Study: There Has Been No 'Ferguson Effect' in Baltimore

The 2014 killing of Michael Brown by police turned the word “Ferguson,” the name of Brown’s Missouri hometown, into a call for action against police violence. Proponents of aggressive policing styles, however, have managed to appropriate the term to fit an opposing agenda. While the Ferguson cause has been about exposing the devastating consequences of the over-policing of black neighborhoods, the “Ferguson Effect” is a campaign about over-hyped, alleged crime waves overtaking urban landscapes.

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”?