Mark Esper, front right, taking part in the walk of shame to the St. John's church photo-op last week.Shawn Thew/CNP via ZUMA

President Trump sure has problems with his top military people:

The president consulted several advisers to ask their opinion of the disagreement, intent that day on removing Mr. Esper, his fourth defense secretary since taking office in January 2017, according to the officials. After talks with the advisers, who cautioned against the move, Mr. Trump set aside the plans to immediately fire Mr. Esper.

At the same time, however, Mr. Esper, aware of Mr. Trump’s feelings, was making his own preparations to resign, partly in frustration over the differences regarding the role of the military, the officials said. He had begun to prepare a letter of resignation before he was persuaded not to do so by aides and other advisers, according to some of the officials.

So White House “advisers” talked Trump out of firing Esper and Defense Department advisers talked Esper out of resigning. Sounds like a great relationship. If Esper had left, Trump would right now be working on a nomination for his fourth secretary of defense in four years (fifth if you count Richard Spencer’s 8-day fill-in).

How hard is to reform police forces to become less violent and less confrontational? Connie Rice is a civil rights attorney who has been working on this problem for years in Los Angeles, and in the LA Tmes today she says there’s some good news:

Under warrior policing, communities on the right side of the “thin blue line” receive safety and protection; communities on the wrong side receive suppression and prison. The good news is, we know how to change this.

In 2010, then-LAPD Chief Beck and activists created the Community Safety Partnership, a holistic, problem-solving approach to safety for high-crime areas that minimizes suppression, maximizes trust and acts through partnerships among residents, gang interventionists, local leaders, experts and other agencies to remove the root causes of trauma and crime. A recent UCLA evaluation found that reductions in violent crime and gang control in these partnership sites exceeded countywide declines, and the gains were accomplished with far fewer arrests and no police shootings or beatings. Moreover, residents reported higher trust in Community Safety Partnership officers.

Residents of neighborhoods traumatized by gang violence, predatory policing, endemic poverty and mass incarceration do not report seeing significant improvement in policing since 1992. The exception was residents in partnership sites.

Here’s what makes this kind of thing so difficult to evaluate. What Rice says about the UCLA report is true, but it relies on an analysis of only two neighborhoods, which it then compares to a “synthetic” neighborhood created to be statistically similar to the neighborhoods under study. This methodology can be fine, but it’s also really easy to misuse: the accuracy of the synthetic neighborhood is critical to the results. And in this case, it turns out that almost all of the “improvement” in the real neighborhoods is a bit of a mirage. Nothing much happened for years, but in 2015 crime rates in the synthetic neighborhood suddenly went up, which made the real neighborhoods look better:

Now compare this to a report from the Urban Institute that was commissioned by the Housing Authority of Los Angeles, one of the partners in the CSP initiative. It looked at seven neighborhoods and compared them to seven similar neighborhoods rather than constructing a single synthetic control. Here’s their evaluation:

Overall, we found that CSP reduced crime and improved police-community relations in at least one housing development.

Oof. That doesn’t sound so promising. Let’s look a little further:

Crime rates were consistently higher in CSP developments than comparison developments, but trends are similar across CSP developments and comparison developments. No clear patterns before or after any CSP wave exist. Thus, it is difficult to determine from these figures whether CSP has impacted crime, underscoring the need for a more rigorous methodological approach.

But wait! There’s also this:

The CSP neighborhoods saw a 14 percent drop in crime compared to the control neighborhoods. That’s good. At the same time, if you look at the chart you can see that this result is driven almost entirely by the year 2018. That’s sort of a thin reed. And there’s this:

Interviews revealed that CSP officers generally perceived community trust in the police to have increased. However, HACLA managers offered mixed responses regarding residents’ perceptions of the police. Overall, residents generally do not trust the police and expressed concerns about mistreatment, including a lack of anonymity when reporting crimes. There were also concerns that CSP officers may have been acting contrary to the program’s goals.

In other words, cops thought the program was working, but the residents of the housing developments were a lot less sure. The rest of the report has more details on this.

In one sense, all I’m doing here is illustrating, as usual, how hard it is to do good social science research. It’s really complicated and slightly different methodologies can produce big changes in results. In this case, the UCLA report is optimistic about CSP, but it relies on a tiny sample size of two neighborhoods and shows only that its precise choice of a synthetic control suffered a synthetic increase in synthetic crime. The Urban Institute report uses a bigger sample set and real controls, but even so shows statistically significant results in only one category, mostly driven by the results of a single year. On the qualitative side, we see something similar: the UCLA report says the CSP program is viewed pretty positively, while the Urban Institute report is far more qualified.

So is it true that when it comes to the “warrior police” mentality, “we know how to change this”? I would say no. We have some intriguing hints in the CSP program, but not much more than that. This is a really hard problem.

James Cooper/ZUMA

As a first (?) step, Alex Tabarrok recommends that we unbundle the police:

Don’t use a hammer if you don’t need to pound a nail. Road safety does not require a hammer. The responsibility for handing out speeding tickets and citations should be handled by an unarmed agency.

….Similarly, the police have no expertise in dealing with the mentally ill or with the homeless—jobs like that should be farmed out to other agencies. Notice that we have lots of other safety issues that are not handled by the police. Restaurant inspectors, for example, do over a million restaurant inspectors annually but they don’t investigate murder or drug charges and they are not armed.

This has some things in common with recommendations from liberal policing critics, and it would be interesting to see it spelled out in more detail. A separate traffic agency would result in fewer encounters with “the police,” but would ordinary citizens actually view it that way? Or would the traffic enforcers just get mentally bundled as “cops” along with anyone else who has the power to hassle you?

Tabarrok’s second recommendation closely dovetails with that of many liberals, but it’s a tricky one. Police officers themselves complain about having to be social workers too much, but a lot of their social work comes as a direct result of violent confrontations: domestic disputes; 911 calls that later turn out to involve the mentally ill; gang violence; and so forth. You don’t always know beforehand which is which.

Here’s a miscellaneous idea: Suppose the police departments in big cities were split into two specialties. Recruitment and early academy training wouldn’t change, so all cadets would have at least a minimum of standard police training. But then they’d split into two tracks: the ordinary police track and a second track that provided training in what we call social work. All patrol car teams would have one of each type. Both would have training in standard police tactics and both would have training in social work, but there would always be one of them who had deep and ongoing training in social problems and how to deal with them.

Just a thought.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 8. I mentioned yesterday that I was going to boot Brazil off the daily charts since it’s pretty obvious they have no intention of reporting honest numbers. But what country should replace them? For reasons I don’t really want to fess up to, swapping one country for another in my spreadsheet is a huge pain unless it’s in the same alphabetical order as the old country. I’m a little tired of all the messing around I’ve been doing on these charts lately, so I made it my goal to pick a country that was alphabetically before Canada and could slide right into Brazil’s place.

So say hello to Argentina! It’s an interesting country because (a) it’s pretty big and (b) it has a remarkably low rate of COVID-19 infection. This is largely because they moved fast: their first death was recorded on March 7 and they announced a full countrywide lockdown less than two weeks later, on March 19. This is faster than Italy or any other country I’m aware of. They are now in the stage of loosening the lockdown except in Buenos Aires, and it will be interesting to see what happens.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

This is from Wesley Smith over at NRO:

Well, well. The World Health Organization now says asymptomatic people with COVID infection rarely spread the disease.

Pardon my whiplash. So, now that we know COVID is not as dangerous as was initially thought, will those calling for mandatory vaccines and mask-wearing retract their advocacy?

I’m not especially picking on Smith here. This is just an example of an attitude that I see all too often: Ho ho ho, they changed their mind, they must be idiots. And sure, I get how frustrating it is that every bit of advice we get seems to be tentative and subject to change. But SARS-CoV-2 is a brand new virus and it acts in some very unusual ways. The science is moving at light speed right now, and as more cases are studied and more countries are compared we keep learning more. It’s inevitable that advice from the experts is going to be contingent for at least many months, and maybe longer.

CDC and WHO have made some mistakes, but they’re still the best advisors we have on the epidemiological side of things. Regardless of how the virus is spread, a vaccine is still the only way we’ll truly get rid of it, and mask wearing still seems to be important even if we don’t know precisely why.

So settle down, folks. Researchers are compressing what would normally be years of work into a few months. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

POSTSCRIPT: On the other hand, apparently WHO was vague about the difference between asymptomatic (no symptoms now or ever) and pre-symptomatic (no symptoms yet, but there will be eventually). The former is only 20 percent of all cases, so it doesn’t matter much how widely these folks shed virus. What matters are the pre-symptomatic cases. And how can you tell them apart anyway in real time? This appears to be a pretty horrible job of public communication from WHO, and they certainly deserve plenty of criticism for that. Keep wearing those masks, people.

Here’s a nice picture of an endless train shrouded in rising waves of heat and reflected in the rail. Don’t worry, though: I didn’t risk my life to take this picture. The train wasn’t moving.

HISTORICAL NOTE: This picture was taken in Yermo, California, home of the very first Del Taco store.

The inimitable Patt Morrison wants to know what “Defund the Police” means:

We’re overdue for a clear definition. Does “defunding” mean “getting rid of” police altogether? Does it mean “dismantling and rebuilding”? One message, one definition. Without clarity and unity, this will get played by the #Trump campaign to its advantage. https://t.co/yxjMDipyH6

— patt morrison (@pattmlatimes) June 8, 2020

We can write thousands of pieces telling people that “defund” doesn’t really mean defund, but honestly, you can hardly blame people for nevertheless thinking that defund means defund. That is, cut police budgets to zero and get rid of them entirely.

There’s not a Democratic politician alive who thinks we should do this, and keeping the phrase in use is just an invitation for unnecessary conflict between politicos and their base. Maybe it’s too late, but can’t we come up with something better? Rebuild the Police? Reform the Police? Demilitarize the Police? There’s got to be something.

Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer have a paper out today that looks at the impact of “Pattern or Practice” investigations of police departments. In a nutshell, what they find is that ordinary investigations have a generally positive effect, leading to fewer homicides and reduced crime in the surrounding community. However, investigations that were spurred by a “viral incident” had just the opposite effect, leading to a large increase in both homicides and crime in general:

Why the difference?

The leading theory for why some investigations have led to an increase in crimes is a striking decrease in the quantity of police activity — which is evident in all cities we were able to collect data. All other theories considered contradict the data in important ways, though lack of complete data makes definitive conclusions elusive.

In other words: police forces act like small children when investigations are performed after highly publicized protests against police brutality. They stop patrolling, they instigate “blue flus,” and they just generally throw hissy fits. The authors estimate that the cost of this juvenile behavior was nearly 900 lives lost in the five “viral” cities studied (Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Ferguson, and Riverside).

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 7. Brazil has decided to stop reporting COVID-19 numbers, apparently because president Jair Bolsonaro believes that if there are no official numbers then he can pretend the virus doesn’t exist. Replacing a country in my set of charts takes a surprising amount of time, however, and I wasn’t able to do it in time for today’s update. I’ll get to it tomorrow.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

For a long time there’s been a huge Black-white gulf in opinions about police brutality: Black people think it’s common while white people think it’s rare. In a 1968 poll taken after the 1967 riots, for example, 51 percent of Black respondents said police brutality was a major cause of the violence. Only 10 percent of white respondents agreed. That’s a 41 point gap.

So what’s happened since then? It’s impossible to find polls with identical question wording, but I dug up a few that were all related to police use of force and had crosstabs for Black and white respondents. Here are the results:

Between 1968 and 2014, there’s no movement. But in 2019, five years after Ferguson, there’s a noticeable drop: white opinion is only 30 points different from Black opinion. And in a YouGov poll taken a few days ago, there’s yet another drop. By next week or the week after, who knows?

I’ll caution again not to read too much into this since each of these polls asks its question differently, but it looks like the events of the past five years really have changed white opinion a fair amount. If we go through another week like the last one, where smartphone video of obvious police brutality is leading the evening news night after night, we might get pretty close to zero. The George Floyd protests might be what finally awaken white America to the fact that Black movements against police abuse are, and always have been, justified and just.