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Officials Debate Whether ‘Ferguson Effect’ Is Real

WASHINGTON — A rift widened Wednesday within the Obama administration over the politically charged question of whether a surge in crime in some cities reflects the reluctance of the police to confront suspicious people because of increased public scrutiny of their behavior.

“I think there’s something to it,” Chuck Rosenberg, the acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told reporters at a news conference.

Mr. Rosenberg said he sensed “more trepidation” among the police about confronting people for fear of ending up in a video controversy like the kind that have become common in cities nationwide in the last year.

“Rightly or wrongly, you become the next viral video,” he said, adding that “now you can do everything right and still end up on the evening news.”

Mr. Rosenberg became the second top federal law enforcement official in two weeks to wade into the debate over the so-called Ferguson effect, named after the Missouri city where the fatal police shooting of a black teenager, Michael Brown, led to months of protests.

James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, said in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School last month that he was concerned about “a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year.”

But the White House has distanced itself from that notion, and some officials there and at the Justice Department felt that Mr. Comey’s remarks undermined their efforts to hold the police more accountable for civil rights abuses, while revealing a division within the administration that threatened to become a political distraction for President Obama on a major criminal-justice issue.

Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Comey’s description of the impact of increased scrutiny on the police was not a cause of rising crime rates in some cities. “In fact, you hear law enforcement leaders across the country indicating that that’s not what’s taking place,” he said.

Mr. Obama met with Mr. Comey at the White House last week, and he said in a subsequent interview with NBC News that “we have not seen any evidence of that” when he was asked about the Ferguson effect.

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Remarks by Chuck Rosenberg, the acting chief of the D.E.A., diverged from the stance of the Obama administration.Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images

The White House and the Justice Department had no comment Wednesday on the comments by Mr. Rosenberg, a longtime prosecutor who worked for Mr. Comey at the F.B.I. as his chief of staff and is personally close to him.

While national crime rates remain well below peaks in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a number of cities — including Washington, Baltimore, Milwaukee, New Orleans and St. Louis — have seen a troubling spike in murders so far this year. Criminologists and law enforcement officials have struggled to explain the increases.

Mr. Rosenberg said that based on his recent conversations with unnamed police officials in local departments, he sensed that some officers had become “reluctant to engage in certain situations” because of the fear of ending up in a videotaped confrontation, even if the use of force was justified.

He declined to talk about specific cases, but he said that Hollywood films have given the public a false sense of an officer’s ability to end a confrontation by simply shooting a gun out of a suspect’s hand or disabling him without deadly force.

When an officer decides the use of force is justified, he said, “you shoot to kill.”

“That’s what you do,” he added.

He acknowledged that it would be hard to measure whether officers had become more reluctant to approach suspicious people, whether the Ferguson effect really exists, and whether it is driving a rise in crime.

But he said that the issue deserves closer attention, and he called Mr. Comey’s comments “spot on” in drawing attention to a difficult issue.

“If there is a Ferguson effect — and it’s hard to measure — how do we at least talk about it with each other?” he asked.

Mr. Rosenberg made his comments as he released his agency’s annual findings on the use of drugs in the United States.

The findings showed an increase in the illegal use of heroin and controlled prescription drugs as well as persistent and wide use of methamphetamine. Mr. Rosenberg said that because many street drugs are supplied by Mexican cartels and other violent international gangs, the ability of law enforcement agents to effectively confront armed or violent criminals is critical.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Officials Debate Effect of Scrutiny on Police . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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