Since I grew up a handful of miles down I-70 from a now-infamous town, my ears perk up each time I hear of the “Ferguson Effect.”
This still-debatable new phenomenon attempts to explain a recent upward jog in violent crime in some cities. The thinking goes that, in this era of instant smartphone-to-YouTube mass communication, police are growing increasingly reluctant to, well, police. And when cops look the other way at suspicious behavior — or people — then criminals are freer to prey on humanity, so the narrative goes.
Implicit in this belief is that those who’ve protested – largely peacefully, if noisily at times – a lengthening string of fatal encounters between cops and people who were at no risk of ever making the FBI’s 10 Most-Wanted List have made life more dangerous for police and communities alike. It’s easy to roar up to that conclusion in an age of social-media duels between hashtags like “Black Lives Matter,” “Cop Lives Matter” and others.
The roiling debate over the Ferguson Effect is interesting to me for other reasons. Regular readers may recall that I grew up in a family of law enforcement officers. My relatives, at various times, have served warrants, run a big-city jail, rolled with a SWAT team, investigated murders and signed on to squads dedicated to ferreting out illegal guns. I could go on.
So my genetic code has scant sympathy for lawlessness. Society’s predators need to be called to account. Most times, that happens without incident as cops arrest scores of people daily. Sometimes, though, physical persuasion has to be applied, up to and including use of deadly force.
I get that, even when I don’t understand how a nonviolent street hustler can be asphyxiated by police with impunity, or a teen girl whose mom had recently died can be hurled across a classroom by a sheriff’s deputy for refusing to leave her desk.
And I consider myself blessed to now live in a place that knows more about diversity and cross-cultural understanding than most. That’s a competitive advantage I hope never weakens across time.
FBI Director James B. Comey famously discussed recently the factors that’ve come to be described by invoking the name Ferguson. His speech at The University of Chicago Law School is quite nuanced and worth reading in its entirety, especially in this “gotcha” age when context-laden arguments are usually hacked down to a salacious sliver or two.
Speaking about violent criminals, Comey remarked that, “Lives are saved when those potential killers are confronted by a strong police presence and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close ‘What are you guys doing on this corner at one o’clock in the morning?’ policing.”
Lost in much of the followup is that Comey honestly said “I don’t know” when giving a rhetorical answer to the question of whether a “Ferguson Effect” was inflaming crime rates.
One thing that I do believe is at risk of being lost in all this noise is street-level trust of police. Distrust between cops and citizens can spike crime rates and lower courtroom conviction rates.
How’d we get here? One factor, I believe, is that too many civilians and cops alike believe that law enforcement’s job is to behave as occupying armies do. Overwhelm with force, and regard related injuries and bloodshed as collateral damage, an unavoidable byproduct of an aggressive “war” on felonies and misdemeanors alike.
That approach, I believe, too-often isolates police from the neighborhoods they’re sworn to serve. It stretches even more-tautly the Thin Blue Line and can endanger both cops and citizens as a result.
Forgotten in both aggressive policing and the in-your-face zealotry of cellphone-videotaping activists is that the police and community need each other. Briton Sir Robert Peel, considered a founder of modern policing, is credited with observing in the 1800s that, “The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.” His next observation was that, “The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.”
I don’t know whether the metro cops who routinely showed up at a house near my childhood home ever studied Peel’s Principles. They could have taught them, from what I saw, even when they occasionally made arrests at that address. No shots were ever fired, and force used at times seemed sufficient to get the job done, nothing more.
Among the many eyes watching police as they resolved calls to that home was a child who lived there. She grew up to carry a gun and badge herself.
Her career choice speaks to the power of cops routinely behaving at their best as they go about their risky, necessary and often-thankless work. We need more of that kind of policing today.
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