Here is the great irony confronting the Defund the Police Campaign of Black Lives Matter, which arose from the death of Saint George Floyd, is that there was a dramatic rise in Black Deaths. Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital: "Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 after the death of George Floyd followed a pattern of spiking violence that we've seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. This pattern has been termed the ‘Ferguson Effect’: police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously." “In 2019, at least 7,484 Black Americans were murdered. That number shot up to at least 9,941 murders in 2020, meaning there was an increase of 2,457 Black Americans murdered over the previous year.
The number of Black murders was also far higher than White murders in 2020. The FBI data shows there 7,043 White people murdered that year, meaning 2,898 more Black people were killed compared to Whites.”
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-americans-paid-enormous-price-for-defund-the-police-movement
“Support of Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police reverberated across America in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, igniting social justice protests and riots at a time when the coronavirus and lockdowns upended society in unprecedented ways. What was left in 2020's wake was a massive increase in the number of murders, dealing a disproportionate blow to Black Americans.
"Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 after the death of George Floyd followed a pattern of spiking violence that we've seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. This pattern has been termed the ‘Ferguson Effect’: police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously," Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital.
Murders across the board spiked by nearly 30% in 2020 compared to the year prior, according to FBI data, marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes. Among Black Americans, the number of deaths spiked by more than 32% compared to 2019.
In 2019, at least 7,484 Black Americans were murdered. That number shot up to at least 9,941 murders in 2020, meaning there was an increase of 2,457 Black Americans murdered over the previous year.
The number of Black murders was also far higher than White murders in 2020. The FBI data shows there 7,043 White people murdered that year, meaning 2,898 more Black people were killed compared to Whites.
Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 5,954 White murders, which is roughly 16% lower than the 10-year average of Black murders. During that same time period, an average of 6,927 Black Americans were murdered each year, meaning Black murders shot up by 43% in 2020 compared to the previous 10-year average.
There was a roughly 21% increase in White murders in 2020 compared to 2019.
The figures are more staggering considering White Americans make up 76% of the population compared to Black Americans representing only 13%, according to Census data.
Murders in the 2010s first broke the 7,000 murder benchmark in 2015 after the high-profile deaths of Freddie Gray that same year and Michael Brown in 2014, jumping by nearly a thousand in one year. Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer and Gray died after he sustained injuries in the back of a Baltimore police van. Their deaths sparked protests and riots similar to the ones following Floyd’s death.
Prior to Brown's death, Black murders had fallen the previous four years.
Fox News Digital reviewed murder data from 2014 and 2015 and found a spike of 15% in year over year data. At least 7,000 Black Americans were killed each year thereafter without ever exceeding the 8,000 mark.
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson coined the increase the Ferguson effect in November 2014. The theory gained widespread attention in 2016 after the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal arguing the effect is one "where the Black Lives Matter narrative about racist, homicidal cops has produced virulent hostility in the streets."
The summer of 2020 was marked by swaths of America pledging support for the Black Lives Matter movement and defunding the police. Many cities answered supporters’ calls by removing portions of police funding, such as Portland and New York City. The social justice movement even trickled down to small cities and spread to nearly every facet of America, stretching from major corporations, celebrities and the sports world demanding change.
Some experts have pinned the cause of the crime spikes on the coronavirus entirely and warned about it at the beginning of the pandemic.
"I’m not surprised at all that we had an increase in crime," Volkan Topalli, a professor of criminology at Georgia State University, told Politico in 2021 after he became a victim of crime himself. "Criminologists and public health people were saying that that was going to be the case as soon as they heard about the pandemic."
"The pandemic … revealed something that most of us already knew, which was that we have segments of society that don’t have the advantages of other segments of society," Topalli said. "They’re just beneath the surface and the pandemic sort of, you know, as with a hurricane … has revealed the disparities."
A University of California study that estimated more than 100,000 Californians bought guns in 2020 out of fear the pandemic's destabilizing effects. The study argued that by aggravating "poverty, unemployment, lack of resources, isolation, hopelessness and loss," the pandemic has "worsened many of the underlying conditions contributing to violence," the New York Times reported in 2020.
But to Mac Donald, the Ferguson effect played out again in 2020 – with even more swiftness and brutality than before.
2020’s "violent-crime increase—call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect— has come on with a speed and magnitude that make Ferguson 1.0 seem tranquil," Mac Donald wrote during the crime spike that year. "George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May was justly condemned — but the event has now spurred an outpouring of contempt against the pillars of law and order that has no precedent in American history."
Mac Donald told Fox News Digital this month that the Black Lives Matter and the defund the police movements contributed to the crime spike in 2020 and had nothing to do with the coronavirus and lockdowns. The spike "began months after lockdowns beginning only after riots," noting the "spike was not at all related to COVID."
The FBI crime data in 2020 came as the FBI switched to a new recording method, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), amid a push to change how law enforcement agencies provide crime figures and record details on every single crime incident.
Murders and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses were already on the rise during the first half of 2020, with FBI data showing a 14.8% increase across the board from January to June.
Murders began to rise in the late winter of 2020 which is typical of that time of year, with the spike appearing to begin in April with 1,261 murders – the month prior to George Floyd's death. However, April's numbers were not far off track with April's numbers in previous years.
May recorded 1,499 murders – which compared to previous Mays is high – before reaching its peak of 1,772 in July, far above July peaks in the previous six years, according to the New York Times citing FBI data. Murders dipped in the month of September to 1,611 before shooting back up to 1,740 in October.
Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI for the data set obtained by the Times to take a closer look, but was told they "do not have the Supplementary Homicide Report File List available at this time."
Here is the take on this rise in black deaths from Ann Coulter:
“With the mind-boggling rise in violent crime since the Democrats turned all policing policies over to BLM, the media have become obsessed with convincing us that it’s all the fault of the pandemic. (At least they’re not blaming it on Putin this time.)
In its coverage of the subway shooting by a rage-filled black nationalist last week, the New York Times inserted its pandemic theory of crime into nearly every update (emphasis added):
- “Shootings in New York City rose during 2022’s first quarter compared with the same period last year … the continuation of a drumbeat of violence that emerged early in the PANDEMIC, and has not ebbed with the virus.”
- “This year’s first three months have also seen rises in crimes like burglaries, robberies and grand larcenies compared to the same periods in 2020 and 2021, though experts warn against short-term comparisons, particularly during the statistic-skewing PANDEMIC.”
- “Mr. Lee said reports of attacks across the city, along with the violence that other Asian Americans in the city have experienced throughout the coronavirus PANDEMIC, have left him fearful.”
(I’d like to know if Mr. Lee cited the pandemic or—my guess—the Times helpfully threw that in.)
- “The city’s police commissioner announced new figures last week that showed a 36% increase in major crimes and a 16% rise in shootings over the past year—part of a rise in violence during the PANDEMIC.”
No evidence is ever cited. The Times made no attempt to tie Frank James’ personal pandemic experience to his outburst of homicidal racism. “The pandemic caused the crime wave” is just repeated in article after article, like the sleep conditioning of infants in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Except even in Huxley’s dystopian world, the bureaucrats only needed to repeat an idea three times a week. The media authoritatively announce that the pandemic caused the crime wave about a thousand times a week.
A spate of shootings over the weekend led to another gusher of “The pandemic causes crime” sightings in the Times. Now it’s not just crime generally, but specifically mass shootings: “Experts are pointing to multiple possible factors that could explain the upswing [in mass shootings], including the pandemic…”
I wonder if that includes any of the experts who spent the first 2.5 months of the pandemic telling us that the lockdowns had had the wonderful effect of virtually ending violent crime! That is, right up until the day George Floyd was killed, whereupon white people became guilty for everything, and black people responsible for nothing, including their own criminal behavior.
Thus, on April 14, 2020, a month into “15 days to slow the spread,” the Times stated matter-of-factly: “Violent crime has dropped precipitously.” Two weeks later, on May 4, 2020, Politico reported: “Major crime has plunged during New York City’s coronavirus lockdown, down 28.5% in the month of April.”
Similarly, on April 23, 2020, the Denver Post reported that during the first four weeks of the pandemic, crime reports were down by a third, adding that “other large cities have seen significant drops in crime during the coronavirus.”
The very day that Floyd died, Voice of America announced that major U.S. cities had “reported dips in burglary, assault, murder, robbery and grand larceny—all due to stay-at-home orders and fewer opportunities for crime.”
How about a bigger comparison? Are there any studies of crime during the pandemic from around the globe? Why yes, there are! A study by Cambridge University of crime rates in 27 cities across 23 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East found that stay-at-home orders during the pandemic “were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime.”
Then, in a crazy coincidence invisible to every member of our media, on May 25, 2020, an innocent black man, just minding his own business, bothering no one, was killed by a cop in Minneapolis, and…
BAM! As you may have seen in Twitter and YouTube videos (at least the ones that were not immediately removed by “moderators”), violent crime promptly exploded in cities across the nation.
Both the FBI and CDC report that murders were up 30% in 2020—the largest year-to-year increase in more than a century. The next biggest increase was back in 1968, when it went up by 12.7%. In 2021, murders were up again, 44% compared to 2019.
And it all started on the mystery date of May 25, 2020. From January 1, 2020, to May 25, 2020, gun homicides increased by 14%, compared to 2019. (Democrats do control the cities.) But from George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, through the end of the year, gun homicides shot up an astronomical 41%.
Obviously, therefore, one problem with the theory that the bacchanal of violence of the last two years is the pandemic’s fault is that there is absolutely no evidence to support it.
As we’ve seen, right up until the hysteria over Floyd’s death, the media were fairly bristling with stories about the salubrious effect the pandemic was having on crime. In addition, as a factual matter, gun homicides nearly tripled from the period before Floyd’s death (B.F.) compared to the period after his death (A.D.).
A second major problem with the pandemic theory of crime is that it requires a complete mind-wipe of everything that happened in the months after Floyd’s death: BLM. … Defund the Police.
Media in unison: We have no idea what you’re talking about.
Here’s a reminder:
- Associated Press, May 29, 2020: “Minneapolis police station torched amid George Floyd protest”
- New York Times, June 12, 2020: “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”
- 770 KTTH, August 25, 2020: “Rioters tried to burn Seattle police alive, sealed door during fire at East Precinct”
- In These Times, December 15, 2020: “The Best Moment of 2020: The Burning of the Third Precinct”
Throughout all this, Democrats and the media celebrated as police budgets were slashed, officers’ hands were tied, and crime after crime was decriminalized.
No wonder they want to blame the pandemic.
Still, there are less obviously false excuses for the current crime wave than the pandemic. (I’m assuming the truth is a nonstarter for our media.)
You know what else happened in 2020? The Pentagon released photos of UFOs! How about replacing “the pandemic” with that? The media should start including clauses like this in their crime stories: “…a drumbeat of violence that emerged after the Pentagon released UFO videos” and “…part of a rise in violence the year UFO videos were released.”
Seriously—that’s less unhinged than blaming the current, epic crime wave on “the pandemic.”