By Steve Sailer
01/01/2021
Earlier: Homicides In St. Louis: From the Ferguson Effect to the Floyd Effect
Ferguson, Missouri, an inner suburb of St. Louis, had the misfortune of being the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement in August 2014, and thus St. Louis was also the birthplace of the Ferguson Effect. St. Louis was catapulted into the national lead for highest murder rate from 2014 through 2019.
Unlike its main rival for the title of Murder Capital of America, Baltimore, where killings were stable this year, St. Louis was hit with a second Ferguson Effect in 2020 due to the revival of Black Lives Matter by the media. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
ST. LOUIS — On the last day of 2020, St. Louis leaders read 262 names aloud from a church podium — each name representing a person killed in the city over the previous 12 months. Their deaths brought the city’s homicide rate to a level 30% higher than any of the past 50 years, records show. …
Three years ago I wrote in Taki’s Magazine:
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.
So now, 2020 murders are up 262 in St. Louis (with New Year’s Eve gunplay yet to be tallied) compared to 113–120 before Black Lives Matter. Back to the Post-Dispatch:
St. Louis’ homicide rate hit 87 murders per 100,000 residents in 2020,
So, at this rate, if you set out to live 75 years of your life in St. Louis, you’d have a 6.5% chance of being murdered? I’m not sure that’s exactly how the statistics work (does anybody have a better way of calculating?), but it’s still an eye-opening figure.
the highest on record since 1970. The figure exceeds the previous top rate of 69 set in 1993, when the growing number of killings made headlines in local and national news.
That year registered the most total homicides in the city — at 267 — but St. Louis has about 87,000 fewer residents now. …
City leaders and criminologists said the economic, civic and interpersonal stress the coronavirus pandemic has created likely have driven a nationwide spike in crime in the nation’s large cities.
The Establishment Media declaring that George Floyd’s death justifies a Racial Reckoning had nothing to do with it!
But in St. Louis, by 2019 the homicide rate has already topped large U.S. cities for six years straight, making a spike particularly deadly here.
In other words, St. Louis started its current run as America’s Murder Capital in 2014, the Year of Ferguson.
Black Lives Matter has a lot of blood on its hands by now.
Why do I care? I guess I’m just some kind of weird extremist who is Anti-Murder.
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