It completely ignores the elephant in the room

Provocatively reported but underlying argument appears increasingly true. From Homicide Rate is Rising? Do Tell! by John Hinderaker.

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On August 9th, 2014, Michael Brown was shot to death in self-defense by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown had robbed a store, was stopped by the officer, then attacked the officer, attempted to steal the officer's gun (discharging the gun in the process), refused instructions and charged the office in one last attack. Despite the repeated findings by local, state, and Federal authorities that this was a justified shooting, the media and agitators attempted to represent the death as a police brutality issue, a race issue, and a general indictment of society.

The anti-police movement, Black Lives Matter, had their origins in the protests following Brown's death. In the following couple of years, there were repeated attacks and assassinations of police in select cities across the nation. In response to BLM efforts, a number of cities, including, perhaps most notably, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and others, rescinded broken windows policing and adopted much more passive policing strategies.

It has been argued since then that relaxation of proactive policing would, and was, leading to a rise in crime in general and shooting deaths in particular in those locales which had elected to abandon active policing. This became known as the Ferguson Effect:

The Ferguson effect is the idea that increased scrutiny of police following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has led to an increased crime rate (or sometimes increased murder rate) in major U.S. cities. The mechanism usually suggested is that police have less vigorous enforcement in situations that might lead to backlash, though other mechanisms are suggested. The term was coined by Doyle Sam Dotson III, the chief of the St. Louis police, to account for an increased murder rate in some U.S. cities following the Ferguson unrest.

As Wikipedia notes,

The concept has been criticized by some academics and politicians, including former President Barack Obama, as being inaccurate or non-existent.

Three months after Ferguson and the first instances of steep rises in urban crime where police were being sidelined, there was fair argument whether the data was accurate, whether there were confounding variables, whether there was sufficient data to warrant identification of a trend, etc. Three months, sure. Six months? Yeah. Twelve months, well.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is never a sufficient argument, but four years later, as Hinderaker points out (and has been covered by others such as Heather Mac Donald), the data, the causal arguments and the forecasts are all aligning together.

Effective policing makes a positive difference.

Reduced policing leads to increased crime.

Gun control makes no causal difference.

The increase in crime is localized to those areas which have chosen to reduce their policing.

The Ferguson Effect is real and consequential.

It follows from this that those, such as BLM, who advocate for reduced policing are indirectly advocating for increased crime, and in particular violent crime in already fragile communities. It also follows that those who seek to increase local gun control as a solution are chasing a wild goose.

Guns, policing strategies, economic development, societal norms, violence, mental health, etc. are all complex, loosely coupled systems which make it difficult in the near term and with small data sets to come to strong prescriptive conclusions. Long duration, more sizable data sets are much more revealing. And they reveal that reality does not comport with unicorn ideologies.

Which is kind of Hinderaker's point. He is faulting CNN from shying away from the conclusion arising from the facts that it is presenting.

CNN’s article is actually relatively fair. It quotes a pro-gun advocate, who has much the best of the argument. For example:

“Consider that between 2007 and 2016, the number of concealed carry permits in the country rose by 256%, and yet the murder rate dropped almost 10% and the violent crime rate dropped almost 20% (as seen in the FBI’s figures here),” [Erich Pratt] wrote.

But what is remarkable about CNN’s article is that it completely ignores the elephant in the room. It never tries to explain what caused the rising homicide rate, beginning after 2014, merely quoting another expert to the effect that “What is most volatile over time and space is gun homicides.” Not really: the homicide rate, which mostly means the gun homicide rate, had been falling steadily since the 1990s, until 2015. While not trying to ascribe a cause, CNN does acknowledge that the uptick beginning in 2015 has been concentrated in a handful of cities.

Indeed. Just because BLM's campaign preceded relaxation of policing strategies and just because relaxed policing strategies preceded increase violence does not necessarily mean that one thing caused the next caused the next.

But after four years of consistent data and fulfilled forecasts and the fact that the violence increases primarily only in the areas where policing was relaxed, it is not unreasonable to lend credence to the proponents of the Ferguson Effect and call doubt upon the social justice arguments.

It is reasonable, but ideological convictions are hard lenses to see through.