I hear this sort of rhetoric a lot from criminologists but have never seen any of them explain the exact mechanisms by which they think "proactive policing" reduces crime. https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2021/02/03/homicides-rose-2020/

Clearance rates at police departments are down markedly over the last two decades. So if police departments empirically are *less effective at solving crimes* reported to them, why would we attribute crime declines to their efforts?

Analyses of 911 call data show most police activities are unrelated to crime at all, much less crime solving. Does it make sense to attribute crime reductions (or ftm, increases) to those activities? https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2020/07/three-quarters-of-austin-pd-911.html

Isn't it more likely crime declined over the last couple of decades - and/or that murders spiked in 2020 - because of other societal factors entirely unrelated to what police do on the job every day?

I'm aware of at least 18 theories proposed to explain the crime decline since the '90s: mass incarceration, ↓ environmental lead, ↑ abortion in the '70s ... the list goes on. One such theory is "more cops." But they're all claiming the SAME crime decline. Can't all be right.

A unique feature of the 2020 murder spike is that many other categories of crime, including violent crimes, declined, and the accompanying rise in gun assaults was miniscule. https://twitter.com/Abt_Thomas/status/1310602758425374722

This has led me to wonder if the murder increase could be attributable to COVID soaking up resources in the ICUs of America's largest cities, squeezing out resources for gunshot victims. https://twitter.com/Grits4Breakfast/status/1344382084958343170

There's a huge extent to which police and prosecutors claimed credit for ↓ murder rates when improvements in medical treatment for gunshot victims explains a big % of the decline. What if the spike in murders results from DOCTORS being distracted by COVID, not the cops?

I don't know if that's right. To my knowledge, the data to prove or disprove it either doesn't exist or has yet to be mined. But the theory has at least as much support as Dr. Rosenfeld's suggestion that a lack of "proactive policing" was the culprit.