From a forthcoming paper in the American Economic Review: Insights.
A team of criminologists has found that every 10 to 17 new cops added by a city police department can be expected to save one black person from being murdered.
“There are some people who say, ‘We can invest less in police. They’re not doing much to control crime,’” Chalfin said in a November 23 news release published by Penn. “But it’s a complex task to figure out what the effects of doing that will actually be.”
“When a city increases the size of its police force, you get fewer crimes, fewer homicides, and fewer arrests for serious crimes, but more arrests for less serious crimes,” the Ivy League professor said. “[T]he homicides reduced are disproportionately where the victims would have been Black—which is maybe not surprising given that the demographics of homicide victimization skew that way.”
