The simplest explanation for this is that the high-profile murder of civilians by police traumatizes and destabilizes communities, which leads to increases in crime. Police violence periodically generates crime in communities.
https://twitter.com/aaronchalfin/status/1485731834633895936
This has nothing to do with police “pulling back.” It has to do with police aggression leading to catastrophic results for communities. Population-wide effects of police violence on community health, particularly in Black communities, are well-documented: news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
What’s particularly pernicious about the “scholarship” on this issue is that a group of criminologists is advancing a theory that police are *not being aggressive enough* after murdering someone that that causes crime to increase. The exact wrong conclusion to draw from the data.
This is also an example of researcher bias. Some researchers see police violence as the problem that creates the conditions for crime increases and some infer from the same data that it’s police “pulling back” in response to protests caused by police killings that’s the problem.
But the protests wouldn’t have happened if the police weren’t violent in the first place. And a recommendation that police refrain from “pulling back” after murdering someone is a recipe to exacerbate the police violence that caused this in the first place. The wrong way to go.
If police “pulling back” was the problem, we’d see similar crime increases when police do the same thing in other contexts (labor disputes, etc). We don’t. Because it’s not about “pulling back” it’s about the proven fact police violence damages the health of entire communities.
The solution is to stop police violence. To “pull back” further on policing and establish meaningful accountability mechanisms/deterrents to prevent the catastrophe of police violence from recurring. Otherwise it’s a vicious cycle of violence in and against communities.
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