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Merely three years after I revealed here in Taki’s Magazine that both the Ferguson Effect of the mid-2010s and the Floyd Effect of the 2020s had driven up not just homicides but also traffic fatalities, The New York Times has gotten around to noticing that the recent big increase in driving deaths had something to do with George Floyd.

Of course, the Times launches its 4,000-word article “Traffic Enforcement Dwindled in the Pandemic. In Many Places, It Hasn’t Come Back. The retreat has happened as road deaths have risen” the same way it neuters its explanations of these decades’ parallel rise in shootings: by attributing it to the pandemic rather than to political and cultural choices by elite institutions like, say, The New York Times. After all, the Times’ 10 million subscribers don’t pay good money to have their worldviews undermined:

In the early days of the pandemic in 2020, traffic stops by the police plummeted around the country…. By the end of 2023, the police in Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they did prepandemic.

But, gingerly, reporters Ben Blatt and Emily Badger start raising the subversive possibility that this rise in road carnage wasn’t solely caused by Covid:

This decline [in traffic stops], seen in an Upshot analysis of local law enforcement data, accelerated a shift that began in many places before the pandemic, suggesting that the police have pulled back from a part of their job that has drawn especially sharp criticism. To many communities, traffic stops have led to racial discrimination, burdensome fines and deadly encounters—not road safety. But the retreat of law enforcement from American roadways has also occurred against the backdrop of a rise in road fatalities.

The authors point out that traffic fatalities increased from 2019 to 2022 in 27 of America’s 30 largest cities.

They then offer subscribers something of a trigger warning:

It’s hard to draw a straight line from the decline of enforcement to the rise of road deaths, but their likely connection has unsettled researchers, safety advocates and police officials.

Finally, in the ninth paragraph, they admit it wasn’t just the pandemic, but that the sacred memory of George Floyd might also have played a role:

Today’s picture suggests, rather, that as the police have responded to both the pandemic and cries for reform after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, they have also withdrawn from their role pulling over speeding cars and reckless drivers.

The phrase “Black Lives Matter” never appears in the article (and the word “black” only once), but the Times does get up the courage to mention the cultural turning point when BLM emerged in the media:

And the share of Americans who say they have been pulled over has fallen since at least the late 1990s in a periodic federal survey tracking contacts between the police and the public. That share has dropped in particular since 2015, after the police shooting death the prior year of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

“The decline in traffic enforcement predates Ferguson by probably 10 years or more—that’s an important thing,” said Jeff Michael, a former longtime official at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who now studies road safety at Johns Hopkins University. “But Ferguson certainly had an effect. That’s without a doubt. Ferguson, and everything after.”

That is apparent in Ferguson itself, among some other cities.

Traffic stops are down 88 percent in Ferguson since the Obama Justice Department, unable to document its accusation that the inner suburb’s underpaid police department was racist, denounced it for running a speed trap. Not surprisingly, motorists in Ferguson are now speeding more.

And dying more. Traffic deaths on the main drag through Ferguson have almost tripled since Ferguson.

The journalists continue trying to break it gently to loyal readers that the Times hasn’t been giving them the full story when it kept blaming everything bad that happened in the 2020s on Covid:

In data from this era, it’s hard to separate the effects of the pandemic from the demands for reform, or to know if policing patterns might have bounced back from the first shock had the second never happened.

Well, there are a few obvious steps an analyst can take to disentangle.

First, you can break out who died in traffic accidents during the Ferguson and Floyd Effects.

The CDC tracks the causes of all deaths in the United States with a six-month lag. Today you can look up the demographics of fatal motor vehicle accident victims from 1999 through the end of 2023.

Let’s compare the era of the Floyd Effect—June 2020 to December 2023—to the same 43 months a decade earlier—June 2010 to December 2023—which was before either the Ferguson or Floyd Effect.

Total motor vehicle deaths among non-Hispanic whites went up 9 percent.

That’s bad. Car crash carnage should be falling steadily.

But traffic fatalities among African Americans grew an appalling 78 percent.

That blacks have become much worse drivers over the past decade seems newsworthy to me, but nobody else will touch the story.

A half century ago, blacks weren’t bad drivers. Street racing was more of a thing among white working-class kids, as in American Graffiti, Grease, and Bruce Springsteen songs. But in this century, while young whites have lost interest in cars, young blacks have felt a growing need for speed.

This cultural shift might be interesting to readers, but it’s apparently considered in poor taste to mention it because it violates the most sacred rule of the prestige press in this century: Never say anything critical of blacks.

Second, there’s the remarkable correlation during the Ferguson Effect and, especially, the Floyd Effect between road deaths and homicide deaths.

Up until Ferguson, whites had a slightly higher per capita car accident death rate than did blacks (note that whites drive more miles on average, but this graph is per capita, not per mile). But blacks pulled far ahead in June 2020.

The shape of homicide victimization trends is strikingly similar:

Deaths by homicide grew 17 percent among whites from 2010–2013 to 2020–2023 but 71 percent among blacks, even though blacks started with a radically higher rate of dying violently (usually at the hands of other blacks).

Why the correlation? That’s likely because traffic stops are the most common way the cops discourage both bad driving and carrying illegal handguns.

But the article never mentions the concurrent explosion of black-on-black shootings in the days following George Floyd’s demise. That the War on White Supremacy waged by all nice people drove up both car crashes and murders is presumably one red pill too many for even the bravest New York Times article.

Third, in no other major country did either traffic deaths or murders go up notably in 2020 because, while many foreign elites paid lip service to the racial reckoning, nobody else’s ruling class were so stupid as to shoot their country in the foot by sponsoring an actual cultural revolution.

Fourth, a study by the Automobile Association of America found:

Drivers without valid licenses accounted for almost the entirety of the increase in driver fatal crash involvements in May–December 2020 relative to the corresponding forecast.

While deaths were up less than 1 percent among drivers with valid licenses, they shot up 45 percent among those without.

How come?

Depolicing.

If the cops are not pulling over as many drivers anymore due to George Floyd and the mostly peaceful protests, why not risk driving just because your license is suspended, nobody will insure you, you have several outstanding warrants, you have fake license plates, you’re driving a stolen car, and you need to carry your Glock everywhere in case you run into that guy you’re going to shoot for dissing you on Instagram?

In conclusion, this article on the car crash catastrophe of the 2020s is intellectually unimpressive by the standards of Taki’s Magazine’s coverage of the issue. But by the standards of The New York Times of the 2020s, it’s a vast step forward.

So, congratulations to the authors.