According to the Wikipedia entry for the Ferguson effect:
The term was coined by Dotson [chief of the St. Louis police] in a 2014 column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dotson said in the column that, after the protests in Ferguson caused by the shooting of Michael Brown that August, his officers had been hesitant to enforce the law due to fears of being charged, and that “the criminal element is feeling empowered” as a result.
The St. Louis police department has a website where you can download crime statistics and we can create a table of homicides in St. Louis by year:
| year | deaths by homicide | rate | population |
| 2009 | 153 | 49.4 | 309659 |
| 2010 | 148 | 46.3 | 319305 |
| 2011 | 114 | 35.7 | 319144 |
| 2012 | 124 | 38.8 | 319085 |
| 2013 | 130 | 40.7 | 319002 |
| 2014 | 157 | 49.4 | 317976 |
| 2015 | 183 | 58.0 | 315584 |
| 2016 | 188 | 60.0 | 311404 |
| 2017 | 202 | 65.1 | 310015 |
With an homicide rate that high St. Louis would be among the most violent cities in the world. Charting the montly homicde deaths makes the crime increase obvious.
In some cases there wasn’t an increase in crime, but the previously decreasing trend did stop. It’s always possible that people did not want to contact the police after Ferguson. It’s still important to note the change in trend.
Interestingly, there seems to have been no change in trend in Auto Theft
