One reason Donald Trump is president is because of the Obama administration’s own goal in setting off a major murder wave in Ferguson in 2014, in an era when both technology and prosperity should have been lowering the death toll from crime.
So how did the Trump administration do at fighting crime in 2017?
I only pay attention to homicide numbers, because other crimes can be ignored. If the cops in your town have retreated to the doughnut shop to escape Justice Department oversight, you might not bother reporting a porch pirate stealing your Amazon delivery. But a body with a hole in it demands official attention.
The FBI won’t release its 2017 murder statistics for many months. But to shed light on the important question of how the Trump administration is doing, I’ve sifted through year-end local newspaper reports and police department databases from the 51 biggest municipalities in America.
The impact of the Ferguson Effect is statistically vivid in Ferguson’s neighbor St. Louis, where the number of homicides ranged from 113 to 120 from 2011 to 2013. Then in 2014, when the Obama administration and the prestige press took the side of anti-police rioters in promoting the Michael Brown fake news, homicides jumped to 159. Killings numbered 188 the next two years, and in 2017 had reached 205 by Dec. 29.
While St. Louis used to be the fourth-biggest city in America back when it hosted the 1904 Olympics, it is now merely the 61st-largest city, with only 311,000 people. So St. Louis’ murder rate (65.8 per 100,000 in 2017) is now 27 times that of increasingly utopian San Diego (2.4), the least murderous of the country’s fifty biggest cities.
By the way, St. Louis has a slightly smaller population than the entire country of Iceland, which is currently shaken by an outbreak of murder most foul. From Iceland Magazine:
Unusually high number of homicides in 2017 a cause for concern
JAN. 8 2018
More murders were committed in Iceland in 2017 than any time since 2004. Last year four people, two men and two women, were murdered. In recent years the murder rate has been 1–2 people each year.
Similar to St. Louis (although not to Iceland), Baltimore had 211 homicides in 2014. But then in March 2015 came the Freddie Gray/BLM riots and the vengeful indictment of six cops, all of whom have since walked. Killings jumped to 344 that year, followed by 316 in 2016, and 343 last year.
The Ferguson Effect arrived in Chicago in late November 2015, when Chicago’s government finally released the video of the bad shooting of Laquan McDonald. Homicides grew from 468 in 2015 to a savage 762 in the final year of getting the community organized by ex–community organizer Barack Obama.
