By Robert VerBruggen
Monday, April 12, 2021
Last week, Vox spotlighted some results from an important new study
by Travis Campbell.
The study looks at the effects of Black Lives Matter
protests, using data that end in 2019 (and thus do not include the George Floyd
protests last year). The good news is that the protests did seem to reduce
police-involved homicides in the places where they occurred — by maybe 15 to 20
percent, relative to trends elsewhere — and also led departments to adopt body
cameras and community policing. The bad news is that the protests also
coincided with an increase in murder, by somewhere around 10 percent, and reduced
the employment of black officers.
Since everyday murders are so much more common than
police killings, these effects produce a lopsided death toll: perhaps 300
police homicides prevented, vs. 1,000–6,000 more murders.
This study isn’t gospel. It’s the work of a Ph.D. student
and has not yet been peer reviewed and formally published, and of course even
published studies are hardly infallible. It’s also limited in various ways,
including the time period and the fact that, by comparing individual areas with
each other, it sidelines the question of what nationwide impact
the protests had.
But at this point, more than half a decade out from
Ferguson, the evidence is strong that the cycle we’re trapped in — police
killing, followed by intense and sometimes violent protests, followed by crime
spikes as cops back off — is not serving anyone well. We need both careful
police reform, and an activist class that’s pickier in choosing its battles.
In city after city, violence has exploded after policing
incidents went viral. Baltimore broke its murder record following the Freddie Gray
incident, and its murder rate has yet to return to normal. Chicago had a surge in gun violence upon the release of the Laquan
McDonald video. Minneapolis experienced what Charles Fain Lehman called an “unprecedented spike in gun assaults” following the George
Floyd protests. At the national level, murder rose in 2015 and 2016 after decades of declines, and
shot up again in 2020, especially over the summer.
These patterns are backed up not only by the new study,
but also by a paper last year from Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer.
Rather than focusing on BLM protests per se, Devi and Fryer studied the effect
of “pattern or practice” investigations of police departments. These
investigations usually reduce crime, they found. But in the
five cases where the investigations were set off by viral incidents, crime rose
instead, resulting in 900 excess homicides.
There is also evidence that depolicing is part of what
connects these incidents and protests to increases in violence. The new study,
for example, finds that property crimes reported to the police fall after BLM
protests — which likely happens because the community trusts police less and
fails to report crimes, not because actual property crime is down. The police
themselves make arrests in a lower share of reported property-crime cases.
Devi and Fryer similarly found decreased police activity
following many of the viral incidents they studied: “In Chicago, the number of
police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the
investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In
St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.”
So where does that leave all of us? I would suggest three
changes can help: Activists should choose their cases carefully, legislators
should address activists’ legitimate concerns, and police departments should
find ways to keep police activity up even when officers are under scrutiny.
Americans have a First Amendment right to protest the
government’s actions, and police who use force without justification need to be
held to account. Further, I think it’s clear, both from the new study and just
from watching the police-reform debate over the past decade, that protests can
change policy. But when protests can themselves turn violent, and when they can
set off crime increases that cause far more deaths than bad policing does,
activists might want to choose their cases and their tactics more carefully.
After all, some of these protests, from Ferguson, Mo., to Kenosha,
Wis., ended in violence and were based on misleading-at-best accounts of the
incidents that triggered them.
Meanwhile, as I’ve detailed in the past, there are ways we can improve
policing and better hold police accountable without demonizing and demoralizing
cops across the board — and without reducing legitimate police activity (which
increases crime, and which no demographic of Americans wants). We can curtail
“qualified immunity,” limit the power of police unions, require body cameras,
and more aggressively weed out bad cops. We can improve training, restrict neck
holds, and expand community violence-prevention programs with strong evidence
behind them. If we bring down overall crime rates and reduce unjustified police
shootings, we take away some of the impetus for these protests.
And since reduced policing in the wake of viral incidents
seems to be part of the puzzle here, departments should explore ways of
combating this pattern, including disciplining cops who refuse to do their
jobs. Yes, it’s human nature to slack off when you feel targeted and
unappreciated. No, that’s not a good reason to let criminals run wild killing people.
Right now we seem caught in a doom loop, where police
violence — some of it justified, some of it not — sparks protests, depolicing,
and crime, until the next viral incident comes along. The bodies only keep
piling up as we struggle to find a way out.
No comments:
Post a Comment