I had speculated in 2016 “Is There a ‘Ferguson Effect’ Behind Rising Highway Deaths?”: https://www.unz.com/isteve/is-there-...ighway-deaths/
Presumably, much of what’s going on is a belated rebound from the rise in gasoline prices in the later 2000s and the ensuing Great Recession, which cut miles driven and drove a lot of marginal drivers (e.g., teens, illegal aliens, etc.) out of owning a car.
As commentators have suggested, maybe the spread of smartphones is making us more distracted drivers?
But still…is this related to the Ferguson Effect that has been driving up homicides over almost precisely the same time period?
Are cops policing the streets and highways less proactively, spending more time in the donut shop, because they don’t want to wind up on YouTube as the face of Implicit Bias and Systemic Racism Against Black Bodies?
But we didn’t have data broken out by race back then so I couldn’t pursue the question.
During the first three years of the pro-cop Trump administration, traffic fatalities per miles driven, like murders, drifted downward.
But then came the pandemic and the racial reckoning. Police stops declined in March 2020 as cops socially distanced, and then went lower in the summer as The Establishment indulged in an anti-police hissy fit.
For example, the Associated Press articulated this month:
Traffic stops and arrests resulting from those stops declined sharply in Missouri last year due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Black motorists were still far more likely to be pulled over and arrested, according to a report released Tuesday. For arrests, 3.7% of white motorists who were pulled over were arrested, compared to 4.61% of Black drivers who were pulled over. Those percentages were actually an improvement. In 2019, Black drivers were 95% more likely to be pulled over by police in Missouri, and 36% more likely to be arrested.
In other words, according to the AP, the law arresting fewer criminals is an “improvement,” so long as they are black criminals.
Not surprisingly, the murder rate in St. Louis was the worst in the country in 2020.
About the time last summer that the Associated Press started reverentially referring to blacks as “Blacks” (but continued to spell whites as “whites”), evidence began piling up that blacks had become a little too thrilled by their new image as morally deserving to be above the law.
Mass shootings at black parties exploded as the thought of a black man being dissed (by another black) became increasingly intolerable in an American culture that now values black self-esteem above all.
Could it be that between the declining fear of being pulled over, the explosion in black feelings of exuberance and entitlement, not to mention the stimulus checks, blacks just started driving more recklessly?
Back in 2005, I was intensely denounced by ethical paragons such as John Podhoretz for observing that blacks “need stricter moral guidance from society.”
Well, we’ve since tried telling blacks that they are morally better than whites.
How’s that working out for all concerned?
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-racial-reckoning-on-the-roads/
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