Cui malo

In her latest Washington Post column Mwgan McArdle explains some uncomfortable truths that will probably make her no friends on social media:

Empirically, we have a great deal of evidence that putting more police on the street reduces crime. We know that Black and Latino people are more likely to be victims of a serious crime than Whites or Asians. We also know that recent data suggests that homicides spiked in the United States’ largest cities last year by an average of 30 percent.

Yet none of that answers the most important question: For communities suffering under high burdens of both policing and crime, does the benefit of more police outweigh the costs of the policing to both individuals and communities?

Even if you concede that policing does reduce crime considerably — which many “defund the police” advocates don’t — it’s possible that more policing does reduce crime for mostly whiter and more affluent neighborhoods, while historically disadvantaged groups mostly bear the substantial costs of being policed. Most of the debate over the past year has implicitly assumed such a tradeoff.

Yet a new paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests this assumption isn’t quite right. Policing really does disproportionately burden Black communities (especially when it comes to low-level offenses), but it also disproportionately benefits them — not just by protecting victims from the people police arrest, but by protecting people who might otherwise have turned to crime.

The authors looked at 38 years of police employment data for America’s 242 largest cities, not just to see the policing’s effect on crime, but specifically, what its differential impacts were on different racial groups. In tune with earlier research, they found that bigger police forces reduced “index” crime — serious offenses such as violence, burglary or robbery. Depending on the exact model, they found that hiring somewhere between 10 and 17 new officers averted one homicide every year. And as the opponents of the “defund police” movement have suggested, this indeed disproportionately benefited Black communities: “In per capita terms,” they write, “the effects are approximately twice as large for Black victims.”

Get that? Black people benefit disproportionately from more law enforcement.

In an associated note published through the Niskanen Center, the authors write, “The decline in index crime arrests is four to six times larger for Black civilians than whites, which suggests that investments in policing are unlikely to have contributed to the massive and racially disparate growth in the scale of incarceration in the United States during the last four decades.”

or, said another way the “defund the police” and revisions to prosecution promoted by progressive states attorneys around the country actually harm black people. That’s completely consistent with what people in the black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago have been saying and completely different from the mostly white, mostly suburban online crusaders.