From Salon:

Beware the murder stats: Why the right will use them to smear Black Lives Matter and how the left can fight back

WEDNESDAY, SEP 14, 2016 12:12 PM PDT

Forthcoming FBI statistics will likely reveal a murder uptick in 2015, but it wasn’t caused by Black Lives Matter

DANIEL DENVIR

It is a fact that murder rates in many cities rose last year. The full nationwide picture, however, will only become clear on Sept. 26, when the FBI publishes its 2015 crime data. As it turns out, that’s the same day as the first presidential debate, as Lois Beckett observed at The Guardian. The data will convey a lot of information, and a fast-moving political circus will likely engulf it in confusion.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, running a hysterical law-and-order campaign, will likely point to a rare fact to bolster his case. Other conservatives, who since last year have blamed urban bloodshed and the murders of police officers on Black Lives Matter, will no doubt claim vindication. But reporters shouldn’t let anyone get away with such quick inferences. The overall murder rate is still way down from the worst years of the early 1990s, and the current spike is being driven by a small number of cities.

A recent New York Times analysis found that the murder rate rose sharply in 25 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, confirming a trend identified in a June report for the National Institute of Justice conducted by criminologist Richard Rosenfeld. Experts estimate that the FBI will report a nationwide increase of between 6 percent and 13 percent, according to Beckett. Numbers, however, don’t speak for themselves.

Many conservatives have been peddling a theory known as the “Ferguson effect,” which posits that Black Lives Matter protests are causing the police to pull back from doing their jobs, leading to increased crime. Such commentators and some credulous reporters will claim that this data proves their case. But the Ferguson effect theory, aimed at delegitimizing the movement against police violence, remains as unsubstantiated and implausible as ever. What follows is a handy guide for fighting politically motivated disinformation in the weeks and months to come.

The Ferguson effect doesn’t make any sense

The Ferguson effect theory, as I wrote in June, doesn’t make sense because it lacks a plausible causal theory as to how so-called de-policing (to the extent that it has taken place) leads to more people shooting one another to death.