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More on the 'Ferguson Effect,' and Responses to Critics
[Manhattan Institute] This piece is the fourth installment of a guest-blog series by Heather Mac Donald for the Washington Post's The Volokh Conspiracy.My advocacy of what I have called the "Ferguson Effect" has proved to be the most controversial and contested aspect of my new book, "The War on Cops." When I first proposed the theory in a May 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the policy arm of the American Society of Criminology immediately sent out an alert seeking rebuttals to my hypothesis. The opposition has hardly abated since then. Yet virtually every police officer working in an urban area in the post-Ferguson era tells the same tale: He or she is backing off of discretionary, proactive policing. Officers operate today under the presumption that they are racist, even homicidal; their stop and arrest activity is measured against population benchmarks, rather than crime benchmarks, and thus deemed racially biased; they worry that any use of force against a black civilian, no matter how justified, could be interpreted as a race-based assault and could put their career at risk. Posted by: Besoeker 2016-07-22 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=462592 |