The blowback has begun. After the Black Power and urban revolts of the 1960s, policy wonks and politicians gave us law and order, super-predators, and mass incarceration in response. Now, after major and ongoing protests after the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and others, the powers that be have launched a new counteroffensive centered on the “Ferguson Effect.”

The “Ferguson Effect” is the charge that a new, violent crime wave is emerging and is directly traceable to protests against police brutality. Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute rose the specter of a rising tide of criminality and homicide across the nation.

“The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness,” she argued, “is the intense agitation against American police departments. Since last summer the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today.” The result, she said, is the purported “Ferguson Effect,” as cops disengage from “discretionary” and “proactive” policing under “the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric.”