The media enthusiastically remind us that it’s the first anniversary of the death of Ferguson’s Michael Brown, a death that spawned the so-called Black Lives Matter movement.
In a September speech at the United Nations, President Barack Obama said, “The world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri — where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”
Never mind that both a grand jury and the federal Department of Justice exonerated the officer who shot and killed Brown. Never mind that neither the physical evidence nor eyewitness testimony corroborated the assertions that Brown had his hands up or that he said, “Don’t shoot.”
Never mind that cops, fearing false accusation of racial profiling and police brutality, are increasingly reluctant to engage in proactive policing — to look for suspicious activity in an effort to prevent crime. As a result crime has gone up, particularly in cities with high-profile cases of alleged racial profiling.
Call it the “Ferguson effect.”
In New York City a black man, Eric Garner, was killed by police in 2014 as he resisted arrest. A grand jury found insufficient grounds to indict any of the officers involved. Still it became a cause celebre. In New York City, shootings rose 20 percent during the first half of 2015, compared to the previous year.
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