Summer of Rage? Summer of Discontent? Summer at Home.

What if the story of violence in the summer of 2020 has nothing to do with partisan politics or perhaps even the police?

I want to pivot a little today from the long-term discussion about a reimagining of police and write about the discouraging rise in homicide this summer of 2020. The idea that seems to have taken hold of the pundits is that the protests are causing a rise in homicides and other violence. I do not quite understand what mechanism is hypothesized to cause this covariation between policing, public demonstrations and homicides. I suppose it is some variation on the theme of what I think of as ‘the Deterrence Constant’. This is the idea that all else being equal, stable policing deters violence is some very predictable way. If you assume constant deterrence, any exogenous shock to policing will cause violence to rise. So, if many officers are diverted from one location to another to respond to demonstrators, this will reduce the deterrent effect of policing. Or so the theory seems to go.

This seems to me to be an explanation in search of a problem. I think what gets confused here is the rela…