The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed piece by Jason Riley, an economist at Harvard University.

The sub-headline reads in part: “…when the cops pull back, homicides increase.”

“In 2016 Mr. Fryer released a study of racial differences in police use of deadly force. To the surprise of the author, as well as many in the media and on the left who take racist law enforcement as a given, he found no evidence of bias in police shootings.”

He concluded that, as the WSJ put it, “racial disparities in police shootings stemmed primarily from racial disparities in criminal behavior.”

Professors of the University of Maryland and Michigan State University reached the same conclusion:

“We didn’t find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”

He has studied what happens in cities where there is a horrific and widely publicized and an outside investigation takes place.

Think Baltimore, Chicago, Furgeson.

“When police were investigated following incidents of deadly force that had gone viral, police activity declined and violent crime spiked,” his indirect quote said.

“’…homicide goes up considerably. Total crime goes up considerably.’ What happens, he said, is that police effectively pull back. They don’t stop doing their jobs, but they become less proactive and curb their interactions with civilians.”

The pull-back of police presents resulted in numerous additional deaths, most of them black, he observes.

In other words, there are trade-offs in bringing in outsiders to examine a police department in which a few officers do wrong.

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The column is here, but it is behind a paywall.