I don’t think it makes sense to look at number of police versus crime because cities usually hire more officers when crime goes up, and in the case of the BLM c

I don’t think it makes sense to look at number of police versus crime because cities usually hire more officers when crime goes up, and in the case of the BLM crime surge it seems like they aren’t laying off officers but rather pressuring police to avoid discretionary, preventative policing for fear of becoming the next Ferguson. There are quite a few papers that establish this connection, but this one springs to mind: > In June 2020, Harvard economist Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi released a paper showing evidence of the Ferguson effect. Across five cities where a deadly shooting that went viral preceded an investigation into crime and policing, they found that the violent crime rate increased, resulting in an additional 900 homicides and 34,000 excess felonies across two years. They suggest that this was caused by changes in the quantity of policing. Other theories, such as changes in community trust, were not supported by the data. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324.pdf