Fatal encounters between police officers and civilians are rare & crime soars when police pull back

See Memphis’s Problems Are Only Going to Get Worse by Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"fatal encounters between police officers and civilians—including black civilians—are rare in America, even though annual contacts between police and the public number more than 60 million."

"In a 2021 report published by the Manhattan Institute, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann noted that “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” A study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery in 2018 looked at more than a million service calls to police departments in Arizona, Louisiana and North Carolina and found that officers used physical force in the course of arrests less than 1% of the time. Moreover, 98% of suspects who were arrested using force “sustained no or mild injury.”

In New York City, home to the nation’s largest police department, police shootings have declined by about 90% since the early 1970s. Nationwide, police killed 999 people in 2019, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. The victims, almost all of whom had weapons, included 424 whites and 253 blacks. Twelve of the black victims and 26 of the white victims were unarmed."

"Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who has researched the aftermath of high-profile encounters between black suspects and police, found a disturbing pattern. When police departments are investigated following incidents of deadly force that have gone viral, police activity tends to decline and violent crime increases."

"In a 2020 academic paper, Mr. Fryer and co-author Tanaya Devi concluded that in cities where investigations weren’t prompted by national media attention there was little change in police behavior or in homicides. But for “investigations that were preceded by a viral incident of deadly force—Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Riverside [Calif.], and Ferguson—there is a marked increase in both homicide and total crime.”"

"In Baltimore and Chicago, police-civilian encounters fell by 90% or more after the investigations were announced, and violent crime soared."

"“Our estimates suggest that investigating police departments after viral incidents of police violence is responsible for approximately 450 excess homicides per year,” write Mr. Fryer and Ms. Devi."