriented methods. And in places like Richmond, Virginia;Nashville, Tennessee; and Dallas,
Texas.
It is true that were seeing an awful surge in murders in St. Louis and Baltimore right now. Mac
Donald blames this on police reform activists by claiming their rhetoric both emboldens criminals
and makes cops either afraid or unwilling to do their jobs. On the first point, the implication
seems to be that people should just keep quiet in the face of what they perceive to be brutality
and injustice, lest it embolden violence against the police. As I and others have documented, the
protests in St. Louis were about much, much more than Michael Brown. Thats true in Baltimore
too, but there the instigating incident also appears to have been much more egregious and
unjustifiable than the one in St. Louis. In any case, even assuming this were true, its basically
an instruction to the residents of these cities to live with one of two evils: Either live with
harassment and abuse from the police, or live in fear of crime. (Or there is no choice at all
you live with both.) Surely we can do better than that.
The second point is more alarming. If police in Baltimore and St. Louis are letting protesters and
critics make them too afraid or spiteful to do their jobs, essentially turning their backs to allow
people to be robbed and killed, that isnt a problem with protester or social justice culture, its a
problem with police culture. One would hope that a conscientious cop would be encouraged by
the indictment of a bunch of cops for giving allegedly giving a man an illegal, extra-judicial
punishment that resulted in his death. Getting bad cops, law-breaking cops off the street is after
all a boon to law and order, not to mention to the reputation of cops who do it right. Instead,

were told by law enforcement groups and their advocates that your average, well-intentioned
cop is so outraged by these indictments that hes refusing to do his job. Or, more ridiculous still,
that even the good cops are hesitating to protect people out of some fear that theyll be publicly
criticized by racial justice groups. For a profession that takes such pride in its bravery, police
advocates make cops seem remarkably thin-skinned.
This same pride in the bravery of police officers is also frequently invoked as a reason why we
should give cops the benefit of the doubt, and allow them more room to use more force.
Because theyre courageous, we shouldnt second-guess them. But which takes more courage:
Shooting a suspect dead from 20 feet away because hes holding a knife or a screwdriver, or
putting yourself at risk to disarm a suspect without discharging your gun?