STUDY FINDS MURDER RATES GO UP DRAMATICALLY IN CITIES AFTER BLM PROTESTS
by Kevin Ryan
The recent controversy over the police shooting of a 16-year-old girl who was attacking another girl with a knife has highlighted questions over the police use of force, and led to a discussion over what would have happened had the policeman not been there.
The incident in Ohio drew harsh criticism from Black Lives Matter, who point out that the girl who was killed would not be dead if the policeman was not there. Other observers, however, say that the police officer’s action may have prevented a murder, and that the girl she was attacking would be dead if the police officer had not been there.
New research may actually help answer the question of what would happen if police were not there to stop incidents like that.
The study from The University of Massachusetts concludes that a decrease in policing after BLM protests led to a big increase in murders that far outpaced a much smaller decrease in police-involved shootings.
The researchers found that cities that experienced BLM protests experienced a combined 300 fewer deaths by police shootings in the 5 years following the protests. But that decrease was dwarfed by an additional 1,000 to 6,000 murders that occurred in those cities.
Researcher Travis Campbell is by no means biased against BLM, and says he believes the data does not capture other positive impacts of the BLM protests. But he said his data suggested that BLM protests result in “less police effort and less proactive policing,” and such a shift may happen because police “back down” from enforcement in the face of public backlash.
Other researchers and studies have reached similar conclusions. A separate study of the so-called “Ferguson effect” found that murders and robberies rise 10% to 17% in cities following a “high-profile” police killing. And Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton University who has done seminal research on the effect of protests, said the results are consistent with existing research.
The reasons for the rise in murders are not fully known, but one possible explanation is that police reduce their efforts when facing nationwide scrutiny. This theory is backed up by a 5.5% decrease in the number of property crimes solved, which is consistent with reduced policing following a protest.
Researchers also speculate that people call the police less often following a shooting or protest, which emboldens criminals and allows the commission of more unfettered crime.
But this also has the effect of reducing police-involved shootings, since a police shooting obviously cannot occur if police are not at the scene of the crime.
Other theories on why BLM protests might decrease police shootings include police departments changing policies due to public pressure, by increasing the adoption of body cameras and improved training, for example.
But not all cities experienced declines in police shootings following protests: Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco, and St. Louis all experienced increases during the five-year period Campbell studied.
It’s important to note that the study only looks at impacts of the BLM protests from 2014 to 2019. The huge protests from last summer and subsequent skyrocketing in murder rates have not yet been included in the research.
If they had been, it’s likely they would show an even larger “Ferguson Effect” and further verify what happens with fewer police or less policing: killings by police fall because there are fewer police, but murders soar… because there are fewer police.
SOURCES:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097
After a spate of protests touched off by high-profile incidents of police use of force, there has been a renewed focus on whether public scrutiny shapes policin
papers.ssrn.com
