I love when people cite this study because I get to gush over how notoriously flimsy it is! They estimate cops reduce between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides which is a huge variance that they just handwave away and hope no one notices, but everyone rolls with the 0.1 figure because it sounds better. The lower end of this figure means you have to spend over $1.1 million plus benefits and pensions to stop 1 homicide, which is absurd. The lower estimate of spending is only $664,000. Meanwhile they ignore the other finding of the working paper which says that adding more cops just leads to a bunch of bullshit arrests of minorities on low-level offenses.

Also it makes the mistake of assuming correlation = causation and ignores that murder rates have gone down as cities became more prosperous. It's a baaaaad study that people only trot out because it fits their narrative.

This passage

> the results imply that larger police forces are unlikely to be an important driver of lengthy prison sentences or mass incarceration, for both Black and white civilians

Should really disqualify the paper from ever being taken seriously. The authors even recognize that they didn't really find anything statistically significant, but second-hand reporting makes the data seem much more solid than it actually is:

> While we find that investments in law enforcement save Black lives, the number of averted homicides (1 per 10-17 officers hired) is modest and might even be zero in cities with large Black populations.