Submitted by: Terry Payne
April 25, 2022
Six years of BLM Killed More Blacks than 86 Years of Lynchings
By Ronald J. Kozar <https://www.americanthinker.c
In 2014, the number of black American murder victims was 6,095
<https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-
anded-homicide-data/expanded_h
hnicity_and_sex_2014.xls> . Then, after the August 2014 killing of Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, anti-police protests and riots began, federal
officials
<https://www.pbs.org/newshour/
ation-oppressive-abusive-citin
rioters brought heightened scrutiny to police practices, BLM began its
career
<https://www.pewresearch.org/i
r-emerges-social-activism-on-t
<https://www.usnews.com/news/a
eaths-add-scrutiny-to-broken-w
police morale plummeted
<https://www.usatoday.com/stor
cops-reluctant-make-stops/9644
began to surge, never to return to 2014 levels.
The "excess" murder victims from 2015 through 2020 who were black -- that
is, the additional black victims each year beyond the 2014 baseline -- add
up to 11,005. Compare that to the number of lynchings during the heyday of
Jim Crow. According to the Tuskegee Institute, the number of blacks lynched
from 1882 through 1968 was 3,446
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
0Tuskegee%20Institute%20has%20
20of%20blacks.> .
Here are the numbers of black murder victims from 2014 through 2020:
Year No. of Blacks Murdered "Excess" Victims
2014 6,095 --
2015 7,039 944
2016 7,881 1,786
2017 7,851 1,756
2018 7,407 1,312
2019 7,484 1,389
2020 9,913 3,818
The numbers come from the FBI, though the FBI report for 2020 was visible
online for only a short time in 2021. Crime analyst Jeff Asher
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/
reported the 2020 figures before the FBI took the report down
<https://www.heritage.org/crim
-want-you-know-about-2020s-rec
One might object that 2014 is an unfairly low baseline against which to
compare the ensuing years. 2014 seems a natural starting-point for the
analysis, as that was the year of Ferguson and the founding of BLM. But the
homicide figures in 2014 represented an historic low, a fact that might make
the "excess" death figures for the ensuing six years look artificially high
by comparison. With the rise of "stop and frisk
<https://www.nbcnews.com/think
worth-remembering-rush-critici
homicides had been trending downward each year
<https://www.factcheck.org/201
minor exceptions, from 1992 through 2014.
But even if one were to pick a more typical pre-Ferguson year, the analysis
would not be much different. Take 2010
<https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-
hrtbl01.xls> , for example, the first full year of Obama's presidency, when
the number of black murder victims totaled 6,470. If "excess" black murder
victims from 2015 through 2020 were gauged against a baseline of 2010
instead of 2014, the number would be 8,755. That still vastly outstrips the
3,446 blacks killed by lynch mobs from 1882 through 1968.
Another objection might concern the inclusion of 2020 in the analysis. That
year saw the biggest annual increase in the number of post-Ferguson murders.
The 3,818 "excess" murders of blacks that year alone exceeds Tuskegee's
86-year tally for lynchings of blacks. But 2020 was also the first year of
the pandemic. Many commentators argue
<https://www.politico.com/news
that the big jump in the homicide numbers that year had more to do with the
lockdown <https://econofact.org/crime-i
governmental shutdown of the nation's economy than with policy choices urged
by BLM.
But 2020 was also the year of George Floyd. His death in police custody
triggered a wave of protests and riots
<https://www.nytimes.com/artic
widespread and violent than those seen over the four years before it. Only
after Floyd's death did the push to defund police departments
<https://abcnews.go.com/US/def
d/story?id=74296015> , an idea hitherto confined to the most radical margins
<https://www.politico.com/news
lainer-316185> of public life, become a mainstay of urban Democrats. The
result was not a break with the Ferguson Effect but an enlargement of it.
The ensuing sanctification of Floyd
<https://uscatholic.org/articl
vilification of police
<https://www.usatoday.com/stor
olice-departments-have-long-hi
pullback in police presence
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/
-11626969547> in the most troubled neighborhoods and a further increase
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/
its.html> in police retirements and resignations, a Ferguson Effect on
steroids.
The murder statistics for that year point to the politics of Floyd's death,
not to the pandemic, as the cause of the 2020 surge. Before Floyd's death,
the pandemic lockdown had driven crime rates not higher, but lower than the
year before
<https://www.marketwatch.com/s
d-lockdowns-and-stayed-down-11
some localities, with April 2020 homicide totals in New York City
<https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nyp
pril-2020> and Chicago
<https://www.nbcchicago.com/ne
l-police-say/2264894/> , for example, showing a slight uptick from the year
before. (Since 2015, Chicago had been experiencing its own local variation
of the Ferguson Effect, namely the "ACLU Effect
<https://psmag.com/social-just
after Floyd's death on May 25, homicides surged, and remained far in excess
of 2019 totals for the rest of the year. Conservative writer Steve Sailer
graphed
<https://www.takimag.com/artic
-per-day/> the weekly gun-death figures for 2020 gathered by the Gun
Violence Archive <https://www.gunviolencearchiv
the seven-plus months from Floyd's death through the end of 2020 saw 50.5
murders a day, a 41% increase upon the 35.7 murders per day for the
corresponding period a year before. Mainstream sources corroborate
<https://www.bloombergquint.co
y-on-young-black-men> the timing of the post-Floyd surge, even if they do
not comment on the obvious correlation.
It is seldom easy to reliably identify the causes of social trends, but even
a child can connect the dots where the increase in murders since 2014 is
concerned. The communities most afflicted by violent crime have sent an
unmistakable message, through their protests, their rioting, and the
pronouncements of their elected tribunes, that the police practices that
brought the crime rate down after 1992 must end. Democracy, alas, has
worked exactly the way it's supposed to, with voters telling elected
officials what to do, those officials telling the police what to do, and the
police obeying. And anyone can see the results.
The most puzzling question is not what caused the surge in murders, but why
the people most victimized by that surge are so heavily devoted
<https://civiqs.com/results/bl
true&zoomIn=true&trendline=tru
the support of large majorities of black voters, the curtailment of "broken
windows" policing and the reduction of police budgets would never have
occurred. But for the decisions of black voters, most of those 11,005
"excess" black victims might well be alive today.
******************************
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Terry Payne
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