FBI chief again says Ferguson having chilling effect on law enforcement [View all]

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FBI chief again says Ferguson having chilling effect on law enforcement
Wesley Lowery
Washington Post

Twice in recent days, FBI Director James B. Comey has stepped to a podium here and asserted that police across the nation are reluctant to aggressively enforce the law in the post-Ferguson era of smartphones and YouTube.

Comey, nonetheless, stayed the course, telling thousands of police officials gathered here for a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police that a violent crime wave is gripping the nation’s major cities. And he suggested that police officers themselves are in part to blame, made gun shy by the prospect of getting caught on the next video of alleged police brutality.

His comments have been interpreted as giving credence to the notion of a “Ferguson effect” — the theory that riots and racial unrest in places such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where police killed civilians, has prompted police officers to become more restrained. That, in turn, has theoretically resulted in an uptick in violent crime as criminals become emboldened.

Comey acknowledged Monday that he has little evidence to support the theory.

“The question is, are these kinds of things changing police behavior around the country? The honest answer is: I don’t know for sure whether that’s the case,” he said, but he added that “I do have a strong sense” it’s true.

In his speech, Comey also contradicted what has been the administration’s stance on the incarceration of thousands of men and women in the 1980s and 1990s related to the national drug war.

“Each drug dealer, each mugger, each killer and each felon with a gun had his own lawyer, his own case, his own time before judge and jury, his own sentencing, and, in many cases, an appeal or other post-sentencing review,” Comey said. “There were thousands and thousands of those individual cases, but to speak of ‘mass incarceration,’ I believe, is confusing, and it distorts an important reality.”

This is all kinds of fucked up, right? Police brutality leads to people protesting about it, so cops back off and crime rises? Is this dog-whistle racism or just racism? Why does this person still work for the FBI?