From the New York Times Opinion page:

Half the Police Force Quit. Crime Dropped.

July 2, 2023

By Radley Balko

Mr. Balko is the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” and the criminal justice newsletter The Watch.

Libertarian opinion journalist Radley Balko has crusaded against the police for years, helping boost black deaths by homicide and car crash during the Ferguson and Floyd Effects. But now he’s finally found one small suburb, Golden Valley, MN, where the # of cops went down and so did crime (at least according to the new black police chief and if you can’t trust a police chief who is BLACK, who can you trust?)

…Amid spiking nationwide homicide rates in 2020 and 2021 and a continuing shortage of police officers, many in law enforcement have pointed to investigations like these—along with “defund the police”-style activism—as the problem. With all the criticism they are weathering, the argument goes, officers are so hemmed in, they can no longer do their job right; eventually they quit, defeated and demoralized. Fewer police officers, more crime.

Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can’t have both.

In accord with that view, some academic studies have found that more police officers can correlate with less crime. But the studies don’t account for factors that the Minneapolis report highlights—the social costs of police brutality and misconduct, how they can erode public trust, how that erosion of trust affects public safety—and they don’t account for the potential benefits of less coercive, less confrontational alternatives to the police. We don’t have as many studies that take those factors into account, but to see the effects in real time, you need only step over the Minneapolis city line.

Golden Valley is a suburb of about 22,000 that in many ways is as idyllic as its name suggests. The median annual household income tops $100,000, there’s very little crime...

But the town’s Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay. There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year, and there’s quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black—the result of pervasive racial covenants.

“We enjoy prosperity and security in this community,” said Shep Harris, the mayor since 2012. “But that has come at a cost. I think it took incidents like the murder of George Floyd to help us see that more clearly.” The residents of the strongly left-leaning town decided change was necessary.

Joe Biden won 75% of the vote in Golden Valley.

One step was eliminating those racial covenants.

Racial covenants haven’t been enforced in the last half century. What Radley is referring to was a wholly symbolic gesture about exorcising the evil spirits of covenants.

Another was changing the Police Department, which had a reputation for mistreating people of color.

The first hire was Officer Alice White, the force’s first high-ranking Black woman. The second was Virgil Green, the town’s first Black police chief. …

Members of the overwhelmingly white police force responded to both hires by quitting—in droves.

An outside investigation later revealed that some officers had run an opposition campaign against Chief Green. One of those officers recorded herself making a series of racist comments during a call with city officials, then sent the recording to other police officers. She was fired—prompting yet another wave of resignations.

The typical Golden Valley police officer makes a six-figure salary with good benefits. The city has almost no violent crime. It’s a good gig. Yet in just two years, more than half the department quit.

“I haven’t been on the job long enough to make any significant changes,” Chief Green said. “Yet we’re losing officers left and right. It’s hard not to think that they just don’t want to work under a Black supervisor.”

The interesting thing is that according to Chief Green, despite the reduction in staff, crime—already low—has gone down in Golden Valley.

Proof! Radley Balko has finally found a single data point to support his life work. Well, of course, to get this single data point he has to take Chief Green at his word, which many people closer to the situation aren’t inclined to do.