Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.

But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”

Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.