Sparks flew during a CNN segment Tuesday night after 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky said the “Ferguson effect” and less police presence in communities leads to spikes in violent crime.
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson coined the term “Ferguson effect” in 2014 following the fatal police-involved shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which hypothesizes that a decrease in police activity leads to a surge in violent crime. Girdusky argued that the “Ferguson effect” and the death of George Floyd led to a surge in black male deaths in response to CNN’s Abby Phillips’ criticism of former President Donald Trump calling on the involvement of the military to suppress the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots in the summer of 2020.
“There are the post-George Floyd riots [that] resulted in 15,000 black male deaths in this country,” Girdusky said.
“How?” CNN political commentator Bakari Sellers asked.
Girdusky said there was less police presence at the time of the 2020 riots because officers feared for their jobs at the time, leading to a surge in violent crime.
“The surge of violent crime, it was like Ferguson effect, the Ferguson effect and the Floyd effect … Because what happens is after the Ferguson riot and after the Floyd riot, policemen in fear of their jobs many times and political coverage, pull back from their jobs resulting in crime size,” Girdusky said.
“Ryan, hold on, hold on. Ryan, we got to stop you there because you’re literally making a connection out of your own conjecture,” Phillips said. “You can not just do that.”
CNN published a piece in October 2015 titled, “FBI chief tries to deal with the ‘Ferguson effect,’ which details former FBI director James Comey linking a rise in violent crime to a decrease in police activity.
After Phillips quieted the panel down, Sellers said a surge in riots and violent crimes cannot be blamed on the deaths of black men.
“That literally, and my point to you is, that makes no sense,” Sellers said. “And I would argue to you that I’m not coming from a perspective where I want fewer police. I want police actually to be paid more, I just want better police, more qualified police, I want there to be a database where police, if they commit bad acts, they can’t just go from one department to the next. That’s criminal justice reform.”
Phillips then pointed out that Trump was president during Floyd’s death and the BLM riots, leading Girdusky to say that the president does not control local police departments.
“You’re trying to blame crime on Joe Biden, but you’re saying that people who died when Donald Trump was president, that’s not his fault?” Phillips asked. “I don’t agree with either, [with] blame being assigned to either president. I think presidents don’t have a magic wand and they don’t control crime from the White House. But if you’re gonna say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible for a rise in crime.”
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“I didn’t blame Joe Biden,” Girdusky said.
Crime became a major political issue in the aftermath of the BLM riots and leading into the 2024 election.
Vice President Kamala Harris supported the defund the police movement that sprung from the BLM riots right before becoming then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate. She also supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund in a May 2020 blog post urging for the bailing of rioters.
After she joined the 2020 presidential ticket, Harris’ then-press secretary Sabrina Singh said Harris did not support defunding police.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do not support defunding the police, and it is a lie to suggest otherwise,” former Harris press secretary Sabrina Singh said in October 2020, according to CNN. “Throughout her career, Sen. Harris has supported increasing funding to police departments and boosting funding for community policing.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.