Black fatalities rise in US cities after ‘Defund the Police’ movement surges

According to a report by “The War on Cops” best-selling author Heather Mac Donald, police data and news reports in urban centers like Chicago and New York reveal that violent crime has surged following the George Floyd protests.

The Ferguson Effect—which Mac Donald coined in 2014 after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—describes the rise in crimes following the subsequent wave of civil unrest by street rioters. 2,000 additional black homicide victims then occurred in 2015 and 2016, the report cited.

Mac Donald calls today’s violent-crime spike “Ferguson Effect 2.0” or the “Minneapolis Effect.”

In Minneapolis, shootings have more than doubled this year, the report says. Almost half of these 3,218 shots-fired calls have occurred since Floyd’s death, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune analysis.

In last month’s Police Executive Research Forum report, police officials spoke out on the rise of crime in their communities.

In mid-June, New York City saw 53 shooting incidents and 72 shooting victims in a single week, NY Police Department chief Terrence Monahan reported.

“We have to go back to the week of July 4th in 2012 for a week like that,” Monahan said.

Milwaukee has a 132 percent increase in homicides with 86 this year compared to the 37 at this point last year, Milwaukee inspector Leslie Thiele reported. “We haven’t seen these numbers since 1991,” Thiele stated.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 18 people were killed and 47 were wounded by shootings last weekend, bringing Chicago past 300 homicides this year. Last year’s fatalities didn’t pass 300 until early August, Sun-Times data shows.

The victims were overwhelmingly black. To-date this year, approximately 77 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, even though blacks constitute one-third of the city’s population.

Still, defund-law-and-order advocates enable lawlessness and ignore the growing loss of black lives.