5th Anniversary of the Death of George Floyd — The Damage Continues, Part 2

        In dealing with the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles police chief described his force as “overwhelmed” by the protesters and rioters. The city, as is the case with many of America’s other large cities, suffers from inadequate manpower. The size of the LAPD is the smallest in 20 years.

        The George Floyd protest/riots-inspired “cops-are-out-to-get blacks” narrative is not just false and insulting to cops — it gets people killed. The narrative has caused police officers to quit or retire early, and the negative image of the police discourages new applicants, resulting in manpower shortages in city after city.

        The fake narrative results in what some call the George Floyd Effect or the Ferguson Effect, the phenomenon of cops pulling back from “proactive policing,” resulting in fewer arrests even though many categories of crime have increased in some cities in recent years. This means more violent crime and more deaths in urban America — where a disproportionate amount of crime takes place — than would otherwise have occurred.

        Isaac Kriegman, a former Thomson Reuters data scientist, studied what he called “excess” deaths because of the diminished use of proactive policing. He, as mentioned, found that most of these excess deaths were the very black and brown people the left purports to care so much about.

        Kriegman said complaints about “disproportionate” black arrests and encounters with the police ignore the disproportionate amount of crime committed by blacks: “In plain English, the number of arrests for violent crime is proportional to the number of violent crimes actually committed by each group. Black people are not arrested at a rate disproportionate to the number of crimes committed, suggesting that black neighborhoods are not ‘over policed.’ Instead, the reason more blacks are arrested for violent crimes is because black neighborhoods suffer more from violent crime. In turn, the primary reason there are more arrests, confrontations with police and, consequently, police shootings in predominantly black neighborhoods is because police disproportionately encounter perpetrators of violent crime there.”

        Kriegman examined the nearly immediate change in policing following a high-profile death of a black person by the police, a death considered by the media and activists as “unlawful,” often regardless of the circumstances. Kriegman wrote: “In 2014, after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the BLM movement’s anti-police rhetoric and propaganda found a receptive audience. As police were demonized with falsehoods, their morale declined and their willingness to engage in proactive policing, such as street stops for suspicious behavior and other forms of policing designed to prevent firearms crimes, plummeted. Police officers reported that they were scared or unwilling to confront suspects because any confrontation could escalate into a situation where they would need to use force.”

        Kriegman reviewed the work of Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who studied the Ferguson Effect. Kriegman wrote: “After an exhaustive statistical analysis, (Fryer) concluded that not only was something like the Ferguson Effect real, but in just the five cities he examined, it caused a staggering 900 excess murders, and 34,000 excess felonies that would not have otherwise occurred — and it was expected to cause hundreds more murders in those cities in the following years. Extrapolated to other cities and time periods this result suggested thousands of additional murder victims nationwide.”

        Police Magazine discussed a poll asking self-described “very liberal” people how many unarmed black men did the police kill in 2019. Half of the “very liberal” thought cops killed 1,000 or more, with 8% guessing 10,000. Thirty-nine percent of self-described “liberals” put the number of unarmed black men killed by cops in 2019 at 1,000 or more, with 5% guessing 10,000. The actual number, according to The Washington Post? Twelve. Just 13% of “conservatives” thought the police killed 1,000 or more, and only 1% of “conservatives” put the number at 10,000.

        This means “right-wingers” who refuse to buy the “police-are-out-to-get-black people” rhetoric are not indifferent to the “plight of blacks who suffer from anti-black police systemic racism.”

        The George Floyd/Ferguson false narrative encourages more riots, more property damage and more flight by insurance companies. Business owners and homeowners end up paying higher premiums from the insurance companies still willing to insure, and the owners’ property appreciation suffers because of the omnipresent threat of riots.

        Larry Elder is a bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an “Elderado,” visit www.LarryElder.com. Follow Larry on X @larryelder. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.