Protestors keep complaining that no one is listening to them. So they keep protesting. Some even think that more action is necessary, like property damage, rioting, and violence, to get people’s attention.

They are wrong. They have people’s attention, but unfortunately, because of the ill-considered methods they are using to protest, the consequences are more negative outcomes.

Take for example, the Ferguson Effect. This is the “theory” that police have reduced their policing in violent crime areas to avoid being attacked themselves, or most likely to having their every move questioned, videoed, and put up for public consumption on the evening news. Some criticize the Ferguson Effect as not being real. There is nowhere like Chicago to prove this criticism false.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW6BnXM3g70

This week in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s city, a female police officer resisted drawing her weapon on a suspect who was high on PCP and eventually beat her so badly that she lost consciousness and ended up in the hospital. Two other officers were also injured trying to arrest the man at 10 o’clock in the morning. Why were they trying to arrest him in the first place? He was trying walk away after he ran his car into a storefront window. Surveillance video here.

So why wasn’t more force used, when it probably would have been justified? The female officer, a veteran of seventeen years on the force, said “[s]he didn’t want her family or the department to go through the scrutiny the next day on national news.”