Want more evidence that the “Ferguson effect” is a myth? Look no further than the nation’s largest city, where crime is at an all-time low despite the police force slowly being forced to accept more and more accountability.
The New York police department released its crime statistics on Monday, and they showed that over the last six-month period violent crimes and murders are at an all-time low, with shootings down 20% to the lowest total for a six-month period in the city’s history. (So were burglaries, robberies and auto theft for that matter.)
Remember the widespread panic in the Michael Bloomberg administration when they claimed even the mildest of police reform would cause an increase in crime? The new stats, touted by the De Blasio administration this week, come after the NYPD was forced to curtail its unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program that ensnared countless African American and Hispanic people, after it finally had to abandoned its mass surveillance program of the Muslim community, and after it finally named an inspector general for the police force, which the former mayor fought to the very end of his term.
This data also suggests that, at least in New York City, the “Ferguson effect” – the insulting idea put forth by FBI director Jim Comey and others that the transparency and accountability that comes with police being filmed by bystanders in public stops cops from doing their jobs – remains a complete myth.
I’m not trying to suggest that the NYPD is a model for police reform in this country - it’s not. But the NYPD has eliminated two of the worst programs at its disposal, which officials claimed were essential to fighting crime, only to show that crime dropped even more without them.
Still, since the tragic attack on police officers in Dallas by a lone gunman who had nothing to do with the Black Lives Matter movement, police unions have seized on the attack in an attempt to kill any criminal justice or police reform. (It doesn’t seem to matter that police deaths by violent assault are at the lowest number in 35 years.) This random act of violence should not undo all the progress Black Lives Matter has done for the national discourse on this issue.
It should be noted that Dallas itself is an example of why it’s important that politicians increase the urgency for reform. Dallas police chief David Brown has won plaudits for those he’s implemented in Dallas, where he emphasized de-escalation and has seen police abuse complaints plummet in the last few years. (Though as the New York Times points out, whether the Dallas police has improved really depends on who you ask.)
But despite the sea change in national discourse, many local police departments have managed to resist any systemic changes. More police officers wear body cameras now, but when they are not conveniently “falling off” or being shut off just before officers shoot someone, they are censored from public view by law enforcement or by new laws (like the one just passed in North Carolina that makes footage off limits to the public).
Barack Obama supposedly limited the controversial federal program that funnels military gear from overseas wars to local police, but the program has not been eliminated. And as we can see from the photos from Baton Rouge a lot of cops are still armed like an occupying army – and now they are agitating for more. And a meager criminal justice reform bill that would reduce some mandatory minimum sentences has languished in Congress for months, despite strong bipartisan support and a compromise that weakened the bill so that the changes were almost non-existent.
If police are really worried about what the public thinks of them, it’s in their best interest to support reform efforts just as much as Black Lives Matter does.