The Fast and the Curious

Merely three years after I revealed here in Taki’s Magazine that both the Ferguson Effect of the mid-2010s and the Floyd Effect of the 2020s had driven up not just homicides but also traffic fatalities, The New York Times has gotten around to noticing that the recent big increase in driving deaths had something to do with George Floyd.

Of course, the Times launches its 4,000-word article “Traffic Enforcement Dwindled in the Pandemic. In Many Places, It Hasn’t Come Back. The retreat has happened as road deaths have risen” the same way it neuters its explanations of these decades’ parallel rise in shootings: by attributing it to the pandemic rather than to political and cultural choices by elite institutions like, say, The New York Times. {snip}

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But, gingerly, reporters Ben Blatt and Emily Badger start raising the subversive possibility that this rise in road carnage wasn’t solely caused by Covid:

This decline [in traffic stops], seen in an Upshot analysis of local law enforcement data, accelerated a shift that began in many places before the pandemic, suggesting that the police have pulled back from a part of their job that has drawn especially sharp criticism. To many communities, traffic stops have led to racial discrimination, burdensome fines and deadly encounters—not road safety. But the retreat of law enforcement from American roadways has also occurred against the backdrop of a rise in road fatalities.

The authors point out that traffic fatalities increased from 2019 to 2022 in 27 of America’s 30 largest cities.

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Finally, in the ninth paragraph, they admit it wasn’t just the pandemic, but that the sacred memory of George Floyd might also have played a role:

Today’s picture suggests, rather, that as the police have responded to both the pandemic and cries for reform after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, they have also withdrawn from their role pulling over speeding cars and reckless drivers.

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Well, there are a few obvious steps an analyst can take to disentangle.

First, you can break out who died in traffic accidents during the Ferguson and Floyd Effects.

The CDC tracks the causes of all deaths in the United States with a six-month lag. Today you can look up the demographics of fatal motor vehicle accident victims from 1999 through the end of 2023.

Let’s compare the era of the Floyd Effect—June 2020 to December 2023—to the same 43 months a decade earlier—June 2010 to December 2023—which was before either the Ferguson or Floyd Effect.

Total motor vehicle deaths among non-Hispanic whites went up 9 percent.

That’s bad. Car crash carnage should be falling steadily.

But traffic fatalities among African Americans grew an appalling 78 percent.

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Second, there’s the remarkable correlation during the Ferguson Effect and, especially, the Floyd Effect between road deaths and homicide deaths.

Up until Ferguson, whites had a slightly higher per capita car accident death rate than did blacks {snip} But blacks pulled far ahead in June 2020.

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Deaths by homicide grew 17 percent among whites from 2010–2013 to 2020–2023 but 71 percent among blacks, even though blacks started with a radically higher rate of dying violently (usually at the hands of other blacks).

Why the correlation? That’s likely because traffic stops are the most common way the cops discourage both bad driving and carrying illegal handguns.

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If the cops are not pulling over as many drivers anymore due to George Floyd and the mostly peaceful protests, why not risk driving just because your license is suspended, nobody will insure you, you have several outstanding warrants, you have fake license plates, you’re driving a stolen car, and you need to carry your Glock everywhere in case you run into that guy you’re going to shoot for dissing you on Instagram?

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