“When I started, Black folks I’d speak to in Minneapolis seemed surprised that I’d been hired,” Chief Green said when I spoke with him recently. “They told me they and most people they knew avoided driving through Golden Valley.”
Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both hires by quitting — in droves.
As a liberal, this doesn’t pass the smell test. Correlation is not causation. Did the crime rate drop, or did people stop reporting because they thought that the cops wouldn’t respond? Or did the crime rate drop because cops were stressing the criminals out? Maybe the crimes done by people who got a thrill out of getting away with it got bored?
Without a theory/hypothesis for the drop, this piece is pure conjecture.
Basically: bad cops create crime. They do this by convincing people that the risks associated with calling the cops are greater than the benefits, and by diverting attention away from actual crime and towards minorities who haven’t actually committed any crime. This makes it easier to get away with actual crime, so it criminal behavior thrives.