By Rob Ingersoll
Greetings, Dear Reader,
Welp, another Memorial Day in the can.
Was it insufferable online? Absolutely.
Let’s get into it.
WE NEED A GEORGE FLOYD MEMORIAL DAY
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey knows exactly who and what to remember on Memorial Day.
So does Cory Booker.
Yes, that’s right, George Floyd. Floyd died of an overdose and the first casualty of his death was Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who was wrongly imprisoned for murder in a bogus show trial. Really he was turned into an avatar for the left’s hystericism over racism that’s in large part or wholly apparitional.
Another 25 to 41 deaths occurred in the riots that followed, depending on who’s doing the counting. Most of those deaths were black people. Many were attempting to protect themselves or their businesses from violent rioters.
Obviously these Memorial Day genuflections to objectively shitty person George Floyd pissed off anyone to the right of Nancy Pelosi online, which was most of X (at least, from my vantage point).
And while I sometimes cringe at the over-the-top veteran worship, by the numbers, as of May 2026, 7,000+ troops had been killed in the “war on terror” Bush launched in 2001.
The stat reminded me of something.
You remember how brainwashed both liberals and conservatives were during the height of Black Lives Matter? The entire movement was kicked off by a series The Washington Post created tracking the deaths of black men at the hands of police.
At the story’s absolute height of saturation, staggering percentages of both liberals and conservatives believed police were slaughtering black men in battalion numbers.
More than 7,000 troops killed in combat since 2001. In 2022, just 11 unarmed black men were killed by police. My guess is, if I spot checked all 11, somewhere close to 11 police killings would have been legally justified. Maybe one or at best two might have been questionable. “In 2019, 9 unarmed black people were shot and killed by police while on duty, compared with 19 whites, in a country of over 330 million people.”
Rather than a rebuke, that’s a stunning endorsement of modern policing.
As I thought about these competing ideologies on Memorial Day – both insufferable in different ways – I wondered about another number.
Since the Michael Brown “hands up don’t shoot” lie had been perpetrated on the public and public policy officials, there’d been a hypothesis known as “the Ferguson effect.” Ferguson, if you remember, was where Brown was shot and killed after robbing and beating up a bodega worker and then attempting to beat up a cop. (The ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ lie was eventually debunked by the Justice Department, which found that the shooting of Michael Brown was “justified” because he posed a threat, but only after the false claim that Michael Brown was murdered was widely peddled on CNN and other liberal media.)
Wider media has continuously denounced the “Ferguson effect” as fake news. Just more conservative fever dreams.
There are peer-reviewed and highly-cited studies, however, documenting this “fever dream.”
One on the National Institute Of Health website tracked increases in homicide and assault in 44 cities after Brown’s death:
“21 of the 44 cities experienced a significant increase and one had a significant decrease. The pooled effect was a 26.1% increase in the homicide (99% CI: 15.3% to 36.8%). Aggravated assaults increased above baseline, though the effect was 15.2 percentage points smaller (99% CI: -26.7 to -3.6) than the effect in homicides”
Another published at the University of Utah after George Floyd was killed concluded (emphasis mine):
A close analysis of the emerging crime patterns suggests that American cities may be witnessing significant declines in some forms of policing, which in turn is producing the homicide spikes. Crime rates are increasing only for a few specific categories—namely homicides and shootings. These crime categories are particularly responsive to reductions in proactive policing. The data also pinpoint the timing of the spikes to late May 2020, which corresponds with the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis and subsequent anti-police protests—protests that likely led to declines in law enforcement.
This line from the Utah study was particularly compelling:
If this thesis is correct, it is reasonable to estimate that, as a result of de-policing during June and July 2020, approximately 710 additional victims were murdered and more than 2,800 victims were shot.
These findings largely mirrored findings by Harvard’s Roland Fryer a few months earlier:
This paper provides the first empirical examination of the impact of federal and state “Pattern-or-Practice” investigations on crime and policing. For investigations that were not preceded by “viral” incidents of deadly force, investigations, on average, led to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime. In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by “viral” incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies.
Let me put the above paragraph in simpler terms.
Post-police shooting investigations of “pattern or practice” that are not a reaction to a frothing BLM mob result in better policing. Investigations that are a reaction to mob pressure – like the one that led to Derek Chauvin’s incarceration – “caused almost 900 excess homicides” and “almost 34,000 excess felonies.”
Fryer, a world renowned researcher in police action, used the word “caused.” Not “contributed to” or “correlated with,” but “caused.”
I wanted to know the total toll of a 10-year range, from 2014 to 2024. So I plugged these and other similar papers into Grok. I demanded a methodology, then a body count range.
Grok estimated that of the 35-40,000 excess homicides – that is, more homicides than occurred the previous year – between 2014 and 2024, somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 could be “plausibly attributed to the Ferguson effect.”
Meaning demoralized, defunded and/or unjustly attacked police forces that pulled back operations in high-crime areas caused that many deaths due to spikes in criminal activity. Again, those deaths were primarily black and brown people and usually the most vulnerable, elderly, women and children.
I took all of Grok’s work and dumped it into ChatGPT for a cross check. Chat, like Grok, was skeptical but willing to process the partial numbers and take an educated guess.
So Chat did likewise. Methodology and a range of 3,000 to 8,000.
Twenty-five years of war claimed the lives of 7,000 troops.
Here at home, in just 10 years time, the Ferguson effect claimed the lives of, let’s say midrange, 5,000 people, overwhelmingly black.
That means left-wing activism and the media that supports and promulgates it have been roughly twice as deadly to black people than the Taliban or Al Qaeda could ever hope to be to American troops.
Mychal Moultry, 4, was visiting family in Woodlawn near Chicago in 2021. He was hit by stray bullets through a window while getting a haircut inside a home. He died two days later.
In May 2021 in Minneapolis, Jacob Frey’s own city, Aniya Allen, 6, was super excited when her mother pulled into McDonalds. She was shot in the head by a stray bullet while in the backseat during crossfire between groups. Case unsolved years later.
In St. Louis, June 2020, David Dorn, 77, a retired St. Louis police captain, was shot and killed while responding to a burglary alarm at a friend’s pawn shop during looting amid the 2020 unrest.
D’Uwan Morgan, 14, was fatally shot by a stray bullet while playing video games inside his bedroom in north St. Louis County. Bullets came through the window during an argument outside between groups of teens.
Whitney Brown, 24, was standing outside her car with her friend Devon Fletcher, 28, in St. Louis in 2015 when a gang started shooting at rivals. Bullets struck both Brown and Fletcher, killing them. Brown’s five-year old was in her car and witnessed the slayings.
Those are just six people. They’re real people. Multiply that sorrow by 1000 and you’ve got the death toll of BLM activism and anti-police media reporting.
So let’s steal Jacob Frey’s idea. Let’s take Cory Booker’s sad George Floyd tweets and run with them. Let’s do a George Floyd Memorial Day the Tuesday after Memorial Day.
Let’s remember the literally thousands of innocent bystanders, overwhelmingly black themselves, victimized and killed as a result of Black Lives Matter.
