Eventually real data supersedes wishful thinking

From What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike? by Scott Alexander.  Since May 2020, it has been reasonably clear that the spike in violent crime, particularly murder, was a) largely centered in major cities and b) followed from BLM riots and the effect those riots had on depolicing.  

The implication is that policy has impact and that bad policy creates bad impacts.  Consequently, there are many who are avid that the BLM protests and city governments who defunded police, threw them under the bus, or simply backed away from providing support to them are not to blame for the excess deaths in the hundreds and thousands and are not their fault.  Certainly not.

Some have even gone so far as to blame the advent of Covid lockdowns as the genesis of the rise in criminal violence.  

Alexander looks at all the US data and affirms that which was known since 2014 - There is indeed a Ferguson Effect and that when city leaders choose to depolice, it always leads to an increase in violent crime.  Which, incidentally, is always concentrated among the most economically and socially vulnerable groups.  

Alexander goes further and identifies that if the critics of the Ferguson Effect who argue that this was a Covid effect are right, then we should see spikes in violent crime abroad in countries experiencing the travails of Covid.  This implied forecast is shown to be false as well.  No one experienced a spike in violent crime.

The Ferguson Effect is real, depolicing leads to violent crime, and the data is all there to validate those hypotheses.

The public policy choices of city leaders are the cause of the excess in violent deaths plaguing many large American cities.  Political leaders made their choices and are responsible for the outcomes.