The 'other' Ferguson effect

Jesse Singal at NYMag says the murder rate is going up, for whites and blacks, for different reasons. And the researcher he talks to endorses a "Ferguson effect," but different from how it's usually defined. There's a crisis of police legitimacy that is enabling the bad guys.

The Ferguson effect is a thoroughly politicized concept at this point, because it contains an implicit rebuke of the protests that exploded in the wakes of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and other young black boys and men who have been unjustly killed by police. The thinking goes that all those angry, loud protesters are making it harder for police to do their jobs. 

But there’s another way of looking at this: It could be the case that yes, deteriorating relationships between communities and the police are helping drive the increased homicide rate, but that things go in the other direction. That is, some communities have come to view the police with such profound anger and fear that their members are less likely to seek out the assistance of law enforcement, and this is making it easier for people to get away with murder.

So how do we know which Ferguson effect might be causing the spike in murders?

A rather ingenious study lead-authored by Matthew Desmond, a MacArthur-winning sociologist at Harvard (and the author of the truly excellent 2016 book Evicted), lends some solid support to this hypothesis. As I explained in a study write-up, Desmond and his colleagues obtained detailed emergency-call data from the city of Milwaukee, and showed that after a horrific, high-profile event in which a group of police brutally assaulted a young black man, 911 calls appeared to be significantly depressed in black neighborhoods relative to what Desmond and his colleagues’ number-crunching suggests they should have been.

We need for the police to be seen as legitimate enforcers of law in the communities where they serve. It matters. But that legitimacy earned, and easily forfeit.

The other takeaway: White on white crime is a BIG driver of the rising murder rate.

Rosenfeld and his co-authors explain that increases in the white homicide and homicide-victimization rates are a big part of the story here — “the growth in the non-Hispanic white victimization rate was greater than in any year since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack.” In fact, according to some calculations Rosenfeld ran for me, the increase in the white murder rate drove a large chunk of the overall increase. “If white homicides had not increased from 2014 to 2016, the 2016 homicide rate would have dropped from 5.3 per 100,000 population [in 2016] to 4.8 per 100,000, 9.4% lower [than the actual rate],” he said in an email, meaning the overall trend would look quite different and less worrying.

It's hard to avoid the thought we're entering an ugly era.

No, the New York Times isn't normalizing Nazis.

Yes, this story could be better — for it to have some meaning, we'd get some insight as to why Tony Hovater became a Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizer. But the critics go further, saying that the story "normalizes" Nazis.

I dunno. Not sure how you can read this and think "gosh, that's normal":

Or this:

It's true, the story doesn't spend a lot of time screaming "this is bad!" But I suspect that's because the NYT editors know their audience probably doesn't include a lot of Nazi sympathizers, or even many folks who are Nazi agnostic.

When bad cops get fired and rehired

Great Washington Post piece about Gene Gibbons, a lawyer with remarkable success in getting bad cops rehired by the same police departments that deemed them unfit for duty. The un-shocking thing? He's from Philadelphia. His origin story is a little bit unexpected, though.

For Gibbons, an affable, barrel-chested man, the path to becoming an advocate for embattled police officers began when he was a teen growing up outside Philadelphia in the early 1980s. 

Then 16, Gibbons was driving home in the family station wagon when a Philadelphia police officer pulled him over. Gibbons sat quietly while the officer ran his license. When he returned, the boy asked the officer why he had been stopped. Gibbons said the officer abruptly punched him in the face and told him to go home.

“I was stewing mad,” he said. “The police had tremendous power.”

So, naturally, he made a career of ... enabling those abuses of power. Huh.

Anyway, there are lots of examples in the story of officers who had long documented patterns of bad behavior who got their jobs back anyway. Important thing to note: The examples are from Florida, which is renowned for its "sunshine" laws. In most states, police unions have persuaded legislatures to close such records to the public, making it very difficult for the public to know about problems in their local department. Police, who keep the rest of us accountable to the law, are practically immune to any such accountability themselves.

The book I'm most thankful for in 2017

Buzzfeed checks in with writers to find out which books they're most thankful for.

First, I'm thankful to be back in the book-reading business in a serious way. I had a nasal reconstruction surgery this year that largely alleviated some sleep deprivation issued I'd had in recent years. I'm able to concentrate on an enjoy long-form reading again.

Second: The book I'm thankful for this year is Alan Jacobs' "How to Think."

Here's what I wrote on Facebook after completing it:

Finished reading Alan Jacobs' "How to Think" after two days. It's that good (and also that slim - about 160 pages). I want to sit with it a couple of days before writing about it more, but it gets at some thoughts I've had since the Trump Election and how I've tried - with varying degrees of success (and by "varying," I mean outright failure at times) - not to write off people with whom I have disagreements. 

Mostly it boils down to: They are human. With different journeys than I have. If I had made their journey, maybe I'd think the way they think. And having made my own journey, I might be blind sometimes - almost assuredly am - to errors in my own thinking. 

This doesn't mean I'm wrong or my Trump Voter friends are right, nor does it mean there is no truth to strive for - no right or wrong - but it does mean we are occasionally limited in our capacity to know it. And knowing those limits, it's good open our ears to people who think differently: We may never change our minds about anything, but to be somewhat open to the possibility is to be alive and self-aware and striving to be bigger and better than you are. 

That's my hope, anyway.

I'm currently reading Stephen L. Carter's "Civility." It shares some themes with Jacobs' book. I'll share more in the near future.

Why are Dems opposed to Trump's tax reform bill?

The Weekly Standard seems genuinely mystified.

Bringing U.S. corporate taxation in line with that of our global peers will spur the sort of broad-based growth that the Obama administration’s central planners could never achieve and that will benefit middle-income families quite as much as “the wealthy.” 

Ahem.

The first question was straightforward. Would they agree that if the US passed a tax bill “similar to those currently moving through the House and Senate,” GDP would be “substantially higher a decade from now”? Of the 42 economists polled, only one thought the Republican bill would boost the economy. The plurality said it wouldn’t, and the remainder were uncertain or didn’t answer.

Back to the Standard:

But the House bill, at least, contains some needed simplification: It cuts the number of brackets from seven to four, abolishes the estate tax, and gets rid of arbitrary breaks for such things as medical expenses, student-loan interest, and rehabilitating a historic home.

So. The promise of economic growth seems like a promise that might not materialize for the middle class or anybody else — but the loss of "arbitrary breaks" that help the middle class, for medical expenses and student loan interest — are pretty clear. The payoff may not come, but the sacrifice definitely will. This isn't that confusing.

No nondisclosure agreement for Congressional misconduct settlements

Probably the first time I've ever agreed with Andrew McCarthy:

Our public officials are supposed to be accountable and transparent, especially when they are expending public money. It is thus outrageous that Congress has made this cozy arrangement to sweep under the rug malfeasance by members of the club. There is no legal or policy reason to refrain from legislation that would out the lawmakers involved in misconduct settlements — regardless of the type of misconduct (I wouldn’t limit it to sexual episodes). 

Donald Trump's race problem

Donald Trump's supporters really want the public not to think he's racist, Vox reports, but Trump himself isn't really helping the cause.

Even before Wednesday morning, Trump’s blows to Lynch and Ball fit into an ongoing pattern of the president’s use of sports and the behavior of athletes of color as a battlefield for a culture war waged on behalf of his supporters. In Trump’s envisioning, black athletes are showing contempt for the country through displays of blatant disrespect and lack of explicit gratitude, a framing that his critics have called out for being little more than a thinly veiled racial dog whistle, one that is rooted in Trump’s troubled history on racial issues.

Understand, it's not just that Trump criticizes black athletes. Remember, he's refused to condemn folks like David Duke or the Charlottesville white supremacist marchers — or done so in a belated, churlish, "fine folks on both sides" way. The combination of who he criticizes and who he refuses to criticize seem pretty telling. All the excuse-making by his conservative media allies can't really cover that up.