WaPo reports that Baltimore’s police commissioner has been fired:

Baltimore’s mayor on Friday abruptly replaced Police Commissioner Kevin Davis weeks after the city ended 2017 with a record-setting homicide rate and amid increased political pressure to control crime….

The leadership change comes as Davis was overseeing the department during one of its most difficult eras. He was tasked with driving down violent crime that flared to historic levels after a young man’s death in police custody while simultaneously reforming an agency the Justice Department cited for discriminating against black residents.

You can see the problem immediately. Homicide in Baltimore, as in other cities, is mainly a black-on-black crime. But how are you going to police black areas of the city if, in doing so, you’re accused of discriminating against blacks?

As the WaPo story puts it,

Davis was left to balance trying to change a culture of policing the Justice Department called discriminatory while being tough enough on criminals to deliver safe streets.

Officers were not as aggressive as they might ordinarily have been out of fear “they, too, would be arrested for doing their jobs,” said Gene Ryan, a Baltimore police lieutenant who heads the Fraternal Order of Police labor union.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said the average tenure of a police chief is three or four years but that Davis was “really between a rock and a hard place in trying to implement reform and deal with violent crime.”

“It’s almost like changing two tires on a car at the same time,” Wexler said.

What it’s really like is being expected to do a job without being allowed to use the requisite tools.

Baltimore’s soaring homicide rate is evidence of the Ferguson Effect, which Heather Mac Donald wrote about in “Yes, the Ferguson Effect Is Real” (National Review, September 26, 2016). She was seconded by John Hinderaker (“Violent Crime Jumped in 2015“, Power Line, September 26, 2016), who said:

I don’t know of any potential explanation for the jump last year other than the war on cops, Black Lives Matter, and the Obama administration’s anti-incarceration policies. Expect another increase when the numbers come in for 2016.

And he was right. See, for example, Mark Berman’s “Violent Crimes and Murders Increased for a Second Consecutive Year in 2016, FBI Says” (The Washington Post, September 25, 2017).

I get to the root of the problem in “Crime Revisited”, to which I added “Amen to That” and “Double Amen”. What’s the root of the problem? A certain, violence-prone racial minority, of course, and also under-incarceration. It’s not racism:

Criminologists talk about the race-crime connection behind closed doors, and often in highly guarded language; the topic is a lightning rod for accusations of racial hostility that can be professionally damaging. They avoid discussing even explicitly racist examples of black-on-white crime such as flash-mob assaults, “polar bear hunting,” and the “knockout game.” What criminologists won’t say in public is that black offending differences have existed since data have been collected and that these differences are behind the racial disparities in arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. They also won’t tell you that, despite claims of widespread racial discrimination in the justice system, legal variables—namely, the number of prior arrests and the seriousness of the crime for which the offender has currently been arrested—account for all but a small fraction of the variance in system outcomes. Nor will they tell you the truth about politically correct remedies, such as diversifying police forces, hiring black police chiefs, or training officers in the alleged effects of implicit bias: that these measures won’t reduce racial disparities in crime….

… 50 years of research on the topic have failed to find the smoking gun linking justice-system disparities to racism. Claims to the contrary often manipulate data or ignore them altogether. [John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisis, “What Criminologists Don’t Say, and Why“, City Journal, Summer 2017]

Follow the links — and read and weep.