A new study from Johns Hopkins University finds that evidence for a so-called “Ferguson Effect” in Baltimore is “very weak,” reports The Atlantic’s CityLab. In fact, most violent crime in Baltimore actually decreased between August 2014 and April 2015.
The “Ferguson Effect” campaign has been determined by criminologists across the board to be at best a premature rendering of a small timeline of rising crime in a few cities, and at worst an overblown statistical fluke. The Brennan Center for Justice and The Sentencing Project have both provided data indicating that there are only a handful of cities that experienced a rise in violent crime over the past two years. Baltimore is one of those cities. Given that 2015 was a record-setting year for homicides there, the city can’t be overlooked in debates over whether violence is escalating. But can Baltimore’s homicides be attributed to the so-called “Ferguson Effect”?
The evidence for that kind of attribution is “very weak,” according to a study released Tuesday by the Johns Hopkins University sociologists Stephen L. Morgan and Joel A. Pally. Between August 2014 (when Brown was killed and the Ferguson riots erupted) and April 2015 (when Freddie Gray died in Baltimore while in police custody), most violent crime in Baltimore actually decreased, the researchers found.
Read the full article in CityLab.
