Two years ago Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece titled “The Grim Trade-Off Of BLM?” The question mark was there to signal that the answer to that question couldn’t be known for certain because all of the data was not yet in. Still, there was a trend which seemed noteworthy. Police shootings were down and, at the same time, police nationwide appeared to be pulling back from aggressive policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and that seems to have resulted in a sharp rise in civilian shootings and homicides.

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?

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?

…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?

Today, the NY Times published an opinion piece by Thomas Edsall which essentially takes a look at this same argument.

A couple of years ago, Travis Campbell, an economics professor at Southern Oregon University, published a study showing that from 2014 to 2019, Black Lives Matter protests “meaningfully reduced” police homicides.

Campbell noted in his paper, however, that these gains came with some costs. “Total reported homicides increased by 12.89 percent over the five years following B.L.M. protests, which is consistent with rising overall crime,” he wrote. That increase, he added, amounted to “over 3,000 homicides.”…

In his paper, Campbell readily acknowledged that these two numbers — 200 fewer lethal police shootings, more than 3,000 additional civilian homicides — raise questions about “the social welfare implications of B.L.M. protests.” But he argued against “using a measure of lives saved/lost following protests to determine the social welfare implications of B.L.M.”

But the piece goes on to suggest that maybe we really should measure BLM in terms of lives saved/lost because maybe the protests and the violence are indirectly connected. John Roman, the director of the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago made the argument this way.

It’s just my opinion, of course, but clearly there was an unprecedented level of toxic stress that contributed to the surge in violence. The depolicing — whether intentional or just a result of pulling back for officer health and safety — set the stage. At least in neighborhoods where violence is most common, I tend to think of the surge in violence and the surge in protests as stemming from the same source of hopelessness.

That would also explain why the spike in homicides begins in the last week of May 2020, exactly when George Floyd was murdered. It would mean that these outcomes are connected, not in the sense that BLM protesters are out shooting people but in the sense that the protests were one element of a larger anti-police reaction that swept the country. As we saw that summer, some of the protests became violent and resulted in arson, vandalism and threats against police. Those elements were a minority but they probably existed everywhere to some degree. Roman connects that to hopelessness but having watched a lot of these protests I’d say it had much more to do with anger.

BLM signaled a nationwide change in many people’s views of police, one that had an immediate impact on policing itself. As police decided to be less aggressive and to resign in cities where they were told they were not wanted, violent people in those communities became more aggressive. And so you get this mixed outcome where BLM achieves a lowering of police violence but that decline is overwhelmed by a much larger increase in civilian violence which is focused in black communities.

Perhaps the most significant development is that the NY Times is now discussing this. Here’s the top comment on the piece.

In other news water found to be wet. Seriously, when a cop stands to lose his job, see his photo plastered on TV coast to coast, and to see himself be labeled as a monster without trial or recourse to impartiality, do you really think that cop is going to be eager to pull over some car without license plates?

“Defund the Police” wether it occurred immediately or not is the direct result of BLM. No one wants to be a police officer. To recruit salaries have to be much higher, the result is understaffed police forces coast to coast.

To do their jobs police need the support of the population. That means stopping every person they suspect of criminal activity, arresting shoplifters and turnstile jumpers, public drunks and drug sales.

Police also need a justice system that incarcerates law breakers. People busted on gun charges should go to prison, not released the next day. If someone with a record of violent felonies is arrested with a gun, that’s a sign they are intent on shooting someone, and they should be removed from society so the rest of us can be safe.

Our entire justice system is dysfunctional.

And one more good point:

It’s not clear, but it seems the author is equating all 200 police killings almost all of which were most likely justified, to 3,000 civilian killings, none of which were most likely justified. If that’s correct wouldn’t that change the analysis.

Police shoot about 1,000 people a year but in the majority of those shootings the victim was armed. Even in cases (much rarer) where the victim was unarmed he was often doing something that could reasonably justify a police shooting, like driving a car toward an officer. Looked at this way, it’s not just 200 lives saved vs. 3,000 lost. It’s 200 shootings that would mostly have been justifiable to a reasonable person vs. ten times as many killings of which very few (maybe some were self-defense) were justifiable.