Here’s an interesting tidbit from Vox that proves you really need to read the story, not just the tweet. According to the tweet, there was a reduction in the use of lethal force in areas with Black Lives Matter protests.

“For every 4,000 people who participated in a Black Lives Matter protest between 2014 and 2019, police killed one less person,” Vox reports. However, the study also showed those same areas had an uptick in murders:

[Travis] Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests. Campbell’s research does not include the effects of last summer’s historic wave of protests because researchers do not yet have all the relevant data.

The reasons for this rise in murders are not fully known, but one possible explanation is that police morale drops following scrutiny, leading officers to reduce their efforts and thereby emboldening criminals. Another is that members of the public voluntarily withdraw from engagements with the police after a police homicide delegitimizes the justice system in their eyes.

Police morale drops when protesters chuck rocks and fireworks at them and threaten to defund them?

For what it’s worth, these are just the preliminary findings by a Ph.D. student in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, so take it with a big grain of salt.

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