The Retreat to the Donut Shop

A new story out of New Jersey shows that few still get how the Ferguson/Floyd Effects work.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

FF/FX: The Floyd-Ferguson Effects

Steve Sailer

December 11, 2024

Source: Bigstock

A fascinating recent example of what I call cops retreating to the doughnut shop began in July 2023 when the New Jersey State Police largely stopped issuing traffic tickets for six to eight months after being accused once again of racial profiling, with the result that, surprise, surprise, car crashes went up.

That the police are highly political in the sense of paying close attention to trends in thought among civilian leaders and influencers is a point I’ve made repeatedly over the past decade.

This is, on the whole, a good thing. We give cops guns and badges, so it’s better if they pay attention to what nonpolice leaders say they want.

But it also means that civilians need to think hard about the realities of policing. The Establishment utterly failed at that in 2020 and evidently hadn’t learned their lesson by 2023 in New Jersey.

You can’t expect the police to just do less of what you don’t want and more of what you want. Their job entails trade-offs.

So, if you tell the cops to stop hassling blacks as much, they’ll do it…by pulling everybody over less. After all, they mostly can’t see who is in the car, especially not at night. So, what else can they do?

Read the whole thing there.