Black Lives Matter blamed for cops pulling back causing a spike in murders of African-Americans

The number of black Americans murdered in 2020 jumped by 32 percent – with an expert blaming BLM protests for the huge spike by scaring-off cops.  

Killings across racial demographic have swelled by 30 percent between 2019 and 2020, the largest increase since 1905, but blacks have borne the larger impact of that deadly trend, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime report.

In 2020, 9,941 African Americans met their death at the hand of another human being, compared to 7,484 the year before, an increase of 2,457 murders.

Murders of whites jumped 21 percent from 2019 to 2020, from 5,787 to 7,043. 

And Hannah Meyer, from think-tank the Manhattan Institute, says widespread ‘defund the police messaging’ further worsened the murder rate among black people.  

She believes that the widespread ideology – combined with real cuts to multiple police departments – prompted cops to withdraw from policing areas with high crime, where lives could have potentially been saved. 

Meyer also said that the COVID pandemic could not be blamed for the spike, and attributed it directly to the crime wave that followed in the wake of Floyd’s death.  

In the year that the pandemic began 7,043 white people were murdered, but black deaths still outpaced white deaths by nearly 3000 that year.

Considering whites make up 76 percent of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census bureau, compared to the 13 percent black population, the trend is even more troubling.

Broken down over the 50 states, the data shows that those areas with the lowest black populations, like Montana and South Dakota, saw the number of murders climb more than 80 percent, according to FBI stats. 

Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and California murder rates all jumped at least 36 percent between 2019 and 2020. New York homicides jumped 47 percent.

This trend has been consistent over the years. In the 10-year period between 2010 and 2019, there were 5,954 whites killed each year on average, 16 percent fewer than the number of black victims.

There were an average of 6,927 black Americans were killed each year during that decade, roughly a thousand more blacks each year. In total, about 43 percent more blacks were killed than whites over that 10-year time span.

Protesters lit buildings on fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin after the police involved shooting of Jacob Blake in August 2020

George Floyd was seen in a video pleading that he couldn’t breathe as white officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee against his neck for nine and a half minutes 

Hannah Meyer, the director of policing and public safety at the conservative Manhattan Institute, who worked in the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau for five years, believes that the bloody trend was spurred on by the Black Lives Matter protests that began after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and Freddy Grey in Baltimore, Maryland at the hands of police. 

But the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota by Officer Derek Chauvin, accelerated the problem, she said.

‘Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 followed a pattern of spiking violence that we’ve seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray,’ Meyer told Fox News. ‘This pattern has been termed the ‘Ferguson Effect’: police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously.’

The term ‘Ferguson Effect’ was coined by St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson and has come to refer to law enforcement taking a less aggressive approach to policing, especially in minority communities after police-involved fatalities. 

A grand jury declined to charge Wilson after he shot Brown (pictured) on August 9, 2014. Civil rights leaders and Brown’s mother had hoped that Bell, St Louis County’s first black prosecutor, would reopen the case after he took office in January 2019

The shooting happened after Wilson (pictured) told Brown and a friend to get out of the street as they walked down the middle of Canfield Drive on a Sunday afternoon. A scuffle between Wilson and Brown ensued, ending with the fatal shot. Wilson said Brown came at him menacingly, forcing him to fire his gun in self-defense

Meyer also blamed criminal justice reforms, like the kind that have taken place in New York, Pennsylvania and California for the increase in violent deaths.

‘In NY, statewide changes to the bail laws that went into effect in 2020 prevented judges from holding a huge range of defendants in jail pre-trial and effectively prevented judges from considering dangerousness in the decision to set bail. The rate of felony among defendants out of jail pre-trial who prior to ‘bail reform’ has been estimated at 43 percent. That is a significant number,’ she told Fox News.

Meyer’s Manhattan Institute colleague, Heather MacDonald, believes that the authority of the law has been undermined by the revelations of excessive force.

‘George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May was justly condemned,’ MacDonald told Fox. ‘But the event has now spurred an outpouring of contempt against the pillars of law and order that has no precedent in American history.’ 

Are alternative theories circulating around think tanks and in criminal justice research circles pins the blame for the increased violence on the pandemic and the economic imbalance in the US and the increase in gun sales.

Crime in Baltimore surged after Freddy Gray, pictured, died while in police custody in 2015. Six officers were charged, but later cleared, with their treatment sparking anger by anti-brutality campaigners and police unions 

The FBI named Baltimore as one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate of 58.3 per 100,000 people compared to the national average of 5 murders per 100,000, according to the latest FBI data released in September 2020

‘I’m not surprised at all that we had an increase in crime,’ Georgia State University criminology professor Volkan Topalli told Politico last year. ‘Criminologists and public health people were saying that that was going to be the case as soon as they heard about the pandemic.’

A University of California survey found that 110,000 state residents purchased guns in 2020, 95,000 more than the year before.  

‘These are particularly high-stress times,’ Professor Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, who lead the gun study, said. ‘When you add a firearm into those situations it adds particularly fatal risk.’