Panic USA!

From ‘welfare queens’ to ‘anchor babies’ — Here are 12 of the most idiotic racist moral panics:

...This phenomenon has reared its ugly head again with the Ferguson Effect, a panic that that Blacks Lives Matter movement and its “heightened rhetoric” are somehow leading to an increase in police murder and crime. This latest wave of baseless innuendo has all the elements of a classic racist moral panic: an uncritical media, old stereotypes and dubious “trends” backed up by little or no evidence. It’s presently being floated by everyone from the Daily Beast to the New York Times to the Telegraph, but has thus far proved to be a total myth. No one, including the Harris County sheriff who recently suggested a link, has shown any proof of a connection between any killings and the Black Lives Matter protests. Executive director Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice nonprofit, recently told Think Progress that the Ferguson Effect is a “dangerous concept” that “gets us back to the era of the 1980s when police had crime policy developed by soundbites and anecdotes...”