'Broken Windows' Fights the 'Ferguson Effect'
It's not easy to find a middle ground between the tough-on-crime and "#BlackLivesMatter" movements, but it has to be done.
As police officers find their routine stops or arrests recorded increasingly by civilians with their smartphones, a rising chorus of critics fear that wary cops already might be bringing the nation's 20-year crime dip to an end.
I suspect that we have nothing to fear but a wrong-headed reading of statistics.
One of the most respected conservative thought leaders in this arena -- even when I don't agree with her -- is Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute fellow and author of "Are Cops Racist?" (Spoiler alert: Mac Donald says not much.)
Writing in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, she cites recent violent crime surges in Baltimore, New York and Chicago, among other cities to charge a "Ferguson effect," a new wariness by police to conduct arrests, weapons searches or other crime-fighting measures for fear of being prosecuted themselves.
Police, speaking privately, have not discouraged that notion. "The cops I've spoken to say it's different now," Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore City police officer who is now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Time magazine. "Cops are saying, If we're going to get in trouble for well-intentioned mistakes, then f--- it, I'm not working."
If widespread, that attitude could put a severe pinch in the controversial "broken windows" policing that has had impressive success at reducing crime in cities across the nation since the mid-1990s, mainly by treating no offense as too minor for police to pursue (graffiti, turnstile jumping, etc.).
Unfortunately, for poor black and Hispanic people in New York City, where the policy began, it also has meant profiling, stop-and-frisk searches and serious penalties for individuals who were not committing any serious crime.
"Broken windows" policing, for example, led to the famously video-recorded death of Eric Garner, an unarmed Staten Island man who police were trying to arrest for peddling untaxed cigarettes.
Protests following that death and others, such as the killing of Freddie Gray -- for which six police were charged with murder in Baltimore -- may have led to surging violence around the city by emboldened criminals. This May, for example, there were 43 homicides in Baltimore, according to numbers compiled by the Baltimore Sun and the FBI.
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