| > That's an unanswered question (crime is complicated), but there are probably many factors, not least of all that people get arrested for misdemeanors and then they're found with felony amounts of drugs or weapons and thus removed from the street. Being in jail doesn't stop homicides. In fact they have more homicides than the general population. > It's not his analysis, he's reporting on the findings of studies. It's both. If you read the studies, while in the abstract they purport to establish a causal link, they don't back that up in their methodology. Lehman combines this into a greater analysis. > He doesn't profess that belief in the article. He professes a causal link between police _protests_ and increased homicides, finishing his article with "But it does give support to those who propose a relationship between 2020’s wave of anti-police protests and the ensuing homicide wave still sweeping the country—and to those who believe that continued hostility to the police will lead to more bloodshed." > The article posits that as a factor as well (specifically that loss of trust in policing leads to less cooperation from the community). While calling out protests specifically as being causal wrt to homicide rate. > "Your" model also requires us to believe that the evidence of decreased proactive policing is merely a coincidence, which is hard for me to stomach. I don't doubt that the loss of trust contributed, but I only think this is the "fault" of policing as an institution to the extent that the activist and media narrative is accurate (which is to say, "not very"). No, police not doing the basics of their job while still overall increasing their budgets, and particularly arbitrarily and capriciously enforcing the law would be a major factor in loss of confidence in the justice system. I'm not saying that it's a coincidence; I'm saying that it's part of the model. If you can't rely on police to respond reported crime, then you start handling disputes person to person. Meanwhile with budgets continuing to increase _and_ police not doing their jobs, any semblance of social safety nets disappear. That's the point of "defund the police", noticing that they refuse to do the basics of their job, and in fact the goal of using them as a catchall for all sorts of social services failed, so put that portion of the budget back into more productive uses. |