We don't do this because we have values as a nation other than "minimize crime at any cost." Allowing it to be possible to commit some level of non-state violence is the price we pay for personal freedom from absolute government tyranny.
So it’s important to plan police not to eliminate crime, but to reduce crime as much as possible given liberties. There’s probably some optimal frontier to it, but I don’t want to trade tyranny for crime.
What will be interesting is whether these higher murders had some trade offs elsewhere. I would like to see some research that all those fewer arrests also did something positive.
I don’t think there’s many accidental/unjustified police shootings of civilians but I would guess those went way down.
I suspect this is one of the cases where “correlation does not equal causation” should be mentioned. It certainly might be causative, but it also might not be.
As the other commenter mentioned, you really need to look at the actual murders themselves. No amount of stop and frisk is going to reduce domestic murders.
The author suggests it’s fewer police out and about policing. It might be that.
This is a really card situation to prove causation since it’s retrospective observational. But maybe more researchers can try to isolate variables and find controls, etc.
For me, it’s trying to find a reasonable story so I can stop wondering. I imagine that police waking and driving around arresting people doesn’t stop murders, but fewer police being around doing stuff might result in more violence.
The authors used changes in the terror alert level (which caused increases in police presence) as a natural experiment, and found that crime dropped significantly in the area when the terror level increased.
I think the explanation here is probably quite simple: an increase in the number of police officers in an area means that calls are responded to more quickly and for any given crime the criminal has a higher chance of being arrested. As we'd expect, a high likelihood of negative consequences deters crime.
I’d like to compare the rates of policing to murders and shootings in more metro areas to confirm, but if they match the ones shown it seems like the homicides are due to police response to the protests more than the protests themselves.
The fewer pedestrian stops in LA seems to show that there were just fewer cops out and about. So this somehow resulted in more murder. I want to investigate other crime as well.
I think there’s likely some other benefits to having fewer police stops, but it seems, despite the errors and prejudice shown during many stops, that they reduce crime.
I was surprised with the increase murder because I expected it to go down due to everyone being cooped up. I expected domestic violence and suicide to rise, but murders and property crime to drop just due to fewer human interactions.