All we have to do is choose to do it.

From The Grim Trade-Off Of BLM?: Fewer African-Americans killed by cops; many more killed by civilians by Andrew Sullivan.

Why have murder rates spiked so badly over the last 12 months? No one seems to know, and perhaps it is simply impossible to know at this point. We don’t have all the data, since the big uptick is quite recent; and we cannot even agree on what helped bring crime down so sharply in the past three decades. But it does seem to me that the rise is significant, and those who care about black lives might want to figure it out.

I am getting tired of this faux ignorance on the part of the mainstream media - Where did this spike in murders come from?  We know where.  The data tells us.  Just because the answer is troubling to the critical theory/social justice theory crowd does not make it wrong.  

I am not picking on Sullivan, his is actually a better piece than most I see.  I was listening to an Atlanta local talk show, Political Rewind the other day, who started out with this same performance art - where did these violent crime come from?  It's a mystery.  Fortunately, I arrived at my destination before too many brain cells were killed.

This is exactly the charade we went through with the Ferguson Effect in 2014 after the shooting of Michael Brown as he criminally assaulted a police officer.  The data was clear, a spike in criminal activity occurred within a month of the shooting and the associated protests and continued for 12-18 months before things began to revert to the decline in crime to which we have become accustomed.

The Ferguson Effect was broadly denied by the mainstream media even though the data was clear.  Reduce policing, increase crime, especially violent crime.  To the tune of 2,000 lost black lives due to depolicing post Ferguson.

The one good thing to come from Ferguson is that it gave us a baseline of causal mechanisms.  The sharp rise in crime only occurred in cities and neighborhoods where police were held back from their normal policing activities.  It wasn't that police forces were reduced in size, it was that they were constrained in their activities.

Similarly, Ferguson made it clear that police officers could do everything legally and by the procedural book and still suffer horrendous life consequences.  Not all reduction in policing activities were due to explicit constraints placed on selected police forces.  Police everywhere came down with the blue flu, self-policing their activities to reduce their exposure to risk, knowing that the political and legal system would not protect them.  

This post-George Floyd sharp rise in violent crime is clearly not due to defunding alone.  Only a handful of cities have actually defunded anything.  But in far more cities than after Ferguson, police have been pulled back.  In addition, far more police everywhere have come down with the Blue Flu knowing that they will not be protected for lawful actions.  

Here in Atlanta, a black majority city, with a black majority City Council, and black mayor, and majority black police force, after a couple of BLM/Antifa riots, the mayor threw black and white police under the bus, firing them before their actions were even investigated.  

Ferguson and Floyd crime spikes are due to the same thing - De-policing.  The intentional reduction in policing on the part of weak political leaders.  Crime is so bad in Atlanta at the moment that the mayor has declined to run for her second term, facing a landslide defeat.

Sullivan pretends that none of this is obvious; sort of.

He goes through a handful of popular excuses and provides the data to show that they are not explanatory.

Covid-19 - No!  Lots of obvious data on this.

 Poverty - No!  Lots of obvious data on this.

The Fentanyl Crisis - No! A real crisis but not a causal factor in the violent crime spike. 

Defunding the police - No! Very few police departments actually defunded.

He follows this construct to allow him to reach the obvious conclusion.

What else have we got? Well, surely the timing of the surge in murders counts. And it can be timed quite precisely, in fact: to the very end of May, before which there was little change and even some decline. The National Commission on Covid19 and Criminal Justice report shows what University of Utah researcher Paul Cassell calls a “structural break” in the data timed exactly to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent wave of mostly peaceful protests and subsequent looting, rioting and violence that raged across many cities. Before Floyd, no big increase in homicides, aggravated assaults, and shootings. After, a huge spike.

Click to enlarge. 

In city after city the charts look the same.  BLM/Antifa riots following George Floyd's death immediately leading to dramatic increases in violent crime.  Due to mayor after mayor or council after council effectively telling police departments to stand down.

Having arrived at the most obvious and well supported by data conclusion, Sullivan then backs away.

Of course, that is not causation. But it’s one hell of a correlation — and no other event seems relevant. It’s as if the Floyd murder, and the subsequent urban chaos, sent a signal: the cops are on the defensive. Which means murderers can go on the offensive. And once lawlessness establishes itself, it tends to compound. A few gang murders can soon morph into tit-for-tat urban warfare.

Correlation is never causation but correlation often sheds light on causation.  In this case the timing of the spike is immediately traceable to changes in police activities.  But this conclusion, that reduced policing is being driven by politicians and is leading to rising violent crime is explicitly not a conclusion that many in the mainstream media want to reach.  And even others, such as Sullivan, who is no longer beholden to the MSM but occasionally betrays his olden times thinking.   

Sullivan understands the distinction between defunding and de-policing.  Defunding has happened in some few places but our violent crime escalation is happening regardless of whether there has been defunding.  It is de-policing, a choice by politicians, which is driving this human tragedy.

But manpower was not the most significant factor. What truly mattered, Cassell argues, is that the police pulled back from the kind of aggressive, pro-active policing that has been shown to be most helpful in reducing fatal civilian shootings — but also most likely to lead to fatal encounters with the police. In Minneapolis, for example, “police stops and officer-initiated calls dropped more than half, use-of-force incidents fell by two-thirds while traffic-related incidents and patrols became far less common.” Residents complained that the cops were slow to come, or were in the neighborhoods with their windows up.

In New York City in June of 2020, it was the plainclothes cops proactively tackling street violence who were instantly targeted by the city itself: “about 600 officers in the elite unit, created with the mission of ridding the streets of illegal guns and stopping violent crimes, were ‘immediately’ reassigned to other duties. The Commissioner called the re-deployment a ‘seismic’ shift.” It sure was. A seismic shift toward vastly higher rates of homicides and shootings. (They did the same thing in Portland, abolishing the pro-active team of uniformed police tasked with preventing shootings. It was only after murder rates doubled in less than one year that the city hurriedly reinstated the unit.)

This kind of decision, along with bail reform, and confusing new regulations on how police should arrest suspects, caused NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan to complain that morale had been destroyed: “It’s set off a feeling on the streets right now that it’s okay to carry a gun, settle old disputes, and start shooting at one another. We’re seeing people get sprayed at parties… There’s an opinion out there that the cops aren’t going to stop them … There’s a feeling on the streets right now that if you fight a cop and get it on video, you’re going to have a payday.”

In Cincinnati, the assistant police chief explained: “There’s also the natural pullback by officers based on what we’re seeing in mainstream media and social media. For the last couple months, it’s almost as if policing in general has been vilified. That’s very difficult, the officers are dealing with that, and I think the proactive work has slowed down.” It wasn’t a policy of pull-back. But it was the reality among cops increasingly skittish toward risking their lives — because they feared getting vilified if something went wrong.

Sullivan is trying to push this down onto individual police officers succumbing to a defensive blue flu funk.  But the longer the crime spike continues, the more obvious it becomes that it is not individual officers but whole departments responding to the directions of mayors and city council instructions.  This is a choice on the part of government.  Atlanta, among many cities, has seen a bleeding away of experienced police officers from the City police departments to nearby municipalities and sheriff departments who are still enforcing the law and defending their officers.

Atlanta is down some 20% from it manpower target and the remainder are more junior and less experienced than in the past.  Given the City's reluctance to pay market rates for police officers and the very long lead time for training, things will get much worse before they get better.  And it is entirely the mayor's choice.

Sullivan really, really wants to turn a blind eye to all the data and evidence he is marshaling that increasing violent crime is the choice of the governing Mandarin Class. 

It’s worth reiterating at this point that this is a guess. We don’t know for certain why we are enduring a spike in homicides which seems increasingly durable. The full data are not available; key statistics here are provisional. But the best guess we have leaves us with a sobering thought. What if this is the trade-off?

Yes we do know.  The Mandarin Class simply does not want to accept it.  But no matter how wishy-washy he is in acknowledging the causal mechanisms, Sullivan is broaching, in the end, the central dilemma - reduced policing leads to increased crime and typically the increase in crime falls most heavily on the poorest and most dysfunctional neighborhoods.  Which is what is happening today.  

Wealthy neighborhoods are becoming understandably anxious as NextDoor and apps like Neighbors or Citizen make it increasingly clear just how close some of the crime hotspots are getting.  But the greatest burden falls on the poorest neighborhoods with the weakest social capital.

Sullivan frames it poorly, I think, but it is the central leadership issue:

What if we can indeed lower police shootings — but only if police stay out of exactly the proactive policing that makes them more likely? And what if the price of ending proactive policing is, logically, a huge increase in civilian homicides? A look at the comparative numbers of black deaths at the hands of cops (in 2019, for example, 250), and black deaths at the hand of civilians (in 2019, 7,484) is a sobering reality check. Black Lives Matter could be devastating news for actual black lives.

There is nothing in Sullivan's reporting in this article to suggest that there is a hard-trade off here.  You can have effective policing but it costs a lot in training, compensation, and political leadership.  Political leaders have to lead the way in recognizing that policing is the answer to crime and where there are instance of provable negligence in police behavior, holding them accountable.  Defunding, de-policing, etc. are all abdications of political responsibility.  The political class is unwilling to do their job.  

Sullivan ends with:

So this scenario prompts a question of supreme irony: what if the final legacy of Black Lives Matter is that it actually succeeds in its core goal, and that in the future, far fewer African-Americans are shot by the cops. And what if the price of this symbolic victory is, in fact, a huge increase in the numbers of innocent black lives lost to civilian murder? That’s a trade-off worth discussing, before it becomes a new norm that’s very hard to undo.

This isn't irony.  This is a real choice which political leaders are choosing to make.  Less policing leads to more crime for everyone even if the burden falls more on some than others.  All adults in the room understand this.  If the political class wants to take a knee to BLM and Antifa and throw the public under the bus, that is their choice.  But let's not pretend that it is anything but a complete negation of intelligent, moral and brave leadership and a choice to serve the forces of violence and dysfunction and sacrifice law-abiding citizens.  

This granular report of details of violent crime in July 2020 provides the linkages Sullivan strains away from.  From Breakdown: The unwinding of law and order in our cities has happened with stunning speed. by Heather Mac Donald.  

Let's not pretend we don't know what is going on.  We know what needs to be done to reduce crime for everyone.  All we have to do is choose to do it.