Revisiting the Ferguson effect: Law enforcement perception of recruitment in the post George Floyd era
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14613557221074988 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Original Research Articles |
Revisiting the Ferguson effect: Law
enforcement perception of recruitment
in the post George Floyd era
Christopher Copeland
Tarleton State University, USA
Alex del Carmen
Tarleton State University, USA
Olga B. Semukhina
Tarleton State University, USA
Abstract
Mainstream media have argued that prolonged and harsh criticism of police officers prompted by death of Michael Brown
at the hands of Ferguson police has had a major negative effect on the US law enforcement community. This phenomenon,
known as the “Ferguson effect”, was exacerbated in the following years by the availability of other violent public–police
interactions propagated through social media. The academic literature found almost no evidence that the Ferguson effect
had any impact on crime rates and only limited evidence that it resulted in de-policing in the United States. Missing from
this conversation is research on how the Ferguson effect impacted the ability of police departments to maintain staffing
levels and recruit new officers nationwide. This article fills this gap in the research literature by examining levels of officer
retention and recruitment from an organizational perspective. Police chiefs in Texas were surveyed about their percep-
tions of the Ferguson effect on department recruitment and retention efforts. The results found that the Ferguson effect
is related to increased difficulty in officer recruitment but its impact is relatively small when compared with traditional
recruitment challenges such as limited budgets and competitive job markets. The findings also reported no impact of the
Ferguson effect on police departments’retention issues. This article discusses these findings within the scope and context
of George Floyd’s death and current civil rights issues in the United States.
Keywords
Ferguson, policing, Texas, officers recruitment, officers’retention
Submitted 2 Sep 2021, Revise received 1 Nov 2021, accepted 23 Dec 2021
Introduction
The death of an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, on 9
August 2014 at the hands of local police inadvertently
changed the landscape of US public–police relationships.
Followed by a series of other fatal shootings of African
Americans by local police officers and accompanied in
several cases by video footage,
1
Michael Brown’s death
has brought profound public criticism to local law
enforcement entities while straining already difficult rela-
tionships between police and minority racial groups
(Weitzer, 2015). The term “Ferguson effect”was coined
Corresponding author:
Olga B. Semukhina, Department of Criminal Justice, Tarleton State
University, 10850 Texan Rider Drive, Fort Worth, Texas, USA.
Email: semukhina@tarleton.edu
Original Research Article
International Journal of
Police Science & Management
2022, Vol. 24(3) 261–272
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14613557221074988
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