Obama warns police officers against 'cherry-picking' crime data

Barack Obama cautioned an audience of police officers against cherry-picking crime data as policing experts said they would investigate whether less aggressive policing tactics may have driven an increase in crime, a controversial theory dubbed the “Ferguson effect.”

“We do have to stick with the facts,” the president said in a speech on Monday to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “What we can’t do is cherry-pick data or use anecdotal evidence to drive policy or to feed political agendas.”

Obama spoke to law enforcement leaders after the White House and the FBI director sparred over the existence of the Ferguson effect and whether it has impacted crime.

The president said that violent crime rates this year appeared to be nearly as low as last year, despite headlines proclaiming that violent crime was rising dramatically nationwide. Multiple large cities have seen an uptick in violence, prompting some to point to the “Ferguson effect” as the explanation.

The Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group, is planning to study whether the phenomenon exists and, if it does, whether it has an impact on criminal activity, Jim Bueermann, the organization’s president, told the Guardian.

Bueermann, a former police chief of Redlands, California, said he was hopeful the research would provide a definitive answer about whether police had retreated following protests and increased scrutiny, causing a rise in crime.

“We are attempting to study this right now to try to add some scientific knowledge to whether this effect exists or not,” he said, at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in Chicago. “There is a dearth of good scientific evidence.”

The “Ferguson effect” theory has re-emerged in public debate this week as FBI director James Comey reaffirmed his support for the hypothesis while the White House distanced itself from the controversial theory, which several policing experts say is based on no concrete evidence. Comey admitted on Monday that he had only anecdotal proof to support the theory, which he said was “common sense.”

In addition to calling for a reliance on data, Obama made an appeal for gun safety laws to keep police officers safer and called for criminal background checks for gun purchases.

“It’s too easy for criminals to buy guns and that makes your already dangerous job far more dangerous than it should be,” he said Monday.

The president also reiterated his support for criminal justice reform.

Prof Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri-St Louis said Comey had access to data that could shed light on violent crime and its causes but was choosing not to release it.

Rosenfeld, a criminologist specializing in the causes of violent crime, said the FBI should release its Uniform Crime Report data monthly, instead of yearly, to allow a more up-to-date sample of data to analyze. He said there was not yet enough data to indicate a nationwide increase in violent crime, and much less to explain why the increase is happening.

“I don’t reject the argument out of hand,” Rosenfeld said. “All I’m saying is we have ways of actually evaluating it and the FBI has information, and I just wish they would release it.”

Rosenfeld released a report earlier this year analyzing crime trends in St Louis and concluded there was little evidence to show that a “Ferguson effect” was driving an increase in crime.

The theory was coined last year by Sam Dotson, the police chief of St Louis, Missouri. Dotson said that following intense unrest over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in his city’s suburb of Ferguson, police were disengaging from frontline work and the “criminal element is feeling empowered”.

It has been further fueled by increases in some serious crimes such as homicides in some major cities such as Baltimore, Milwaukee and Atlanta. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, declared in May that America’s “two-decades-long crime decline may be over”.

Several other analysts have produced data to rebut the theory, however. And at a White House briefing on Monday, press secretary Josh Earnest said available evidence “does not support the notion that law enforcement officers around the country are shying away from fulfilling their responsibilities”.

“On the contrary,” said Earnest, law enforcement officials were reporting that officers were “dedicated public servants, who on a daily basis are putting their lives on the line to serve and protect the communities that they’re assigned to.”

Some police leaders speaking at the IACP conference were also cautious in joining Comey’s endorsement of the “Ferguson effect” theory.

“My officers are working, I absolutely know that,” Chicago police chief Garry McCarthy said at a press conference on Monday. “I don’t think officers are cutting down on their enforcement. How could it possibly be if they’re taking more guns off the streets?”

Bueermann said the scope of the Police Foundation’s study had yet to be determined, but that it would analyze raw data from police departments and interviews with officers and community members. He said the study would likely focus on cities with an apparent or reported increase in crime that has been attributed to de-policing.