The reasons for this rise in murders are not fully known! Really?

A fascinating example of almost willful blindness on the part of a journalist.  

The initiating event is the publication of Black Lives Matter's Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-Force by Travis Campbell.  Campbell is looking at the Ferguson effect from 2014 to 2019 and therefore has not addressed the 2020-2021 BLM and Antifa rioting which has been more extensive than the post-Ferguson protests.  From the Abstract:

Has Black Lives Matter influenced police lethal use-of-force? A difference-in-differences design finds census places with Black Lives Matter protests experience a 15% to 20% decrease in police homicides over the ensuing five years, around 300 fewer deaths. The gap in lethal use-of-force between places with and without protests widens over these subsequent years and is most prominent when protests are large or frequent. This result holds for alternative specifications, estimators, police homicide datasets, and population screens; however, it does not hold if lethal use-of-force is normalized by violent crime or arrests. Protests also influence local police agencies, which may explain the reduction. Agencies with local protests become more likely to obtain body-cameras, expand community policing, receive a larger operating budget, and reduce the number of property crime-related arrests, but forego some black officer employment and college education requirements.

Not mentioned in the Abstract is that in the same five year period after Ferguson, murders increased dramatically.  Changes in policing practices caused 300 fewer police initiated deaths but this came at a cost on an increase of up to 6,000 additional murders.  It is a trade-off situation.  Reducing policing causes 300 fewer police initiated deaths but reduced policing leads to 6,000 more murders.  

If your goal is public safety, you don't change anything.  300 police shooting deaths buy you 6,000 fewer murders.  You might not like the brutal reality of the equation and wish that there could be zero officer initiated deaths, and it is not unreasonable to expect that additional training and/or better equipment and communications might help, but there is no evidence that that is the case.

The Washington Post started a database of officer involved killings after Ferguson which fills a critical hole in our data.  They track every published news account of an officer involved killing.  

Despite all the reforms and policing changes in many cities subsequent to the Ferguson riots, year in and year out, the number of officer involved killings has hovered at right around 1,000 deaths a year.  Despite reforms.  Despite officer body cameras.  Despite training improvements.  Despite population growth.  

Policing is inherently dangerous.  Police have the acknowledged right of self defense.  Criminals and the mentally ill pose a risk to themselves, the police and the public.  But no one has found a way to reform the police and not have an increase in murder.

We are now in a period of new data generation.  The protests and riots after George Floyd's death were more violent, larger, and more extensive in terms of number of cities affected than after the Ferguson riots.

And as night follows day, cities are reporting murder rates up 50-150% compared to the year before.  Reduced policing leads to increased murder.  

The irony is that among the 1,000 routine deaths by police in any given year, the great majority of them, all tragic, involve violent armed actions by the descedants against the police.  We can lament the 950 deaths but the armed violence of those resisting arrest make it at least somewhat comprehensible.

What drives much of the outrage are the rare instances where the descedant is not armed.  How could the police have shot someone who was not armed?  The answer of course is that you do not need to be armed in order to be potentially mortally dangerous.  The cases of police killings where the victim is both unarmed and not violently resisting arrest are vanishingly few.

What was striking to me though, was not the research.  That merely better quantified what has already been reasonably well established.  It was the mainstream media response.  In this case from Vox with The effects of Black Lives Matter protests by Jerusalem Demsas.  Demsas captures the main point that BLM protests decrease the number of officer caused deaths but dramatically increases the number of civilian initiated murders.  

There is a studied ignorance in the reporting which is pretty stunning.  

The reasons for this rise in murders are not fully known, but one possible explanation is that police morale drops following scrutiny, leading officers to reduce their efforts and thereby emboldening criminals. Another is that members of the public voluntarily withdraw from engagements with the police after a police homicide delegitimizes the justice system in their eyes. 

We do know the mechanisms for the rise in the murder rates.  Loss of police morale is indeed an element but there are some more critical forces in play in most locations.  BLM protests, particularly in 2020-2021 have led to a series of proposed actions in most cities.

• Defund the police
• Dispense with due process and fire officers involved in a shooting prior to investigation and prior to a jury decision.  
• Tighten the leash on police activities such as patrols, stop and frisk, etc. and reduce interactions in select neighborhoods.
• Suspend arrests, jailing, and prosecutions against criminals during the pandemic.
• Dispense with bond requirements.
• Shrink police force size either by not replacing retirements and resignations or by introducing alternative programs, particularly social workers in confrontations which involve the mentally ill.

Demsas only sees police officers not doing their job but the reality in most cities is that the police, like everyone else, has a reasonable degree of risk awareness.  If you are a police officer involved in a police shooting, no matter how justified, you are in many cities unlikely to receive any due process, likely to be fired without cause and condemned to defend yourself with only your own meager resources against politically motivated prosecutions funded by the state.

The problem is not police officers, it is city policies which are making it ever more risky to be a police officer and ever less rewarding.

For Demsas to not acknowledge that which is readily apparent, widely known and reasonably researched is a pretty astonishing oversight.  It is little wonder the mainstream media no longer attracts much trust.  They keep demonstrating they can't be trusted.