When the police pull back, violent crime — against blacks — spikes.

While the depraved murder of George Floyd should outrage us all, I believe it continues a misdirected focus on police killings, particularly of unarmed men. According to the Washington Post database, in 2019 there were 249 blacks killed by the police: 165 had guns, 33 had knives, and only 14 were unarmed. In 2016, Harvard’s Roland Fryer released a study of racial differences in police use of deadly force and found no evidence of bias in police shootings. His conclusions have been echoed by researchers at the University of Maryland and Michigan State University.

By contrast, in 2018, according to FBI statistics, there were 7,406 black homicides. When Floyd was murdered over the Memorial Day weekend, there were 85 shootings and 24 deaths in Chicago. Black Lives Matters, however, has shown little public concern over any of this violence. Indeed, an article in the influential black magazine The Root outright defended black activists’ refusal to talk about these homicides:

It is the repeated sleight of hand used to distract and drown out the voices of Black Lives Matter. It is an oft-used “alt-right” refrain and . . . the weapon of choice for the black practitioners of respectability politics.

In 2019, the titular leader of the Black Lives Matter, Shaun King, did make an exception and publicized a non-police murder of a black American. In Houston, a seven-year-old girl was killed in a drive-by shooting, in the same way that other victims are killed every year. What distinguished the murder of this child was that it initially appeared that the perpetrator was a white man. Upon hearing about this, King flew to Houston and immediately raised a $100,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s capture. He did receive such information that led to an arrest. To King’s surprise, the killer turned out to be a black man whose gang was retaliating for a previous incident but shot at the wrong car.

Building effective community-police relationships is crucial to lowering homicide rates and reducing the significant racial bias in nonlethal use of force. Despite the current rhetoric, many recent reforms have been quite effective. While police misconduct (and biases) can never be completely eliminated, we can learn from cities where police-community relations are strong.

Criminologist David Kennedy guided Pittsburgh’s launching of a new initiative that better modeled the focused deterrence approach he pioneered and implemented in a number of cities, including Boston. Through community leaders and other neighborhood informants, Pittsburgh’s Group Violence Intervention Unit (GVI) identified more than 500 high-risk offenders. Once a high-risk offender is identified, an officer will visit the offender as well as his or her parents or grandparents. At the meeting, the visiting officer says, “We know what’s going on. You — or your son or grandson — is a shooter.”

If the offender continues to commit crimes, Pittsburgh deals with him harshly. However, if he wishes to turn his life around, services are provided. The GVI unit works with job-training and placement programs, local faith-based organizations, mental-health experts, and multiple families – and housing-related services to help suspects change their lives — “to leave the life.” GVI volunteer coordinator Cornell Jones noted that tattoo-removal services are also offered if needed, because “it’s hard to get any job if you have ‘thug life’ tattooed on your forehead.”

Successes in Camden, N.J., do not fit neatly into the Black Lives Matters narrative. “Its transformation was sparked by corruption and soaring crime, not police brutality,” Los Angeles Times reporter Chris Megerian noted this week. “Leaders wanted to put more cops on the street, not defund the police.” The force expanded from 250 to 411 police officers, about 55 per percent white, reorganized at the county level. The key was new leadership that began implementing the same policies that have proven effective in Detroit, Boston, and other cities.

Las Vegas also demonstrated the value of a community-police partnership. Formerly incarcerated, Jon Ponder created Hope for Prisoners, a prison re-entry program that relies on a mentoring alliance made up of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) and other local criminal justice agencies. Now, more than 65 officers mentor by sharing their stories of success as well as their personal challenges with ex-offenders. The program concludes with a graduation ceremony at LVMPD Headquarters.

Station Casinos and the Raiders Stadium construction site, among others, have agreements with Hope for Prisoners to hire graduates. Since its inception, the program has an employment rate of 76 percent while experiencing an 8 percent recidivism rate. “Hope for Prisoners is one of the most successful prisoner re-entry programs in the country,” Assistant Sheriff Charles L. Hank III said in LVMPD’s 2018 annual report.

Police reforms are not easy, and they are not always successful, but better policing can be accomplished when police are partners in devising and implementing desired changes. By contrast, the fiercely antagonistic approach of the “Defund the Police” movement is less likely to develop the changes necessary and instead may be a catalyst for increased homicide rates.

In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Tanaya Devi and Fryer found that when police were investigated following incidents of deadly force that had gone viral, police activity declined and violent crime spiked. Fryer recently told the Wall Street Journal that, in such circumstances, police effectively pull back, becoming less proactive, and curb their interactions with civilians. He concluded, “My estimates show that we lost a thousand more lives, most of them black as well, because of an increase in homicides.”

We should not excuse or overlook police abuse, but it’s unfair and unwise to demonize the police. Criminal-justice reform should focus on reducing black homicide rates and, to be most effective, must find a way to develop collaborative relationships with law enforcement. Too many lives are at stake to let the “defund the police” movement stand in the way.

ROBERT CHERRY — Mr. Cherry is a professor emeritus at Brooklyn College and a member of 1776 Unites.

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/defund-police-movement-risks-increased-black-homicide-rate/

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Refining our research thus far, we have determined that the COVID-19 mortality, death, and case-fatalities rates are significantly lower than experts and policymakers currently believe. We have estimated the economic costs for various lockdown timelines and when the recovery can be phased in. The point where layoff-related deaths exceed COVID-19 lives saved is when we need to consider whether going on will be costlier than going back.

We estimate an average household burden of $33,442 and $27,848 per employed due to the $4.3trn cost to save COVID-19-related lives. The shorter the duration of the lockdown, the lower the cost and debt burden on the men and women who make our country great. This debt includes $3.8trn in deficit spending and $27trn in public debt, which, either separately or combined, will result in higher taxes, reduced social spending, lower job growth, GDP and living standards.

Numbers are central tendency estimates which likely will not match actual results. However, they are more than sufficient to make our trade-off argument that COVID lives saved should not be exceeded by lives ruined and lives lost.

The cost in human lives

On April 20, University of Washington (Institute of Health Metrics) Professor Ali Mokdad said, “The United States is already past the “peak” in terms of daily COVID-19-related deaths.” The IMHE modelers recently revised projected coronavirus-related deaths sharply downward, estimating 60,300 coronavirus-related deaths by early August. The White House had previously said that there might be between 100,000 and 240,000 coronavirus-related deaths even if most people followed strict social distancing guidelines.

Using our estimates, a 31% increase in unemployment (47m) with a lockdown extending through May will result in a doubling of drug overdoses (69,735) and an additional 15,137 suicides. Together, these account for 84,872 layoff-related deaths, in addition to the base-case estimates of 60,300 (with an estimated range of 34,063 to 140,381) coronavirus deaths predicted by the IMHE researchers.

The grim calculus of joblessness

According to data from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Lancet, a medical journal, every one percent hike in unemployment will likely produce a 3.3 percent increase in drug-overdose deaths and a 0.99 percent increase in suicides.

For the year ending February 2019 (NCHS), 69,029 people died of drug overdoses, almost 7 out of 10 the result of opioids. Suicide, the tenth leading cause of death in the United States, accounted for 48,344 deaths (CDC), more than twice the number of homicides (19,510).

Lockdown-related deaths will likely exceed the base-case number of COVID-19 deaths by 141%—and this offsets 60% of the highest estimate of 140,381 predicted by IMHE researchers.

The number of layoff-related drug overdoses and suicide deaths will soar as lockdown durations grow, and in tandem with job losses, debt obligations, and economic costs.

Our base-case estimate is for 15 million unemployed by the end of 2020, assuming a phased-in recovery starting mid-May. Given the expected recovery, we now estimate 33,743 drug overdoses and 7,324 suicides, which sum to 41,067 layoff-related deaths. While not as grim, it increases the base-case estimate COVID-19 deaths by 68%.

We provide additional tables required to validate and support our trade-off conclusions in the following essay: The price of reducing needless deaths versus the price of COVID-19 lives saved: The grim calculus. The series of essays are from a longer COVID study.

Although statistics for alcohol layoff-related deaths are not as strong, there is a robust correlation. For people aged 50–65, being unemployed is associated with increased drinking, mood swings, and depression, which highlights the need for prevention policies and interventions and to improve access to treatment services during an economic recession, especially for vulnerable groups such as those facing layoffs in middle age.

Given the lockdown costs in lives and treasury, is it not common sense to say that the U.S. must go back to work, perhaps gradually, in phases. A mid-May unlock would reduce the economic cost by approximately $1.2trn, unemployment by 5.2 million, and reduce layoff-related deaths. If grocery stores and Home Depot can operate safely as essential businesses, so can many others. Like a critically ill patient, the economy cannot be on life support indefinitely. This is especially true when wealth destruction from a prolonged lockdown harms our ability to fund healthcare.

With luck and ingenuity, scientists will develop a vaccine for the world’s people. For America’s economy, getting back to work is the best medicine. The point where layoff-related deaths exceed COVID-19 lives saved is when we need to consider whether going on will be costlier than going back.

Note: Donald McGregor’s The Coronavirus: The Health of Our Nation, Our Economy, and Our Liberties, a Delicate Balance is an excellent commentary about the devastating psychosocial impact of a prolonged pandemic lockdown.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/content-guest/article/pandemic-2020-layoff-related-deaths-increase-covid-19-cordle-cfa

The post Pandemic 2020: Layoff-related deaths exceed COVID-19 deaths by 41% first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.