A few months after the protests following Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson, St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson spoke of what he called a “Ferguson effect”: cops were now demoralized, hesitant, and exhausted, he said, while the “criminal element” was feeling empowered by the environment.
In 2015 the conservative pundit Heather Mac Donald wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal asserting that the Ferguson effect had gone national, that cops around the country were now so afraid of protest and criticism they’d stopped doing their jobs, and as a result a “new national crime wave” was beginning to crest. Before you knew it, the “Ferguson effect” became a known phenomenon, accepted by cops, prosecutors, mayors, pundits and others as gospel truth. The moment any crime happened anywhere, local tabloids and national right-wing media ran stories about the “Ferguson effect.” Even Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, said that police were now so terrified of the onslaught of public scrutiny brought about by cell phone videos and Black Lives Matter protests, they had been reduced to a “fetal” position.
As a hypothesis, the “Ferguson effect” was, at least in a national sense, way out ahead of what the data could plausibly show. It was a thesis in search of data, identified before anything definitive had been concluded. (Later, data would show that homicides in 2015 had their biggest jump since 1971, driven mostly by a few major cities.) Under Mayor DeBlasio, crime in New York is at a historic low, despite the 70 percent decrease in “stop and frisk” encounters between 2011 and 2015.
Nonetheless the mayors and pundits charged ahead. This is what happens when you question the cops, they argued, and when you tug on the strings of the tough-on-crime consensus. The entire thing unravels, and we find ourselves hurled down back into the bad old days of rampant violence and criminality. The jungle returns. That’s precisely the warning that foes of Mayor DeBlasio had been offering since before he was elected. And now with each shooting, stabbing, and gruesome crime in the city, they pointed to it as the moment when everything slips back, when all the progress is forfeited and constant anxiety returns.?
If I’m entirely honest with myself, I have to admit that I, too, fear the bad old days’ return. I enjoy the orderliness of the current city. I own a home. I have kids. I don’t want them encountering addicts on the corner. I don’t want a lot of disorder on the streets.
And here is the awful implication of this seemingly innocent desire for order: people like me who reside in the Nation enjoy the benefits of increased real estate values, tranquil urban streets, and poverty quarantined out of view. We directly, materially, personally benefit from the status quo, no matter what awful costs it imposes on those in the Colony. This is the dark magic of the politics of order: fear lurks in the hearts of the Nation’s citizens that if the Colony were ever liberated, if the police were withdrawn and rights restored, life in the Nation might grow much, much worse. Crime, it turns out, is more easily subdued than fear.
* Like Bill Bratton under DeBlasio, Ray Kelly had been on his second tour of duty under Bloomberg. Even the fact that mayors are reluctant to appoint new people to the job shows how powerfully politicians avoid risk in managing crime in New York.
? When, in 2015, a microtrend of topless, painted women started charging tourists in Times Square to take photos with them, the voices of reaction in the city cried out: Here we go again. The bad old days are back! (The mayor quietly moved to get rid of the women.)
VI
America is a wrathful land. Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers. We like to heap marks of shame upon them, to watch them groan and writhe beneath their sins, as far back as the scarlet letter and the stocks. We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric—prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment—the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy. No one else really comes close.
And we are, of course, the only rich democracy that hands out the ultimate punishment: death. Year after year, when the dead around the world have been tallied, the beheadings and the hangings and firing squads and lethal injections, we join Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Somalia, North Korea, and China.
This isn’t simply a manifestation of the democratic desires of Americans, our collective desire to see “them” pay. Surprisingly, public opinion data from Europe shows fairly strong popular support for the death penalty, despite the fact that the practice is banned in the EU. In Britain 50 percent support the death penalty. In France it’s 45 percent.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Bloodlust from the crowd is a common trait; every country on earth has experienced some form of it. In a democracy, the politics of crime present the possibility of vigilantism by other means. Imagine a referendum, Pontius Pilate style, for every person convicted of, say, child molestation. How many would vote for death? We insulate criminal procedure from direct democracy precisely because of the corrupting force of the will of the people. We don’t give child molesters death sentences, but that’s not because such a sentence wouldn’t meet, under the right conditions, with majority approval.