[HN Gopher] Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U...
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Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
Author : rbanffy
Score : 506 points
Date : 2020-06-26 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| [deleted]
| phkahler wrote:
| One way to preventing such positive feedback (more policing means
| more crime) may be to use only reported crime or calls to the
| police when allocating resources to an area.
| booboolayla wrote:
| >More policing means more crime
|
| Sounds like more testing means more people infected
| seaish wrote:
| This is not the answer. People are just as likely to be biased
| as police, and when this system is known, it can be used by
| malevolent citizens to influence where police go, not just in
| racial ways either.
| godelski wrote:
| Looking at all these comments, did no one watch _Minority
| Report_? The whole film was about the difficulties and ethics of
| "precrime" and arresting people before they even committed a
| crime. Obviously we aren't doing that here, but stories often
| exaggerate a bit.
|
| I'd also like to add another good series that explores this topic
| even more than _Minority Report_ : _Psycho-Pass_. _Psycho-Pass_
| is more extreme in that there 's stations setup that are
| constantly monitoring peoples' brain patterns and trying to
| predict aggression. I think many draw parallels to mass
| surveillance and some uses of ML for predictive crime detection.
|
| Both these shows tackle ethical challenges related to policing in
| this manner even when the predictive power is quite high.
| lobotryas wrote:
| But this is not "pre crime". Someone in those areas still has
| to break the law to be arrested. What you write has zero
| connection to reality.
| godelski wrote:
| Often we use stories to draw parallels. If you watch a movie
| or read a book and think "that's not a precise depiction of
| the issue!" I don't think anyone is going to disagree with
| you. I think you are failing to see similarities and are
| focusing on the differences. The differences are there for
| entertainment. I mean... come on... we don't even believe
| that humans have psychic abilities/magic. But that doesn't
| mean that it can't be a compelling and worthwhile story. Even
| Gattaca, which is much more scientifically reasonable, has
| many shortfalls and exaggerates things to tell a better
| story.
|
| There's numbers between 0% and 100%. I'm not claiming
| _Minority Report_ is 100% reality (that 's ludicrous!), but
| that doesn't mean it is 0%.
|
| Take your trolling elsewhere.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Obviously we aren 't doing that here_
|
| IDK. one year olds were added to CalGang database. People were
| added to the CalGang with no supporting evidence. The database
| was used to direct police resources _and also for background
| checks for job applicants_.
|
| So, you're entered into the database as a one year old (or a
| ten year old, or a 30 year old but for no good reason). Now you
| can't get a job. Predictably, you turn to whatever petty crime
| to survive, like selling loose cigarettes or dealing small
| amounts of pot. And, since there's increased police attention
| on you, you're definitely caught.
|
| Taking away people's ability to make a living legally, and then
| arresting them for turning to crime to survive, sounds pretty
| equivalent to just arresting them for precrime in the first
| place.
| godelski wrote:
| I meant specifically arresting people _before_ they committed
| a crime. There is a fine line between that and putting
| someone under watch, but I think _Minority Report_ was
| pointing out that this line might as well not exist.
|
| Personally, I think putting someone under watch before they
| have committed a crime or there is reasonable suspicion that
| the person is about to commit a crime is unconstitutional. I
| do not think statistics is justification for "reasonable
| suspicion."
| lostapathy wrote:
| Everybody commits minor infractions of the law regularly.
| Putting someone under watch, by a cop who needs to report
| that he enforced something, is going to ensure they get
| picked up sooner or later.
|
| There's a saying to the effect that a good cop can find a
| reason to pull any car over if he follows it for just a
| couple minutes.
| godelski wrote:
| I have one that goes back a few more centuries
|
| > If you give me six lines written by the hand of the
| most honest of men, I will find something in them which
| will hang him.
|
| - Cardinal Richlieu
| metrokoi wrote:
| Do they? What are these minor infractions that would get
| picked up on? Likely drug or gun charges. Most people
| don't own guns illegal or use illegal drugs. The only
| common infraction I can think of is speeding, but that's
| not what these criminals are being picked up for. Cops
| don't follow a single individual around waiting for them
| to go 5 over the speed limit.
| Falling3 wrote:
| Are you unaware of the fact that police plant evidence?
| ncallaway wrote:
| I'll give a partial list and refer to the RCW since
| that's a state I'm familiar with. Again, the entire point
| is the driving code is long and complicated. There are
| many many reasons you can be stopped.
|
| Explore the entire RCW yourself on driving rules here:
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61. I
| encourage you to read the _entire section_ and ask
| yourself if you ever have a driving trip longer than 3
| blocks where you _don 't_ violate one of these laws:
|
| - Speeding (even 1 mph over the limit for only 1 second).
| 46.61.400 (2)
|
| - Speeding (even if at/under the speed limit if the
| officer things the roadway is unsafe for that speed,
| subjective to the officer making the stop) 46.41.400 (1)
|
| - Speeding (failure to slow down at an intersection, hill
| crest, bend in the road, or when pedestrians are nearby,
| subjective to the officer making the stop) 46.41.400 (3)
|
| - Passing on the right (except in specific situations)
| 46.61.110 & 46.61.115
|
| - Driving too slowly (driving too slowly such that you
| impair the normal and reasonable flow of traffic; note
| for extra fun that the normal flow of traffic is often
| _above_ the speed limit and this particular law doesn 't
| provide an exception for driving at the speed limit;
| subjective to the officer making the stop) 46.61.425
|
| - Failure to signal (both turns and lane changes, even
| into your own driveway) 46.61.305 (1)
|
| - Failure to properly signal (not signaling a full 100
| feet of travel before turning or changing lanes)
| 46.61.305 (2)
|
| - Illegal wide turn. 46.61.290
|
| - Reckless driving (subjective to the officer making the
| stop) 46.61.500
|
| - Failure to come to a complete halt at a stop sign.
| 46.61.190
|
| - Failure to stop between 15-50 feet __of the rail __from
| a mandatory stop rail cross (note, the distance measured
| is from the nearest rail, not the stop sign) 46.61.345
|
| - Expired tabs (even by a day). 46.16A.030
|
| - Anything not street legal about your vehicle (headlight
| out, taillight out, cracked windshield, window tint).
|
| > Cops don't follow a single individual around waiting
| for them to go 5 over the speed limit.
|
| This is a preposterous statement and absolutely false.
| This happens _all the time_ when an officer becomes
| suspicious of a vehicle. It 's literally routine policing
| that you would learn at the academy if you took officer
| training.
| lostapathy wrote:
| It's not like cops can pull you over for simple
| possession of weed in your glove box. They pull people
| over for a traffic infraction and then find the weed,
| illegal gun, etc.
| godelski wrote:
| I once looked up the arrest records in my local area. The
| number one reason for arrest was "driving without a
| license." (with no other infractions listed). I'm not
| saying that this was racial profiling, but I'm not
| denying that people with Hispanic last names accounted
| for the vast majority of these arrests. I am at least
| implying that it is a little suspicious and maybe
| requires a little more nuance and closer inspection.
| lostapathy wrote:
| Right. Generally, when somebody gets pulled over for a
| trivial violation and then something bigger is found
| during the stop, they only write a ticket for the bigger
| violation. Less paperwork that way and has the end result
| they were looking for.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The reality is that the police can pull you over at any
| time for no reason at all, and you are still required to
| follow their orders.
|
| There is no remedy available in real-time. The law says
| that you must always follow police instructions. So if
| the police pull you over for no reason, and handcuff you
| on the side of the road, you must submit to the
| handcuffing. If they demand to search your car, you must
| submit to that. It is only later that you can move to
| have evidence dismissed, or file a complaint.
|
| I know this goes counter to how we [1] think the law
| works. But this is how things work in reality. If an
| officer acts illegally during a traffic stop, and you
| physically resist it (e.g. grab them to keep them out of
| your car after refusing a search), you have committed at
| least one crime and possibly several. Now you can really
| be arrested, or if the officer is afraid for their life,
| shot dead. Even though there was nothing behind the
| initial pull-over.
|
| [1] Edit to add:
|
| By "we" I mean people to whom the police usually show
| deference and respect; a group to which I belong, and
| with which I'm assuming there's a big overlap with HN
| readership. BTW this deference is part of what is covered
| by the term "privilege."
|
| There is certainly another group of people who have
| direct experience with getting pulled over for no reason.
| Consider the stories told by the former police chief of
| Detroit:
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/11/floyd-
| kill...
|
| > When I was chief, a white DPD officer pulled me over
| one night. He approached my unmarked vehicle and without
| looking at me, asked for my license and registration.
| Wanting to see how far this would go, I said, "Yes
| officer." At some point, he recognized who he had stopped
| and immediately apologized. My question to him was, "Why
| did you stop me?" He said, "I thought it was a stolen
| car." The officer was reprimanded for his actions.
| tasuki wrote:
| That was a good and very moving article. I don't
| understand though: why was the officer reprimanded for
| his actions?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| It's not just putting them under watch. It's putting them
| under watch _while also using the same database to screen
| job applicants_.
|
| Pushing someone out of the legal economy and watching
| closely has an almost guaranteed outcome. Doing those two
| things simultaneously is functionally equivalent to either
| a) starving them to death or b) precrime.
| strbean wrote:
| It's worse than precrime. With precrime, you might never
| be predicted to commit a crime. The situation you
| describe is basically a) starve to death or b) go to
| jail.
|
| I wonder if you could make a case for entrapment here?
| dllthomas wrote:
| Did you ever read the original story? I very much recommend
| doing so.
| basch wrote:
| I like to bring Then Now up everytime precrime comes up. Until
| it goes off the rails in the end, its one of my favorite
| articles of all time. The paragraphs I yanked below, dont do
| its craziness justice.
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
|
| "But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether
| sex offenders are likely to commit crimes again after they have
| been released. In America this is being used to decide whether
| to keep them in jail even after they have served their full
| sentence.
|
| STATIC-99 works by scoring individuals on criteria such as age,
| number of sex-crimes and sex of the victim. These are then fed
| into a database that shows recidivism rates of groups of sex-
| offenders in the past with similar characteristics. The judge
| is then told how likely it is - in percentage terms - that the
| offender will do it again.
|
| The problem is that it is not true. What the judge is really
| being told is the likely percentage of people in the group who
| will re-offend. There is no way the system can predict what an
| individual will do. A recent very critical report of such
| systems said that the margin of error for individuals could be
| as great as between 5% and 95%
|
| In other words completely useless. Yet people are being kept in
| prison on the basis that such a system predicts they might do
| something bad in the future."
| treis wrote:
| The options here are having the judge make the decision based
| on their gut feeling or they can make it based on data. It's
| really hard for me to believe that gut feeling is better than
| data.
| r00fus wrote:
| When the data is just as likely to be false as it is to be
| true then it's worse than useless as a decision support
| mechanism.
| cgriswald wrote:
| In both cases it doesn't actually work. In the case of the
| data-backed nonsense it's been used to justify holding
| people past their prison sentence. In this case it's
| _demonstrably worse_. In the general case anything that's
| "sciency" but doesn't actually work leads to bad outcomes
| because people are far more likely to buy into it or at
| least less likely to call out obvious BS.
| treis wrote:
| >In the case of the data-backed nonsense it's been used
| to justify holding people past their prison sentence.
|
| I'm not sure why you assume that it's keeping people in
| prison and not being used to let them out.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Not sure what the answer is for pedophiles. Hopefully it is
| not this:
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-
| wit...
|
| The point being, some sort of predictive model is always used
| to evaluate sentencing and release. Is 5 years enough, or
| will that pedophile attack more kids when they get out? How
| about 10 years? Gee, they don't seem to be attacking children
| in prison, maybe we should release them early for good
| behavior?
| basch wrote:
| What percent of a population will act is not a good gauge
| of the percent chance of an individual acting.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Unless you have special relevant information about the
| individual, the fraction of the group to which the
| individual belongs which will act in a certain way is the
| probability that the indivdual will act in that way.
| Balgair wrote:
| _Minority Report_ is more than just the movie or the book or
| the pre-production scripts. The whole 'telling' of the world,
| and it's many versions, are interesting to look at. The history
| of the story provides a great, if navel gazing, look at free
| will and the future in general: many possibilities.
|
| The interactions of how empathy for the characters are created
| in the audience via the book and/or pre-production script vs.
| the movie are a great look into how us humans deal with these
| issues of 'free will'. It's largely emotional, not logical. How
| these various 'tellings' deal with that issue honestly shows
| the genius of Spielberg's approach to stories. Why does free
| will elicit such an emotional response in us?
|
| The 'world' of _Minority Report_ is, largely, the antagonist of
| these tellings /stories. It's not just a place where characters
| interact that has cool stuff and whizz-bang technology. Here,
| it's a character itself. In doing that, it demonstrates this
| 'free will' issue again. The world interacts with the audience
| and has the audience 'buy into' the (fictional) world. It's
| oppressiveness and thrilling nature is felt by the audience.
| But why? Where does free will reside in this interaction of
| 'story' and audience? Why are stories gripping in a world
| with/out free will?
|
| The use of water's distortions of light are a big theme in the
| movie too. I'm not sure how it relates to free will, but,
| thematically, it was a really cool feature that comes up all
| over the film.
|
| The movie really is a good one. The great Michael Tucker has a
| fantastic essay on it here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbMPjas_rRU
| lordnacho wrote:
| I haven't seen it since I saw it in cinemas, but thinking back,
| shouldn't the precog's visions be used as a bayesian prior? If
| they see a guy who is just done shooting someone, shouldn't
| that be the starting point for gathering a little more
| evidence? If it turns out he doesn't have a gun or training in
| how to use one, maybe let him go? If you see he goes to shop
| for a gun and spends some days on the range, evidence is
| stronger by any account.
|
| If he then starts sending threatening letters to his ex with
| cut up old bits of newspaper, that's some more evidence.
|
| Maybe do a RCT when goes to visit her, then you can save half
| of them potentially. It's a bit grating how they skip around
| the subject of how exactly they know their prediction method
| works.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Big budget movies sort of struggle against telling stories
| about justice for people whom we discriminate against
| contemporaneously.
|
| You could never make a movie that even loosely portrays the
| plight of Uighers, who suffer under a notoriously technology-
| heavy form of surveillance and oppression (what we are calling
| predictive policing). Not because of censorship but because no
| one is going to fund your film.
|
| So while I love Philip K Dick and Syd Mead and whatever, it was
| still a movie that gave more screen time to an Audi than to a
| black person. Your fiction needs to engage with the real
| somewhere, and people are realizing that the fiction of
| predictive crime is really about the reality of arresting black
| people for crimes that white people do not get arrested for
| more efficiently.
| godelski wrote:
| I think the purpose of movies and stories is to make these
| events relatable. You're supposed to draw parallels. You
| don't have to show a black person to convince white people
| that minorities are being repressed. In fact, it is probably
| more convincing if on screen you are showing white people
| being oppressed because then they are going to more identify
| with that character. Of course, we are supposed to analyze
| these stories and find what they are trying to tell us. They
| aren't always so much "here's the entire problem, why you
| should care, and every little nuance" but rather "this is a
| problem." It often serves as a stepping stone for people to
| learn and start to care. To see things that they didn't see
| before because a story can give you a glimpse into what it is
| like living in someone's shoes. I wouldn't bash a story for
| not being able to compact what requires dozens of hours of
| research into an entertain-able bite size chunk. Stories
| serve different purposes from documentaries which serve
| different purposes from literature and news.
| wongarsu wrote:
| In fact I would argue this is one of the great strengths of
| SciFi as a genre: you can transport present day problems
| into a foreign setting, allowing the viewer to engage with
| the core problem without getting distracted by race or
| nationality
| godelski wrote:
| Exactly! This is why _The Orville_ is a better _Star
| Trek_ than the official reboot. Sci-Fi was always about
| exploring ethical dilemmas in current society. Just
| portraying them as either a different species
| (representing a some subgroup in our society) or
| potential outcomes of policies if they were to be abused.
| I mean, if you think _Blade Runner_ / _Do Androids Dream
| of Electric Sheep_ (and _Altered Carbon_ ) is just a
| gritty Sci-Fi Film Noir, then you missed half of the
| movie which was about socio-economic status and struggles
| (specifically _Blade Runner_ is critical of Reganomics).
| WrongThinkerNo5 wrote:
| With what seems to be nothing but criticism of policing policies,
| I would love to know what the ideal or even acceptable policing
| policies are, presuming that any policing will be accepted.
|
| The most simple minded can be critics, but what is the
| alternative? What happens when the lawless mob and criminals want
| to break and enter your home and take your things and burn down
| your life? It's easy enough when it's the "others" stuff and
| homes and lives. But this is clearly a breakdown of equality
| under the law ... equal laws that are equally enforced with equal
| penalties. Is that objectionable to anyone? I thought we are
| striving for equality. You cant achieve equality when some get
| away with breaking the law and others don't; and some get light
| sentences and others have even the clear case against them
| dropped. That's not equality.
| proverbialbunny wrote:
| >The most simple minded can be critics, but what is the
| alternative?
|
| - Teaching police how to identify bias and showing them the
| alternative way to do things. This is basic statistics, but it
| can be boiled down. Actually, teach it in classrooms. Everyone
| should know it. A lot of "racism" in the US isn't intentionally
| harmful, it's bias.
|
| - Police handle outliers. We have specialists for different
| kinds of situations. If we created more kinds of specialists to
| handle more kinds of situations, we wouldn't need to rely on
| the police who are not trained as specialists but as
| generalists who don't understand how to best help the
| situation.
| socalnate1 wrote:
| "What happens when the lawless mob and criminals want to break
| and enter your home and take your things and burn down your
| life?"
|
| Uhm what? Is this a common problem in your life?
|
| If this question is asked seriously, here is a serious answer:
|
| https://theweek.com/articles/918143/what-america-learn-from-...
| dsabanin wrote:
| Well, not yet...
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Not the person you were replying to, but I can speak as
| someone who lived in a country that was essentially lawless
| as a kid. When there isn't a unifying civil authority, mobs
| do in fact take whatever they feel like if you have the least
| bit of something worth taking. It leads to ubiquitous misery.
| hckr_news wrote:
| Username checks out
| jberryman wrote:
| One answer is that: police don't do what you think they do,
| police are not effective at what you imagine their job to be,
| and police are not trusted to be effective (so much crime goes
| unreported):
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/01/most-violen...
|
| Consider also that as you observe, even with the existence of
| policing as we know it, all manner of violent and property
| crime still exists.
| standardUser wrote:
| "I would love to know what the ideal or even acceptable
| policing policies are"
|
| Some ideas...
|
| A corp of well-trained, unarmed individuals to respond the vast
| majority of non-violent police calls.
|
| Legalize drugs and sex work to dramatically curtail the amount
| of "crimes" and associated "police work".
|
| Zero tolerance penalties for abuses of power by armed police.
| Instead of LEOs receiving less severe penalties when they break
| the law, mandate _more_ severe penalties.
|
| Plus a whole raft of other, popular ideas like banning choke
| holds, requiring highly regulated body cams, ending no-knock
| warrants in most cases, reforming or ending bail for low-level
| crimes, reform qualified immunity for armed government
| employees, the list goes on.
| lordnacho wrote:
| One issue I haven't heard much about is what misconceptions
| people have about AI/ML in general. This kind of thing only makes
| it worse.
|
| There's a lot of ways an ML system can go wrong, and it won't be
| obvious to everyone who uses it. Dataset badly sampled? Cop ain't
| gonna know that. In fact, from his POV he's using fancy new
| equipment that the department has paid some highly qualified
| consultants for.
|
| What I worry about is we have actual data scientists like the
| guys at top unis who teach and know how the sausage is made.
|
| And then we have some consultant people who kinda know how to
| shove some data into a model and get a result out. I'm not saying
| they're totally incompetent, but their incentives are misaligned.
| They want the data to mean some things that it can't mean, in
| terms of epistemology, or in terms of level of confidence. You
| could very easily bake a false correlation <> causation into this
| kind of thing, and use it to arrest whoever you like. This is
| especially true if the guy you're selling it to also has wrong
| incentives.
|
| And the guy at the bottom using this model ends up thinking that
| he has a magic box that tells him who is gonna be a criminal in
| the future. When he arrests someone, it's a very deep explanation
| why it isn't the way he thought, something I could see the judge
| not getting.
|
| That is not to say such a system is never going to work anywhere,
| but if you're operating a predictive system you need to know a
| bunch of stuff about it to do so responsibly.
| franksvalli wrote:
| Just for the record, in 2011 Santa Cruz was proud to be the first
| in the US to try predictive policing:
|
| https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2011/01/14/crime-predictio...
|
| https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/06/20/santa-cruz-cons...
| zpallin wrote:
| So, it means Santa Cruz has a track record for being on the
| cutting edge of policing technology?
| strbean wrote:
| And somehow in this small sleepy town, the same 2 blocks have
| consistently been the "you can always get heroine/meth/crack
| here" blocks for about 30 years, and they can't predict the
| need for a squad car parked there.
| tpmx wrote:
| So,
|
| a) an incompetent or politically stymied police force
|
| b) predictive policing from prior crime data works
| bhntr3 wrote:
| The problem with predictive policing is in the name. Inference
| (ML) predicts the future from the past. If the past is racist,
| then inference will create a racist future. Since racism is
| systemic[1], especially when it comes to policing, predictive
| policing is actively working against an anti-racist future.
|
| There may be statistical ways to factor out systemic racism.
| There are two reasons I don't think that works:
|
| 1. I don't see how one evaluates the correctness of the process
| that controls for racism. What is ground truth for anti-racist
| policing?
|
| 2. These systems are likely snake oil and the vendors of these
| systems are (possibly inadvertently) profiting off racist
| policing. If cops arrest more black people per capita, then send
| the cops to black neighborhoods and have them follow black
| parolees. The system works (according to an objective function
| which maximizes arrests.) Remove racism and send the cops to
| white neighborhoods. Now the cops don't arrest as many people.
| The system fails. So I think it's likely that if you remove
| racist policing from predictive policing, you get the null
| hypothesis.
|
| I'd be happy to hear a counterargument from someone who has
| actual statistics on this though.
|
| [1] If you don't believe this, you're in the minority now:
| https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21286642/george-floyd-protests...
| Narhem wrote:
| These systems are mostly pointless. If you really want to stop
| crimes, you have to get involved with the community and
| understand why they are happening.
| yurlungur wrote:
| I think preventative measures to reduce community crime
| levels are not a bad idea. It just sounds very inappropriate
| if it was the police department doing it, especially if the
| community has fear and antagonism towards the police. If
| these were social workers knocking on doors and showing
| people how they can improve their lives by new education
| opportunities etc this would be much less problematic to me.
| whatshisface wrote:
| To [1]: Totally abstracted from anything you said, a poll that
| people believe something does not in any way resemble evidence
| that it is true. For example, only 8% of Jehovas Witnesses[2]
| believe that humans evolved. Is that evidence that JWs didn't
| evolve? "If you don't believe this you're in the minority now"
| has never in history been a good argument for anything, even if
| you are using it to try and prove something true.
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution
| bhntr3 wrote:
| Of course that's true. I wasn't so much trying to provide
| evidence as to point out that people who felt comfortable
| saying "I'm not racist but I don't think this country is
| racist either" should not feel comfortable socially
| expressing that position anymore. Social proof may not be
| evidence but it is powerful in changing people's minds who
| might not be as receptive to facts and figures. I don't mind
| if people believe the right thing for the wrong reasons (at
| least these days with how anti-science a segment of the
| population seems to be.)
| coffeemug wrote:
| _> should not feel comfortable socially expressing that
| position anymore_
|
| The fact that this meta-view (that one shouldn't feel
| comfortable expressing a certain position) is becoming
| mainstream is deeply concerning. It is a terrifying attempt
| at extracting compliance from political opponents.
| adwn wrote:
| > _at least these days with how anti-science a segment of
| the population seems to be_
|
| Considering the truly abysmal track record of the social
| sciences [1], this seems at the very least understandable
| with regards to the "non-hard" sciences.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _should not feel comfortable socially expressing that
| position anymore_
|
| What people feel safe in expressing, when "safe" means
| "safe from peers disagreeing with you," is a _terrible_
| reason to believe something. If I came back with a poll of
| my local area that said all of my peers thought racism wasn
| 't systemic, would you council me to agree with them?
| That's an extremely dysfunctional way of thinking.
| nwienert wrote:
| Yea, both of these points are so bad as to be almost
| parody.
|
| Not only should you never, ever base your beliefs based
| on avoiding the discomfort of being an outsider, but you
| also should never, ever, use majority opinion as some
| sort of proof of... anything.
|
| If you did, you'd have advocated _for_ slavery if only
| you'd been born south of the Mason Dixon years ago.
| bhntr3 wrote:
| Here's the wikipedia article for the fallacious argument
| I used and which you're critiquing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
|
| Here is some statistical evidence for systemic racism:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/us-systemic-racism-in-
| charts... (Shockingly this is actually pretty good
| despite being from Business Insider)
|
| Honestly, I'd just edit the link at this point if I could
| since it seems to have triggered so many people. My
| assumption, again, was that anyone who doesn't believe in
| systemic racism at this point is not going to be swayed
| by statistical evidence. I am not advocating that any
| critical thinker be persuaded by majority opinion.
|
| Luckily we're all critical thinkers here and we crave
| statistical evidence. I assume that means we also all
| believe systemic racism is a problem in the US. But in
| case you're an outlier I hope that link helps.
|
| That said, everything in that link has been true
| literally forever (for the US.) But opinions are only
| changing now. Maybe 30% of the United States didn't see
| those stats before now but I find that hard to believe. I
| think social proof, despite not being actual proof, is
| more powerful than you folks would like to believe it is.
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| With all due respect, I'm not sure the BI graphs are
| great support for the thesis. All of the economic ones
| are essentially the same: if you're poor, you have less
| savings, are less likely to be employed, less likely to
| be CEO, less likely to have health insurance, and so on.
| They're expected to be correlated, so in some sense they
| are not as informative as a whole as one might guess from
| the large amount of them. It's also not clear that this
| has anything to do with racism, economists would point to
| a whole load of confounders which mags like BI tend to
| skip over.
|
| The one I found interesting was marijuana, where at least
| we have two measurements of the same thing, smoking up
| and getting caught with the stuff. That could be expanded
| on, as there's a thesis out there that police focus their
| resources unreasonably on black people.
|
| A really good study that investigated this would be
| something like the essays in Steven Levitt's books. A
| load of numbers, a load of potential explanations, dig
| into the numbers and every explanation falls (eg if
| abortions reduced crime it would be correlated across
| other datasets, ie countries) except for one or two.
|
| At the moment my leaning is actually with you, but mainly
| from anecdotal evidence. Almost every trip I've had to
| America has has this weird race-vibe to it at some point.
| I go to a wedding, and everyone is 95% a minority race. I
| go to a comedy night, comedian jokes about my race. I
| hear someone talking, I somehow know what colour they are
| before I see them. So something about the society has
| race coded into it.
|
| And then of course there are these horrendous incidents
| that we hear about every now and again, where some poor
| black man has been shot by police. I'm sure far more have
| simply been mistreated, because just by it coming up in
| conversation with other people, it turns out one of them
| witnessed such a beating.
|
| But what we need is proper statistical evidence. The BI
| charts you've got there would be torn apart by an
| economist in a second.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Here is some statistical evidence for systemic racism
|
| None of those charts appear to be controlled for
| confounders. Doing that correctly is hard, but not doing
| it at all is ridiculous. It allows you to "prove" that
| many engineering schools (with majority-white admissions
| boards) are racist against white people in favor of
| Asians, or that "racism" exists to the benefit of first
| generation African immigrants who by many metrics are
| better off than the US population average.
|
| > I think social proof, despite not being actual proof,
| is more powerful than you folks would like to believe it
| is.
|
| It can be effective in convincing people on political
| issues, but that's pure tribalism. It's anti-science,
| because it "works" independent of whether there is any
| truth in the assertion or not.
| [deleted]
| a1369209993 wrote:
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655876 :
|
| > >"If you don't believe this you're in the minority now" has
| never in history been a good argument for anything
|
| > I hear you. I originally had "and you don't really like
| minorities do you?" but thought it was a bit below the belt.
| I guess without the cruel dig it's not as relevant though.
|
| > I'm not confident that evidence will change the mind of
| someone who continues to deny systemic racism though. But
| social proof is very powerful even if it isn't evidence. I
| don't mind if people believe the right thing for the wrong
| reasons.
|
| There are plenty of minorities I don't really like. Such as
| police officers. Or sociopaths. But that's not _because_ they
| 're minorities, and given a choice between a belief that's
| popular and false versus one that's unpopular and true, I'll
| pick true one hundred times out of one hundred, and only
| grudgingly comprehend the distinction.
|
| Anything that can make people believe the right thing for the
| wrong reasons is just as effective (and usually more so) at
| making them believe the _wrong_ thing for the wrong reasons,
| and needs to opposed regardless of whether it happens to have
| invoked "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" at the
| moment.
| [deleted]
| metrokoi wrote:
| I agree, this type of reasoning strikes me as bulling or
| shaming people into believing racism is systemic. The entire
| conversation about racism is becoming more and more about
| shaming or threatening people into line, not convincing them
| with truths. Even pointing this out may bring up accusations
| of racism. Moral shaming or threatening does get results so I
| can't argue with that, but I don't see it as sustainable.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Is reality racist or just the data used to describe it? If the
| latter, I see no issue with your argument. If the former, I
| think we need be careful about legislating reality ( mostly
| because it doesn't work ).
| SkyBelow wrote:
| What if it is such only because we made it so? For example,
| policing policies that increase fatherlessness in specific
| communities will result in increased levels of crime. But to
| then take a 'fair' approach at distribution of policing
| policies based on the actual crime data, and then use that to
| continue to keep the policies that caused the problem to
| begin with seems a bug that needs to be fixed (though some
| would point out it was more of a purposefully designed
| feature).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The problem with the contrary approach is that there _are_
| increased levels of crime there. Children end up equally
| fatherless -- possibly moreso -- if their fathers are
| killed by gang violence as if their fathers are in prison.
|
| You don't solve the problem by sending police away from the
| places with the most crime. You solve it by fixing the root
| causes.
|
| End the war on drugs, because prohibition is the primary
| funding source for gangs. Make it easier to start a small
| business, so that more people without much capital can
| start small businesses. Change the zoning to make it easier
| for people to start a small business out of their home
| instead of needing enough capital to secure prohibitively
| expensive business properties. Stop tying schools to real
| estate and let people choose to send their kids to any
| school they want.
|
| Most of these are local issues that exist predominantly in
| cities and states with Democrat-majority legislatures. They
| could have been solved decades ago. They could be solved
| right now with the stroke of a pen.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| I agree that, in general, you're going to have biased training
| data (with a bias that's difficult to measure) and so
| inherently policing recommendations will be biased. This is
| particularly problematic when it comes to arrests for crimes
| that are inherently 'selective' in their enforcement. Eg; drug-
| related crimes, public intoxication, loitering, trespassing.
|
| But the fact is... violent (fatal and nonfatal) crimes do
| happen at a much higher rate in poor neighborhoods. And black
| americans are calling the police at higher rates knowing full-
| well what that might imply
| [1](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf).
| Anecdotally, when I lived in south side Chicago, when speaking
| to residents (that did not live in a predominantly affluent
| area like Hyde Park) one of the key complaints was that there
| simply wasn't enough police to respond to violent incidents.
|
| There's a worrying trend in the conversation these days that
| has shifted from "there's a serious problem with racism in how
| police go about their job" to "we need less police". Folks in
| neighborhoods living with the constant threat of gang violence
| don't have the luxury to sit in their aeron chairs and argue
| about defunding the police. They face the very real threat of
| themselves or their loved ones being shot on the streets and
| statistically not by police.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think you make a good point about the need for law
| enforcement in high-crime areas, though I disagree strongly
| that the only solution to that problem is a police force as
| currently constituted in the US. I think it's worth pointing
| out that police often has abysmal clearance rates and
| response times and often do not provide effective relief from
| the real problems you outline.
|
| However, what I wanted to raise was this:
|
| > the fact is... violent (fatal and nonfatal) crimes do
| happen at a much higher rate in poor neighborhoods
|
| I think this statement is worth examining.
|
| We certainly know that poor neighborhoods contact the police
| more often and that the police arrest more people (and record
| more crimes) in poor neighborhoods. As I said above, I have
| ever reason to believe residents of poor neighborhoods suffer
| crimes more often and that each crime does proportionally
| greater damage to their lives.
|
| I also think that, as people get access to more resources,
| they are reasons to believe they are less likely to contact
| the police in all circumstances. That, of course, is the
| other way to read the stats you linked about poor
| neighborhoods contacting police. Police clearance rates are
| often low and contacting the police rarely directly addresses
| the harm caused by a crime. Also, because we are most likely
| to be harmed by people in our social circles, wealthier
| people are more likely to be harmed by more powerful people.
| These are all reasons that wealthier victims of crimes might
| choose not to contact the police and generate statistics
| about them. It's difficult to point to data about what isn't
| recorded (of course), but I think the feminist movement has
| done some great work trying to document how under-reported
| rapes (and other sexual crimes) are.
|
| I just want to encourage skepticism about the systems through
| which data is collected. Structural elements strongly bias
| the data that's collected and, if we're serious about
| changing the system, I think it's advantageous to be
| skeptical of every element of the system.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| If we want to stop neighborhood gang violence in the long
| term, we need to work on why people join gangs, and what they
| are fighting over. We can't do that with police, who
| generally don't come into the situation until after it's too
| late and things have gone wrong.
|
| But if most of our money is going to the police, then what
| resources are available to do the longer-term work on gangs
| and neighborhoods?
|
| In software development terms (since this is HN), it would be
| like spending more and more money on QA and support because
| your products have so many problems. At some point a wise
| manager is going to say "wait, we should invest in better
| product development instead."
|
| If you have infinite funding, you can do both. If you don't
| have infinite funding, you need to look at changing your
| allocation.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Talking with police is interesting. I talked policing with
| a police officer who had worked in New Zealand, the UK and
| Australia. These are countries that are relatively close in
| culture and the differences in policing described by the
| officer were striking. A lot of this was in relation to
| what the police role was and how other services cooperated
| (or didn't). It would be great to have a description of
| system differences from an officer who had worked in more
| systems.
| banads wrote:
| Why is the money given to the police the only allocation
| you are wanting to drain for this cause?
| r00fus wrote:
| From studies I've read it is noted that most of those calls
| could be handled by a social worker or other non-violent
| responder.
|
| The problem is the police budget has dwarfed and subsumed all
| non-violent requests as well.
| starkd wrote:
| Not sure You can always separate out violent from non-
| violent events. The police are expected to deal with a
| whole community in a holistic way.
| thebradbain wrote:
| Why does a victim of sexual assault need to report to
| someone who has a gun? Why does a wellness check need to
| be performed with a gun? Why does a standard highway
| patrolman or cop doing routine speed traps need a gun?
| Why does every cop in a school need a gun? Why is the gun
| the constant?
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| > Why does a standard highway patrolman or cop doing
| routine speed traps need a gun?
|
| Because this is statistically the form of policing most
| likely to get cops shot.
|
| > Why does every cop in a school need a gun?
|
| A symptom of America's school shooting problem. When your
| child is being gunned down you'll probably wish the
| police there were armed.
| umvi wrote:
| > Why does a standard highway patrolman or cop doing
| routine speed traps need a gun?
|
| Because civilians have shot and killed police during
| traffic stops? And not just with guns. I seem to remember
| a road rage case in Colorado where the raging driver shot
| and killed another driver with a crossbow.
| andrewprock wrote:
| It's not clear how "there is a non-zero chance a motorist
| has a gun" leads to the conclusion that "all traffic
| enforcement must have a gun".
| raarts wrote:
| As someone from the Netherlands I can say there's a non-
| zero chance that a motorist has a gun. It's smaller than
| the US, but it's not zero. Still our cops carry guns. In
| the US the chances are way, way higher. I can understand
| that cops are armed there.
| solzhenitsyn wrote:
| It's to mitigate that risk factor. You wear your seatbelt
| every time you drive as "there is a non-zero chance you
| will crash" even though the vast majority of the time
| wearing the seat belt was unnecessary.
| r00fus wrote:
| It's easy - when someone wants a well-check or reports
| mental health or substance abuse or maybe even rape, that
| should go to someone other than police.
|
| Showing up with a gun to some events is guaranteed to
| make things worse.
| briandear wrote:
| A rape investigation should be done by a social worker?
| Are they trained criminal investigators? Is a social
| worker familiar with the rules of criminal evidence? The
| job of the police is to investigate crimes and present
| evidence to the DA.
|
| For welfare checks or mental illness incidents, then of
| course a social worker or analogue could be a better
| choice. For investigating criminal acts, that's
| specifically what police do.
|
| If someone calls in a rape, what happens when the suspect
| is still there? Rape is a violent crime and showing up
| with a gun is absolutely appropriate. It's ridiculous to
| suggest violent crimes should be investigated by people
| who aren't trained in criminal investigation nor trained
| to deal with violent and dangerous suspects. Is the
| social worker going to carry handcuffs? Are they going to
| be trained in apprehending suspects? If so, then that
| means the social worker is now a cop.
|
| Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water here.
| vmception wrote:
| Swing and a miss, overpolicing has nothing to do with violent
| crime. It has to do with nonviolent infractions that
| marginalize people to begin with. Being actually caught with
| illicit substances , or caught for the unpaid ticket.
|
| These things are evenly distributed across society, but when
| overly targeting minorities it further marginalizes them.
|
| Exhibit A) YOU might not be able to relate to people that
| routinely have a bag of coke on them, but a proportionate
| demographics of the population do.
|
| Exhibit B) Silicon Valley openly brags about microdosing acid
| to perform at work at their half million $ jobs. Overpolicing
| would ensnare them if overpolicing existed in that
| demographic and then they would be ineligible for jobs the
| rest of their life. If you cant be subsidized by your family
| then you have actual crime to consider. Guess where you will
| live too.
| ryankemper wrote:
| > These things are evenly distributed across society
|
| This is an unproven assertion. You should provide evidence
| of it, because on its face it is a completely ludicrous
| claim. Rates of illicit drug activity, violent crime, etc
| are _not_ evenly distributed in society. Not even close.
|
| > Exhibit B) Silicon Valley openly brags about microdosing
| acid to perform at work at their half million $ jobs.
| Overpolicing would ensnare them if overpolicing existed in
| that demographic and then they would be ineligible for jobs
| the rest of their life. If you cant be subsidized by your
| family then you have actual crime to consider. Guess where
| you will live too.
|
| Quite simply, the reason people that microdose are not
| getting thrown in jail is because they're not doing the
| other things that would lead to them getting discovered,
| i.e. engaging in crime or driving a car with significant
| (meaning, more than a person can safely swallow to avoid
| arrest) quantities of lsd.
|
| ---
|
| Just incase you try to pin a belief-set on me, I oppose the
| war on drugs, no-knock raids, and even speeding tickets
| completely and would entirely abolish them if I were the
| BFDL.
| mnm1 wrote:
| Actually, black people use drugs at slightly lower rates
| than whites. This is common knowledge or should be.
| Here's 3 of the top 6 google links for "illicit drug use
| by race":
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377408/
|
| https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_
| and...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004723
| 521...
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| We're talking about violent crime... drug prosecutions
| and other nonviolent crime are notorious for selective
| enforcement.
|
| A bullet fired, a body, etc. are much harder to hide.
| vmception wrote:
| Yes it doesnt match your worldview, consider seeing if
| you can corroborate it. I know strange concept for you to
| find a source instead of hoping to pick apart the person
| that posted, but you might be surprised
|
| But regarding the rebuttal to microdosing users, if they
| were getting randomly frisked and randomly tested and
| randomly stopped for "broken" taillights, because the
| algorithm said so, they would be getting caught and
| reinforcing the algorithm and human biases
|
| This is what is happening disproportionately to some
| demographics that dont have inherently different behavior
| from other demographics
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Horseshit. Police response to violent incidents in
| 'problematic' neighborhoods is already _extremely_ slow. The
| threat of gang violence is _not_ mitigated by police
| response. The threat of gang violence is mitigated by
| providing _much better_ options for people who would
| otherwise join gangs. Police presence is immaterial to the
| lack of gangs in affluent neighborhoods.
| chaostheory wrote:
| This could be one of the reasons why
|
| https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675359781/americas-growing-
| co...
|
| https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national-
| politics/the-...
|
| It will only get worse.
|
| I wonder if AI and robotics will need to be used in the
| future assuming that the police shortage trend continues or
| gets even worse?
| banads wrote:
| What is horseshit? Nothing in your response is contrary to
| anything the person said that you're responding to
| Misdicorl wrote:
| >There's a worrying trend in the conversation these days
| that has shifted from "there's a serious problem with
| racism in how police go about their job" to "we need less
| police". Folks in neighborhoods living with the constant
| threat of gang violence don't have the luxury to sit in
| their aeron chairs and argue about defunding the police.
| They face the very real threat of themselves or their
| loved ones being shot on the streets and statistically
| not by police.
|
| This is horseshit. The premise is false. The conclusion
| is misleading. It is FUD
| ryankemper wrote:
| So, you haven't provided _any_ citations or even vague
| references to Wikipedia articles, rather you just called
| their opinion FUD and left it at that. How am I, a 3rd-
| party observer of this thread, supposed to extract any
| value from such statements?
|
| The person you were quoting did not provide rock-solid
| proof that having police helps reduce violence, but they
| did provide a citation showing that:
|
| > Violence against persons in poor (51%) and low-income
| (50%) households was more likely to be reported to police
| than violence against persons in mid- (43%) and high-
| income (45%) households
|
| from https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf
|
| So you could certainly argue that they are actually
| irrational to call the police and thus the higher rate is
| explained by them incorrectly thinking police would help
| them. But it's tricky to argue that with no data :)
|
| Cheers
| Misdicorl wrote:
| My job isn't to respond in detail to FUD. Thats how
| trolls win; by engaging people who are willing to put in
| that effort while they can respond with anything
| resembling coherence. My job is to point out the FUD so
| people might not notice (for whatever reason) can at
| least be aware of its presence (or if in doubt, check
| some other reputable source themselves).
|
| You don't need data on this one though. What the fuck is
| calling the police going to do to prevent violence
| _after_ a gang has done a drive by shooting? Use your god
| damn brain
| banads wrote:
| >What the fuck is calling the police going to do to
| prevent violence after a gang has done a drive by
| shooting?
|
| To find the criminals that did that and put them in
| prison to prevent them from doing that again?
| Misdicorl wrote:
| But the original argument is talking about worrying
| response times, not conviction rates!
| Misdicorl wrote:
| I'm done responding to the FUD hydra here. If someone
| wants to come up with a single consistent argument for
| why above isn't bs, I'll engage with them
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >The problem with predictive policing is in the name. Inference
| (ML) predicts the future from the past. If the past is racist,
| then inference will create a racist future. Since racism is
| systemic[1], especially when it comes to policing, predictive
| policing is actively working against an anti-racist future.
|
| One thing that constantly annoys me is that while people are
| becoming well aware of how racist our legal system is, but are
| still just as blind as ever to how sexist it is, despite the
| extent of sexism being greater than the extent of racism (the
| disparity of justice is greater for gender than for race). This
| in turn makes any speeches concerning how we need to make the
| system more just have a bit of a hollow ring to them much in
| the same way as when you hear a marriage equality speech from
| someone fighting for equality of interracial marriages while
| ignoring the discrimination same sex marriages face (granted,
| that happens far less than I remember 10 to 15 years ago).
|
| For example, you can find many police departments that handle
| probation have a way to rating the risk level of offenders.
| People are fine with this system taking into account gender
| even as they fight to prevent it from using race. I was able to
| help with testing one such system once, and while the insides
| were a company secret we weren't allowed to see (which is worth
| an entire rant on its own), the general pattern was for all
| else but gender being constant, males received a higher risk
| rating than females. Very minor or very severe crimes would
| receive the same ratings but otherwise it seemed pretty clear
| cut on how it discriminated based on gender.
|
| Even in this specific case, while they have banned some forms
| of predictive policing, I think it is safe to assume they'll
| still use other forms such as using gender when assessing the
| risk level of offenders and then using that risk level to
| either deny probation/parole or to set the level of
| probation/parole the offender receives.
| monadic2 wrote:
| While discontent with policing has bubbled up in the form of
| outrage over racist policing, I don't see any obliviousness
| to gender at all--I mean I saw a sign just yesterday that
| read "bring our black men home". It's just very difficult,
| apparently, to express the nuances of systemic bigotry as
| expressed through policing in even something as short as a
| modern speech.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Indeed. And worse they can then become an excuse to hide racist
| policy inside. Racist governor, buys racist software, to drive
| racist policing, loved by favored racist constituents, "It's
| not my administration, it's the software, algorithms are
| objective, black people are the problem...".
|
| Maybe _systemic racism_ is a feature of these systems, not a
| bug?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Racists abuse plausible deniability and care not for the loss
| in social trust and cohesion. I really think you are right
| and I hope one day we might know the truth.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| There's a fundamental tension between generating equitable
| outcomes and using race-agnostic decision-making processes.
| This is true for racial policy in general, not just policing -
| for instance, university admissions has to choose between
| admitting an unfairly large number of Asians on the one hand,
| and penalizing Asian applicants merely for being Asian on the
| other.
|
| If generating a racially fair predictive policing algorithm was
| merely a question of optimizing for one of these desiderata,
| it'd be possible in principle. You either ensure that the
| appropriate racial ratios pop out for the neighborhoods to
| patrol, or you ensure that racial information and their proxies
| aren't used in the algorithm. If any algorithm is unacceptable
| unless it does both, well, you're probably going to be
| disappointed.
| ryankemper wrote:
| > Since racism is systemic[1]
|
| > [1] If you don't believe this, you're in the minority now:
| https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21286642/george-floyd-
| protests....
|
| This part was a little odd. It sounds like you're saying
| "because this belief is widely held by people, we should treat
| it as true"?
|
| I definitely am in the minority, but I find a much more
| logically consistent view than the modern definition of
| systemic racism to actually be "there are systems of
| authority/control/oppression, which by their nature can be
| exploited by racists (or other groups) to advance their ends".
|
| In other words - and I hope this isn't too off topic of a
| tangent - one of the primary goals of the BLM protest seems to
| be "racism is leading to excess death/imprisonment for black
| americans, so let's try to purge any traces of racism to
| eliminate these excess deaths". Which to me is missing the
| point: practices/systems like no-knock raids, the war on drugs,
| civil asset forfeiture, etc give police officers an excuse to
| be able to violently invade someone's home (no-knock), violate
| 4th amendment rights (war on drugs wrt "I smelled weed in your
| car"), criminalize behavior that happens to be broken along
| racial and class lines (non-violent drug
| usage/possession/distribution). In other words, the problem is
| not that there are racist people in the system, but that we
| have these systems that give racist individuals the perfect
| excuse to achieve their nefarious ends. That's because we've
| built a system that justifies and encourages oppression, and we
| can see that without having to introduce racee.
|
| Anyway, I'm not hear to debunk "systemic racism" since like so
| many of the new-speak definitions/words, as soon as you try to
| debunk it people claim that you're using the wrong definition.
| But I do think it should be noted that when it comes to looking
| at actual research literature on, say, likelihood of being shot
| by police in a given encounter broken down by race, the
| "systemic racism" doesn't seem to be borne out in the data.
| Whereas we can make incredibly important societal change
| without needing to introduce the idea of systemic racism,
| simply by addressing the actual systems of oppression we have
| set up that give police officers the ability to randomly pull a
| citizen over and harass them since at any given moment each of
| us is violating a nonzero number of laws.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| This struck me as well. Systemic racism means (to me) that if
| you took the people out of the system, you'd still get biased
| outcomes based on race. In my view, it's a different matter
| to say that a system produces biased results because it is
| designed to do so, rather than it is systemic because the
| people operating it make biased choices where their
| discretion is called on.
|
| Are there actual, current examples of systemic racism where
| an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-
| based biased outcomes?
| rexpop wrote:
| > behavior that happens to be broken along racial and class
| lines
|
| A huge coincidence.
| wjsetzer wrote:
| I heard a Reply All episode about the use of CompStat in NYC,
| which is just a manual algorithm for predictive policing. It
| started as a useful tool to prevent crime, but devolved into
| racial profiling as officers began to downgrade crimes in their
| reports to make their numbers look better, until eventually it
| resulted in racial profiling and arresting people on false
| charges.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| What is the claim when data is said to include systemic racism
| and bias? Is it that race data does indeed predict higher crime
| but that biased policing causes the crime rate to be
| misreported as higher because police only focus their attention
| on certain areas? Is it that police actually cause crime due to
| racist beliefs so that they must in some way entice crimes to
| be committed? Is it that crimes are equal between races but
| they go under-reported in some areas and over-reported in
| others due to systemic racism? Some or all of the above? What
| would controlling for racism involve doing?
| hckr_news wrote:
| Let's start by not using software to police people. Is this
| China?
| jjeaff wrote:
| For myriad of reasons, we know clearly that controlling for
| no other factors, crime is higher among black populations. So
| to extrapolate that any one person is more likely to commit a
| crime because they are black is the definition of racism.
|
| It is not ok to assume that someone might be more likely
| guilty or more likely to commit a crime based on the color of
| their skin. Even if you had perfect historical data. It's
| just not acceptable ethically, morally, whatsoever. And the
| very idea by some that it is ok, as long as your stereotypes
| are backed by accurate data, perpetuates racial oppression
| and creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
| banads wrote:
| >For myriad of reasons, we know clearly that controlling
| for no other factors, crime is higher among black
| populations. So to extrapolate that any one person is more
| likely to commit a crime because they are black is the
| definition of racism.
|
| What about controlling for poverty? That seems to be
| largely ignored in this discussion, even though it was a
| central tenent of Dr. Kings mission before he was
| assassinated.
|
| "We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented"
| society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and
| computers, profit motives and property rights are
| considered more important than people, the giant triplets
| of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are
| incapable of being conquered"
| [deleted]
| metrokoi wrote:
| >So to extrapolate that any one person is more likely to
| commit a crime because they are black is the definition of
| racism.
|
| But it's true, a black individual is on average more likely
| to commit a crime. How can recognizing an obvious fact be
| racism? Aren't you also racist for recognizing that crime
| is higher among black populations? It's racist to treat a
| black individual as if they have committed a crime or treat
| them differently because of it, not to recognize that a
| black individual is on average more likely to commit a
| crime. I don't understand how you would come to that
| conclusion.
| lutorm wrote:
| You missed the "controlling for no other factors"
| qualifier.
| hckr_news wrote:
| > But it's true, a black individual is on average more
| likely to commit a crime.
|
| What? Wasn't even sure whether to dignify this comment
| with a response yet here I am.
| cblades wrote:
| >But it's true, a black individual is on average more
| likely to commit a crime.
|
| More likely to be convicted of a crime. That's a subtle
| but very important distinction.
| [deleted]
| squarefoot wrote:
| Am I wrong or they have completely missed the point, or perhaps
| are just making noise to pretend they're somehow assessing the
| problem? The point shouldn't be sending more cops here and less
| cops there but stripping racist fascist drugged psychopaths of
| their uniform, their badge, their weapons and their immunity -
| all of them and for good - then leave real cops who deserve them
| do their job. All it takes is _one_ criminal cop to kill an
| innocent, so playing with numbers won 't achieve nothing. As of
| today, the Police has no quality control, or its parameters are
| messed up to a point most of them became worse than the criminals
| they should fight against.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| Is it the technology or how the technology is used that is the
| problem? I have to add disclaimer that I am not in the US so not
| particularly well informed. Like all technology there good and
| bad aspects to it. Use it to catch a child kidnapper, the
| technology is great. Mistakenly identify the wrong person then
| not so great.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Is it the technology or how the technology is used that is
| the problem?_
|
| Both, and they aren't perfectly separable.
|
| _> Use it to catch a child kidnapper, the technology is great.
| Mistakenly identify the wrong person then not so great._
|
| This "ends justify the means" calculus has not, historically,
| been the disposition of the US justice system. We have many
| constitutionally enshrined rights that indisputably make it
| more difficult to catch child kidnappers.
| srathi wrote:
| Funny, I just rewatched Minority Report last night! I had no idea
| that precrime was an actual thing.
| kriro wrote:
| I think there's a big difference in using it to predict who will
| commit a crime (a big nono imo) vs. where a crime will be
| committed. For example allocating patrols by likelyhood of
| breakins seems acceptable to me and might even free up resources
| for more important tasks. Same for mundane stuff like more patrol
| cars/checks for areas with more potential speeding violations/car
| accidents due to reckless driving etc.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| > Used by police across the United States for almost a decade,
| predictive policing relies on algorithms to interpret police
| records, analyzing arrest or parole data to send officers to
| target chronic offenders, or identifying places where crime may
| occur.
|
| The promise of the software made in a sales pitch or on the
| website, is a far cry from the reality of what such software
| delivers. That's fine when it's business, the cost of a mistake
| is a p&l hit. But here we are talking about people's lives, far
| stricter processes should be in place, more similar to getting
| approval for a new airplane or medicine. To be clear, predictive
| policing is replacing detectives/experts with software, like a
| kind of robo-policing, where decisions to investigate are
| generated by a system and handed to cheaper uniformed police who
| lack the context behind the decision support system they are now
| serving, because software becomes a black box.
|
| Any consumer who has ever dealt with even state-of-the-art call
| centers, knows that humans do a far better job at real-world
| operations.
|
| This is a premature application of software.
| lobotryas wrote:
| You wrote a lot but pointed out none of the flaws of this tech.
| What's so alarming about drawing a conclusion that more police
| resources need to be allocated to a place that has a history of
| criminal activity?
| kelnos wrote:
| When an authoritative figure with no accountability (the
| software) tells you to expect bad people, you expect bad
| people. Even if there are no bad people, or only a few bad
| people, you will invent bad people because you are primed to
| find them.
|
| So you end up punishing people for small infractions that are
| occurring everywhere, even in the so-called "good"
| neighborhoods that you're ignoring. (Let's also recall that
| broken-windows policing doesn't actually work.) This just
| reinforces the software's opinion that all the bad behavior
| is occurring in these same neighborhoods.
|
| Meanwhile, cops enter the "bad" neighborhood on mental high
| alert, expecting a high level of trouble ("if the computer
| sent us here, it must be bad!"), even if there isn't much
| trouble at all. This creates an "us vs. them" mentality,
| which leads to dehumanization, and you can expect higher
| levels of police violence, especially of the unjustified
| kind.
| dorgo wrote:
| >because software becomes a black box.
|
| Is the brain of a detective not a black box?
|
| >But here we are talking about people's lives, far stricter
| processes should be in place
|
| Yes. And I want these stricter processes to protect me from
| software as well as from humans. Why discriminate between
| software and humans?
| kelnos wrote:
| A detective can explain their reasoning and thought
| processes, and a judge / jury / review board / whatever can
| make a determination based on that whether or not the
| detective acted properly.
|
| Software doesn't defend itself, and often the algorithms
| behind it are secret. Even when they aren't, many of the
| models created today are just not explainable, even by those
| who have developed and trained them.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| It's not perfect, but at least a detective can be deposed.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Predictive policing does nothing more than sending policing
| resources where crime is more likely based on statistical
| models.
|
| It does not racially discriminate and it is not racist. It does
| not harm anyone.
|
| I feel that this is posturing and shooting the messenger. If
| crime is statistically higher in "black neighbourhoods" the
| issue will not be solved by pretending it isn't.
|
| If the technology does not work then of course there is no
| point spending more money on it. So, does it work or not? Here
| this feels political, not pragmatical.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It does not racially discriminate and it is not racist. It
| does not harm anyone._
|
| False. I agree that the software itself is not racist, but
| the decisions it makes are only as good as the data you feed
| it. If you feed it racist data, then you will get racist
| decisions from it. And given that policing has had racial
| biases for centuries, all we have is racist data.
|
| And the more you act on its racist decisions, the more racist
| feedback it will have to act on, giving you more racist
| decisions in the future.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Everyone does something criminal from time to time. Policing
| A more than B will lead to more arrests at place A,
| increasing their crime statistics, leading to more policing
| ...
|
| For example drug use is about equal between white and black
| Americans, but since black people are more strictly policed
| (more frequent in traffic stops etc) they are arrested and
| sentenced for drug use far more often than white Americans.
| [0]
|
| 0: https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_a
| nd...
| thelean12 wrote:
| > Everyone does something criminal from time to time.
|
| _Everyone_? Maybe this would be true if you 'd include
| non-criminal offenses (those you'd get a ticket for). Most
| people in their lives will probably jay-walk, or speed, or
| get a parking ticket, or something else in this category.
|
| But you're saying that everyone (I'll read this as "most
| people") will do something that would get them arrested if
| caught from time to time? That's an outlandish statement.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > It does not racially discriminate and it is not racist. It
| does not harm anyone.
|
| This is a dangerously irresponsible statement.
|
| If police are disproportionally spending time in specific
| neighborhoods, and arrests are disproportionally made from
| that population vs. actual crimes committed, this will be
| captured and reinforced in the predictions.
|
| So yes, it's racists and it harms people.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| So you're saying that more police presence is harming
| people. How? If there's no crime there are no arrests or
| reports after all...
|
| Your reply is rather aggressive for not apparent reason. As
| I said this is highly political in the middle of the
| current hysteria.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > So you're saying that more police presence is harming
| people. How?
|
| Ask the disproportionate number of Black men in prison.
| Ask white rapist Brock Turner why a white judge wanted to
| let off "because he's a good boy", or the Central Park
| Five or the Georgetown Jacket Three that spent decades in
| prison because white cops and prosecutors assumed their
| guilt based on the color of their skin.
|
| If my posts sounds aggressive, it's because your posts
| are dismissive of the terrible culture that's led to the
| biased data that would be used to make predictions, and
| you have the gall to claim it's all fine and dandy.
|
| > current hysteria
|
| There is no hysteria going on right now, it's a quite
| reasonable response to decades of bad decision making on
| the part of police departments across the U.S.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| You moved from police presence to sending innocents to
| prison... That's quite a step.
|
| Predictive policing is nothing more than police presence.
| If police arrests innocents and the justice system sends
| them to prison that's quite another issue. On the whole I
| suspect that the number of innocents sent to prison is
| rather low.
|
| There's hysteria alright on 'racial issues' at the
| moment.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > You moved from police presence to sending innocents to
| prison... That's quite a step.
|
| How do you think people get arrested? They show up at a
| police precinct and turn themselves in?
|
| > There's hysteria alright on 'racial issues' at the
| moment.
|
| Yeah, I'm sure the Civil Rights & Suffrage movements were
| just "hysteria" too right?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _So you 're saying that more police presence is harming
| people. How?_
|
| If the police were trained well, then I might agree with
| you. But they're not. They're trained to expect every
| encounter to result in an attempt on their lives. They're
| trained to escalate instead of de-escalate, meaning that
| a run-of-the-mill interaction is more likely to result in
| violence than it needs to be.
|
| Labeling what's going on now as "the current hysteria" is
| painfully dismissive of the real harm that police are
| doing to people.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > where crime is more likely
|
| This is the fundamental disconnect in your argument, because
| historical recorded arrest rates are not necessarily
| reflective of actual crime rates.
| proverbialbunny wrote:
| In statistics there is a thing called bias, which can cause a
| lot of problems if not correctly handled.
|
| An example of bias is historically most black people default
| on their loans. ML is deployed to predict if someone might
| default on a loan. Because ML does not understand bias, it
| sees the person is black and denies them for that, purely off
| of the fact that black people historically have defaulted
| more on their loans.
|
| Bias is when ML sees something not relevant as a pattern and
| uses it as a feature to determine the future. Instead if race
| was filtered out, it might have seen historically most black
| people who got a loan were weak in other areas, like income
| or income stability or something else that actually factors
| in. It then could predict the future with a higher level of
| accuracy.
|
| Police bias is worse than other industries, because it
| creates a feedback loop. If you think a black person is more
| likely to commit a crime, and you put more resources into
| that, then you're going to find more crime. This increases
| bias and it feeds on itself.
|
| It seems the common fear on YC is the algorithms in
| predictive policing have a strong bias, causing problems.
| This is a legitimate risk, but imho not because of the
| algorithms but because of how they're used. They blindly give
| insights and police officers use this to increase bias,
| amplifying the issues we currently have.
|
| On the NSA level the algorithms, which are not predictive
| policing, deal with bias much better and work quite well.
| They're scary good, better than having someone watching you
| at all times. Though, I guess that's a bit off topic.
| rgoddard wrote:
| Any sort of bias present in the training data will be
| replicated in the model. If the police are biased in whom
| they target, that group will naturally show a higher crime
| rate. Which would easily be picked up in any sort of
| statistical model. Leading to a biased model.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > This is a premature application of software.
|
| maybe, but you have no idea yourself so your fear does not
| carry enough weight to carry that statement. It's basically
| like you are saying "it's too early to try Bayesian policing"
| when in fact Bayesian policing might be a great idea, and it
| was a great idea 10 years ago too.
|
| Conditional probability, if there have been a lot of rapes in a
| 2 block radius, do you think it might be a good idea to look in
| that radius? If you try that and the crimewave continues but
| moves 2 blocks away, do you think there might be information to
| glean from that?
|
| considering individual cops as bees in a hive, can individual
| bees make good Bayesian decisions about where to fly next? No,
| the information needs to be consolidated centrally. Who's
| better at Bayesian calculations, people or computers?
|
| I'm sure there is all sorts of defective software out there,
| just like there are all sorts of other lazily/cheaply produced
| products that don't live up to our needs. That doesn't mean
| it's too early to try improvements.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Hmm. You make it sound like very new idea and tool is worthy
| of equal and fair consideration. If a polician today said
| they introducing No Crime Left behind, where cops randomly
| select time and place to swarm, would a rational person even
| dream of debating its merits?
| astrophysician wrote:
| Yea but you're ignoring biases in the data that are difficult
| or impossible to disentangle from the underlying effects.
| What happens when you see an area with 50% higher violent
| crime rate? Is that because there are a large number of
| crimes? Or is it because it's a neighborhood that is
| disproportionately targeted by police? How do you even
| attempt to control for that?
|
| It's not that Bayesian stats can't help or can't offer
| insights, it's that it can easily reinforce underlying
| societal biases, and then it's harder to question because
| "it's science" and no one has to take any responsibility for
| its effects.
| kansface wrote:
| > Or is it because it's a neighborhood that is
| disproportionately targeted by police?
|
| I'd guess violent crime mostly "comes from" people calling
| 911, not from officers stumbling into
| rapes/mugging/murders/home invasions.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I was arguing that it's not "premature" to analyze crime
| and policing data statistically. If we include and add in
| your insights--and I think it's foolish to think crime
| experts haven't thought of them before, but if they
| haven't:
|
| I would still argue that it's not "premature" to look at
| crime and policing data; in fact, I'd say it's high time we
| did it.
|
| tl;dr you are not addressing what I was arguing
|
| (and to everybody else here, I was not advocation Bayes
| Theorem, I was relying on it as a baseline truth for
| synecdoche for statistical analysis. If you want to object
| to Bayes Theorem, that's on you, it wasn't my point...)
| astrophysician wrote:
| no one is objecting to Bayes' Theorem here at all. I am
| directly addressing your argument: there is _inherent_
| bias in policing data, and doing a Bayesian analysis will
| make it very easy to fool ourselves into trusting the
| results while also allowing everyone in the room to
| absolve themselves of taking any responsibility for the
| consequences of doing so. Pretending we know how to
| debias policing data _broadly_ (i.e. we know how to do it
| in every locale and in every instance that the data will
| actually be _used by practicing law enforcement
| professionals_) is a perfect recipe for disaster.
| fsckboy wrote:
| what are you arguing for? no analysis? or do you wish to
| change the analysis? Or why do you claim that analysis is
| premature to remain on topic?
|
| saying "inherent bias" is very vague and has more value
| as a political dog whistle than anything else... unless
| you'd like to suggest what the biases are and point out
| how you have this special knowledge and other crime
| experts don't.
|
| for example, what is the bias in incoming 911 calls?
| medee wrote:
| Our knowledge of crime rates doesn't come form arrest
| records, but rather victims surveys. Yes, we know that
| certain neighborhoods/populations have higher rates of
| crime and not just arrests.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Ideal Bayesian decision theory, the one that beats every
| single other possible statistical method, is uncomputable in
| this universe. It's not a silver bullet.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Why not take your Bayesian decision theory and make a trading
| system? Invest your farm, and you'll make millions with ideas
| like, _if a stock just had two upticks, isn 't it a good idea
| to put a little money into an upward trending stock_. Not
| only will you come to understand decision theory better,
| behavioral prediction better, you'll get paid to do it, and
| nobody else will get hurt!
| google234123 wrote:
| The stock market isn't the same thing...
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| To spell it out:
|
| The stock market is anti-inductive by design. Statistical
| patterns that reflect market inefficiencies are
| _supposed_ to disappear over time.
|
| Most problems are not anti-inductive.
|
| So yeah, "you can't even predict the stock market with
| your methods" is a pretty terrible argument against
| methods that were never meant to predict the stock
| market.
| tootie wrote:
| NYC has used analytics since 1993 and it's widely credited as
| contributing to the incredible drop in crime. I don't buy for a
| second that ending these kind of programs will help anything.
| Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into
| areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of
| policing. We need effective and aggressive law enforcement as
| much as ever. We need to root out the worst abusers and show
| them that bad behavior will be punished severely.
|
| https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/compstat-crime-reduction...
| dv_dt wrote:
| Crime rates nationally dropped also during the same time -
| and not all areas had the same analytics. It's really not
| clear if the reductions were from the NYC stats or in
| particular "agressive" law enforcement.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| not only nationally, but _worldwide_!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop
|
| In Germany we have no "predictive policing" to my
| knowledge, and even cameras and so on are used
| conservatively given how privacy sensitive we ware. Yet
| we've seen the exact same development over recent decades.
| bronson wrote:
| True, CompStat is not at all "widely credited" with
| contributing to the nationwide drop in crime. Even its
| contribution to NYC's drop is debatable:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat#Critique
| latortuga wrote:
| This is so utterly compelling a rebuttal that I can hardly
| believe the original argument was made in the first place.
| You can't argue that tool X led to outcome Y if everyone
| had the same outcome without tool X, and in fact the
| evidence then leads to the opposite causality: tool X is
| useless toward outcome Y.
| misja111 wrote:
| From the article that OP linked to:
|
| "Since Compstat was introduced, crime rates in New York
| City have dropped dramatically. From 1993 to 1995, the
| total crime rate declined 27.44 percent across the city."
|
| National crime rates dropped as well in that period but
| nowhere near 27%.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Seems like national stats maybe lagged NYC a little, but
| from a slightly different range of 1994-2000 on this
| chart the drop was (eyballing) 35% for homicides.
|
| https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/police-budget-
| spe...
| lostapathy wrote:
| I think your sentiment is probably in the right place, but
| the last thing we need are "aggressive law enforcement"
| officers.
| tootie wrote:
| I mean appropriately aggressive. There's still plenty of
| horribly dangerous people threatening citizens. It's part
| of the reason police in the US are so primed for violence.
| coffeemaniac wrote:
| Crime has decreased everywhere since then (not just NYC)
| while the US prison population has increased 500% over the
| past 40 years.
|
| > Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into
| areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of
| policing.
|
| Thanks for pointing out very clearly what you believe to be
| the purpose of policing. For a lot of cops as well, brutality
| is the goal. What we're seeing right now is Americans re-
| aligning those priorities.
| tootie wrote:
| Crime dropped faster and more consistently in NYC than
| almost anywhere else in the US. Plenty of big cities have
| been nearly immune to the national trend while NYC has done
| better and better.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _NYC has used analytics since 1993 and it 's widely
| credited as contributing to the incredible drop in crime._
|
| I see the "NYC did X in the 90s and it caused crime to
| decrease" thing pretty often, but from what I've read, the
| real reasons for crime reduction in NYC aren't well
| understood, and when compared with crime reduction on the
| national level, NYC isn't really all that special; crime was
| dropping at similar rates throughout the country (and the
| world, even). So I'm not convinced that a NYC-centric
| examination of policy is at all representative. Not to
| mention that NYC itself is not a representative place, so
| what works in NYC may have no connection to what works
| elsewhere.
|
| > _Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into
| areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of
| policing._
|
| That's not the issue. The issue is that police are being sent
| to places, and because the computer told them to expect
| crime, they are primed to find crime, even if it's stuff they
| wouldn't bother with under normal circumstances. The simple
| act of saying "this neighborhood is a hot spot" _makes_ it a
| hot spot, regardless of whether or not it actually is.
|
| Put another way: the computer sends the police to places
| where there probably are some problems, but much fewer than
| police are primed to expect, so they end up creating problems
| in addition to any they solve. They get this "warzone"
| mentality where they feel like they're going into an "us vs.
| them" situation, where anyone on the street is assumed to
| possibly be a criminal. That's a recipe for unnecessary
| violence.
|
| > _We need effective and aggressive law enforcement as much
| as ever._
|
| Effective, yes. We severely lack this in many places and need
| to work hard to fix this. Aggressive, no. That's why we're in
| the position we're in: aggressive assholes on a power trip
| who just happen to also be racist and think they're above the
| law.
|
| > _...and show them that bad behavior will be punished
| severely._
|
| That attitude suggests that you aren't really interested in
| making society better, just that you want to punish people
| for doing the wrong thing. But I suppose this shouldn't
| surprise me; based on incarceration rates and the state of
| prisons in the US, it doesn't seem like anyone is interested
| in prevention and rehabilitation, just "sticking it to those
| bad people".
| jjeaff wrote:
| Did NYC drop significantly more than almost every other city
| in America? Because they all dropped precipitously as well
| and most are not using these detailed analytics.
| misja111 wrote:
| See http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
|
| Between '93 and '95 total USA crime rate dropped about 2%
| while in NYC it dropped 27%.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are secondary effects to "tough on crime policies", and
| more severe punishments do not necessarily increase
| deterrence effects on crime, and could even cause more crime.
| There is a very complex relationship between the factors that
| influence crime which is likely anything but linear.
|
| "Tough on crime" statutes were implemented across much of the
| US 40 years ago, and the results we've seen are anything but
| a success story. Sure, crime has dropped, but at the expense
| of becoming the world's #1 country by incarceration and
| causing downstream societal effects as we lose economic
| productivity, rip apart families (and potentially create new
| criminals), and create public distrust of police.
|
| Some might say that is a reasonable price to pay for a
| decrease in crime, but that doesn't hold water when we it
| compare to the rest of the western world who saw the _same or
| even better_ drop in crime without all of the side-effects of
| the 'tough-on-crime' policies. Globalization, technology,
| and a drop in poverty caused this drop in crime, not 'tough-
| on-crime' policies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop
| zpallin wrote:
| I heard this recently, but I forgot where: policing software is
| supposed to be used to help inform decisions in addition to
| established investigative practices, but police are instead
| using the software as decision-makers which has possibly
| decreased accuracy in investigating crimes.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I have no problem with that, but why aren't these types of
| statistical models and curve analysis being used to deploy
| drive by patrols? Some of this seems like throwing out the baby
| with the bath water, does it not?
|
| While I agree that it's way too soon for this sort of
| granularity, is it too soon to have 10 block, increased
| presence of troubled areas helped by statistical analysis?
| [deleted]
| ska wrote:
| Even assuming the models are good, what confidence do you
| have that the data is good?
| diag wrote:
| There are a lot of opportunities for the data to skewed in
| a highly biased manner.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Disproportionate policing of a demographic is going to lead
| to disproportionate application of the law, both spurious and
| justified, to that demographic.
| alpha_squared wrote:
| > I have no problem with that, but why aren't these types of
| statistical models and curve analysis being used to deploy
| drive by patrols? Some of this seems like throwing out the
| baby with the bath water, does it not?
|
| Combined with the evidence of extreme LEO abuse of power,
| doesn't this reinforce the idea that certain
| people/neighborhoods become disproportionately affected?
| Isn't this exactly what the past few weeks of protests have
| been railing against?
| Aunche wrote:
| If police with guns disproportionately hurt minorities that
| doesn't mean no police should be allowed to carry guns. You
| can justify drastic restrictions, but banning a tool
| altogether is being unnecessarily technophobic.
| jedberg wrote:
| AI amplifies human biases. If a few racist cops decide to
| target a black neighborhood, and "find" a bunch of crimes,
| that data gets fed into the system. The system then spits out
| that neighborhood as high risk and assigns extra patrols
| there.
|
| Those patrols feel the need to justify spending all that time
| out there, so then they "find" crimes too. And then it just
| reinforces that data that that is a high risk neighborhood,
| making the whole thing worse.
|
| The entire system is built on decades of bad data. Step one
| is cleaning up the data and/or starting over.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| If crime being caught by a drive-by patrol is a significant
| way in which crime is being caught, to me that screams
| "victimless crimes". I break victimless laws all the time,
| sometimes with my police officer friends and neighbors
| present, sometimes on private property miles from any public
| roads. I never seem to get busted for it. So if 10-block
| patrols of "troubled areas" really saw an increase in
| enforcement action, then combined with the fact that America
| has disproportionately bad imprisonment and recidivism rates,
| it sounds like you're describing exactly what systemic
| discrimination is.
|
| You live in a bad neighborhood, so you're more likely to get
| caught for something, now you're on parole, now anywhere you
| live is a "bad neighborhood" requiring more patrols, more
| likely to get caught for something. Meanwhile I can live in
| my entirely white suburb smoking weed and my life doesn't
| change.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Of course if the law is bad, the solution isn't to
| dismantle law enforcement, it's to fix the law.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| I'm all for that. But systemically we tend to oppose that
| too. You do that long enough, eventually the ones on the
| bottom start pulling down statues. But the problem is
| both. We have victimless laws, and we have law
| enforcement departments with histories of covering for
| their own people when they break the law, or exploiting
| loopholes to railroad people.
| diag wrote:
| How do you deal with police forces ignoring policy and
| performing as they deem fit all while protecting
| themselves?
| iguy wrote:
| If what you describe was the pattern, then the regions with
| lots of observed "victimless crimes" would be uncorrelated
| with the regions with lots of serious crimes (e.g. from
| counting bullet holes down at the morgue, or from
| ShotSpotter). That's great, this theory makes a testable
| prediction. It's falsifiable.
|
| That said, I agree that the smart use of such predictions
| should be sensitive to this. Try to predict where & when
| the murders will happen, use that to direct patrols (and
| searches for potential murder weapons). Rather than
| predicting something simpler like "total number of offences
| including parking tickets" for the sake of chasing numbers.
|
| (Both of these comments are describing where to put
| patrols, i.e. where to spend a limited resource to best
| effect. Prediction applied to human individuals is a very
| different story, and much scarier.)
| ncallaway wrote:
| > then the regions with lots of observed "victimless
| crimes" would be uncorrelated with the regions with lots
| of serious crimes
|
| That doesn't seem like a strong hypothesis I would've
| made from the given scenario.
|
| For example, one area that's consistent with the theory
| is that areas with lots of "serious crime" generate a lot
| of police activity, which turns up a significant amount
| of "observed victimless crime". That creates an
| expectation of a positive correlation between "serious
| crime" and "observed victimless crime".
|
| Then, sure, according to that theory there might _also_
| be some areas where policing starts in an area on
| suspicion rather than serious crime and then we get a lot
| of "observed victimless crime" without as much "serious
| crime". That would be a negative correlation that you
| mentioned.
|
| I just don't think the falsifiable hypothesis you've
| drawn up is one that the theory actually strongly
| predicts, and I don't think refuting that hypothesis
| necessarily refutes the theory.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| I'm not saying it's the pattern, I'm saying it's a
| significant pattern. And I strongly oppose the idea that
| our law enforcement should be treating any individual
| based on "patterns" anyway.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| What you're describing is a reform of America's drug laws,
| not of America's criminal prediction problem and they
| shouldn't be conflated. Police already use prediction
| models, they just do it in their heads and inaccurately
| with much more bias and have a harder time adjusting those
| bias'. I'm all for changing drug laws and trying to reduce
| recidivism through counseling and means other than pure
| imprisonment, but that's beyond the scope of this article
| and discussion.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| Drug laws are one example but by no means the only one.
| I've been on police ride-alongs where police watch a
| "suspicious" (i.e. poor) looking car as it passes them
| heading in the opposite direction. Oh look! They have a
| tail light out, we can pull them over. Then we can shine
| a flashlight in their backseat and see a bulge under a
| blanket. We can ask them certain questions that will
| either make us suspicious, or give us permission to
| search the car. Oh look! They have a pistol magazine that
| holds more than 15 rounds. Now there's a felony that they
| know the local courts will uphold despite there being a
| higher burden of proof about when the magazine was
| purchased than the officers can provide. Nevermind that
| the local gun stores all sell those magazines, and the
| police even buy them for personal use at those stores.
| But now, because of the way law enforcement works and the
| culture that has become normalized, somebody has a felony
| because of selective enforcement.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Exactly. Vice or maybe Vox did a short with an ex-cop who
| mentioned this concept. He said they made a lot of arrests
| of black men carrying illegal switch blades. But said that
| white people carried those illegal blades just as often.
| Including many police officers that he worked with. But
| since they mostly patrolled in black neighborhoods, they of
| course made many more arrests and citations for carrying an
| illegal blade.
|
| The fact that you find more crime where you patrol more is
| such a simple concept, it hardly seems necessary to
| mention. And yet so many people seem to think all this
| police data is useful.
| tux1968 wrote:
| There is an argument to be made that carrying a knife
| should not be a crime for anyone, and that we all have a
| right to carry a knife to protect ourselves or even use a
| tool.
|
| But lets accept for a moment that reducing the number of
| knives on the street reduces violence and protects
| innocent people. If you accept that premise, then you
| have to say it's beneficial to society that the police
| remove as many knives as possible: whenever someone gets
| arrested for a knife violation it's a good thing,
| regardless of their skin colour.
|
| And given that we have limited enforcement resources, we
| should focus most in those areas with the most knife
| crime victims. So while i accept everything you relayed
| in your post, the proper conclusion would change quite a
| bit if there are many more victims of knife crime in the
| black neighbourhoods... I do not know if that is the
| case, and i'm not implying the answer is more likely one
| way or the other.
|
| But if in fact more people are getting stabbed or robbed
| at knife point in black neighbourhoods and you accept
| that knife laws are good in general, then it's good that
| such laws are more strictly enforced in that area, to
| help protect all the innocent people in that area who
| might fall victim.
|
| And this principle really is colorblind. For instance
| many people speed in their cars everywhere, but we should
| more heavily enforce speed limits near high traffic and
| pedestrian areas and locations where accidents keep
| happening.
|
| Now, maybe the rate of knife crime is worse in white
| neighbourhoods, in which case it really is a miscarriage
| of justice that more black men are getting charged for
| illegal blades. But I don't think you can say one way or
| the other without knowing and considering that statistic.
| curiousgeorgio wrote:
| Hannah Fry's book, "Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of
| the Machine" explores this topic in a balanced and thoughtful
| way. Of course algorithms aren't perfect, but they are
| definitely useful tools that should be combined with human
| expertise.
|
| > humans do a far better job at real-world operations
|
| The book points to several examples (specifically in law
| enforcement and criminal justice) where common sense tells us
| this is true ("humans do a far better job"), but statistics
| show otherwise. Human judgement is helpful to a degree, but
| without tools like these algorithms provide, it's actually far
| worse, and subject to all kinds of biases.
|
| The question is, if a particular area statistically has more
| crime, does it really matter whether it's a human or an
| algorithm making the judgement to send officers there more
| often? I know it's taboo to talk about (at least in the past
| few weeks), but police presence overwhelmingly helps _reduce_
| crime, so lets be smart about how, when, and where to deploy
| more law enforcement. Let 's use data-based tools to help
| inform our decisions, but let's also use human judgement to
| understand where those tools might fall short and act
| accordingly. In large part, that comes down to having data
| experts audit the tools and educate those who use them of their
| shortcomings.
| godelski wrote:
| When we talk about this I think we really need to talk about
| Blackstone's Ratio [0] which was clearly an influence for the
| founding fathers. We're talking about peoples' lives and
| freedom, how highly do you value these?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Thanks for introducing me to this. Personally I think instead
| Schrodinger's Cat is more appropriate to legal policy.
| Measurement effects the result. In that excessive policing,
| where a people are treated with extreme prejudice as likely
| offenders, creates more offenders. Because the incentive to
| be a good citizen is eroded by your social guardians.
| godelski wrote:
| Having a physics degree and having worked as an engineer, I
| do not think Schrodinger's Cat applies here (often we in
| the physics community are frustrated in how SC is
| misrepresented).
|
| Really what Blackstone's ratio is discussing is failure
| design. In good engineering practices we want things to
| fail in specific ways. So we actually design failure. For
| example, if you are building a skyscraper you want to
| design your building to collapse in on itself as to not
| take out other surrounding buildings. The trade-off here is
| that you aren't building the optimal structure, but overall
| you have greater safety (obviously you still have to meet
| base structural and safety conditions).
|
| This is a better analogy than SC, which is about the
| complexity of statistics and observation (which mind you
| doesn't need to be human nor have a consciousness). Really
| here we're talking about how we design failure in law.
| "When laws fail, what should happen?" Blackstone's has
| nothing to do with measurement and observation (which mean
| more in the QM world than what they mean in our macro world
| or in engineering. We physicists aren't always great at
| explaining. Sorry :( )
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Furthermore, the stated ideals of the PD/vendor might be far
| different from the actual metrics used to evaluated the PD
| (and, therefore, the software used by the PD).
|
| You can pump up the clearance rate by practicing outright
| discriminatory policing. You can substantially increase revenue
| by targeting the poorest areas. Etc.
| randyrand wrote:
| Does that mean they can no longer arrive at protests before a
| crime has happened?
| CivBase wrote:
| > predictive policing relies on algorithms to interpret police
| records, analyzing arrest or parole data to send officers to
| target chronic offenders, or identifying places where crime may
| occur.
|
| So... instead of using algorithms, how will the police decide
| where to patrol heaviest? Putting a human in charge of that seems
| like a great way to _increase_ racial bias. Or am I
| misunderstanding what "predictive policing" is?
| blueplanet200 wrote:
| I'm very curious what "banning" predictive policing even means
| here. In the broadest sense, predictive policing is using data
| to inform where crime will happen in the future.
|
| Is this to say you can't use historical trends to allocate
| police in a city? Should police be allocated only based on
| population size/density in a region?
|
| Is using your knowledge of what neighborhoods tend to be "crime
| heavy" predictive? Are they crime heavy because of increased
| policing (you found more crime because you were looking) or
| because there really was more crime?
|
| What is the line here?
| fpgaminer wrote:
| I think many commenters here fail to understand the real world
| consequences these racist algorithms have had. Go watch the
| ethics section of Lesson 6 in the Fast AI course
| (https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=6); it covers many ethical
| topics, predictive policing being one of them. It's amazing that
| ethics aren't mandatory in computer science education. Should
| have learned our lesson 80 years ago when IBM happily
| computerized mass genocide.
| m0zg wrote:
| This is a really bad knee-jerk in the long term. These systems
| should be improved, and relied upon less, rather than banned. You
| want to identify the "at risk" individuals and focus on them not
| getting into trouble, preemptively? Predictive policing could
| help you with that. Arguably, this should be its main purpose in
| the first place.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| These over-reactions are bloody stupid. All technology comes with
| issues. But don't ban it, fix it.
| jmspring wrote:
| The funny thing about the origins of PredPol - a sitting
| councilman and a liaison with SCPD were both part of the early
| team at PredPol and those connections helped encourage Santa Cruz
| to adopt the technology.
|
| SCPD, in general, is one of the more level headed and
| compassionate police departments I've known members on and
| they've had a history of lack of city support (it was better for
| a few years) over the last 3 decades.
| chippy wrote:
| is there anything a resident can do? is the city run by the
| democrat or republican? is the pd or mayor a democrat? Is the
| police chief an electable position? (im in the UK and have been
| there for a day or 2, it seems pretty left wing)
|
| how can a normal person living in the city use democracy to
| make real change?
| [deleted]
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Big cities used to be really dangerous but crime was put under
| control by methods that are now under attack. Data-driven
| predictions of where crime will happen allows police to dedicate
| resources to locations where they will be most effective at
| preventing crime. Data-driven decision making is what drives
| every sector in society. It belongs in policing. This ban is a
| mistake. Unfortunately, the consequences of the ban won't be
| experienced until those who voted the rule into effect are long
| gone from office.
| rudolph9 wrote:
| I wish anonymous metadata and source code was open! This kind of
| software has potential to positively impact society but not when
| it cannot be freely audited and debated by the public empowered
| to vote for changes to it.
|
| I suspect there is a storm brewing with proprietary government
| software. Social services like child endangerment checkups, child
| placements, etc. sentencing recommendations, as mentioned
| predictive policing, watchdog/oversight departments , and so much
| more!
|
| These tools can empower us or enslave us and a big step toward
| empowerment is the open source community to push for open source
| and open data for software augmented government functions!
| ISL wrote:
| It is very difficult to make policing metadata truly anonymous.
|
| Source code makes sense, for sure.
| agilebyte wrote:
| If we had access to granular data like this, wouldn't it lead
| to further gentrification and a further rift within a society?
| rudolph9 wrote:
| How so? What is your though process on this?
| agilebyte wrote:
| Given a choice between two neighbourhoods, would I want to
| move to one that has grow ops or a high rate of social
| services checkups? Some of that data is already easily
| available and I know it is being used by real estate agents
| already. The people that can avoid these neighbourhoods
| will, which leaves only those that can't. Gentrification.
|
| The neighbourhood I grew up in was heavily mixed (along
| social strata) which prevented these problems from arising
| in the first place.
| rudolph9 wrote:
| > The people that can avoid these neighbourhoods will,
| which leaves only those that can't.
|
| You're describing people who are stuck in impoverished
| (correct me if I'm mistaken) where but gentrifications
| refer to the restoration and upgrading of deteriorated
| urban property by middle-class or affluent people, often
| resulting in displacement of lower-income people.
|
| Gentrification has a lot to do with location in proximity
| to a city center, transportation, waterfront, etc. Just
| because a neighborhood is safer doesn't necessarily mean
| wealthy people will move there, drive up property values
| indirectly forcing out the poorer residents.
|
| Look at Japan, the country has a universally low crime
| rate and poor areas are still relatively cost effective
| for low income residents. https://www.quora.com/Which-
| part-of-Japan-is-viewed-as-the-p...
|
| I'm not saying this won't accelerate gentrification of
| desirable areas currently full of crime in-turn currently
| avoided wealthier people. But a cost effective solution
| which results in a net decrease in crime (not a zero sum
| game where a neighborhood gentrifies and the crime just
| shifts elsewhere), would likely benefit mostly lower
| income individuals then most.
|
| Obviously solution nothing is universal beneficial and
| there is the obvious concern of humans progressing being
| enslave by black-box AI systems but it has potential to
| be very beneficial if rolled out in a publicly auditable
| way.
| burtonator wrote:
| I'm really torn on this issue because as a data-scientist I'm
| all in but knowing the potential for abuse here or just
| "damage" when a minority group is injured. They wouldn't have
| the financial resources to fight back. Further, we KNOW law
| enforcement uses these systems to gain access and abuse rights.
| K9s are a good example. The police can't search your car
| without a warrant but if a K9 'signals' then they can search
| all they want. None of the false positive hit rates of the K9s
| are auditable so if they're just using the K9 to search
| anyone's car then they've basically use a 'clever hans' to
| bypass the 4th amendment.
| sneak wrote:
| > _His administration will work with the police to "help
| eliminate racism in policing", the seaside city's first male
| African-American mayor said on his Facebook page, following a
| vote on Tuesday evening._
|
| Inconvenient fact:
|
| The only way to eliminate racism in policing is to eliminate
| human beings doing the policing.
|
| All humans have inherent bias. Racism, sexism, classism, and a
| whole host of other -isms will always be present in policing
| conducted by humans. Any solution that does not inherently
| account for this, expect this, and have well defined and widely
| known processes for detecting and remediating this is a non-
| solution.
|
| Every human being has racial biases.
| IndySun wrote:
| I wish we could eliminate worthless comments. Of course,
| technically it is true. But billions of decent human don't go
| around acting on that bias. However, violently biased men and
| women in uniform with guns and alloted power need to be
| removed, arrested in uniform, and charged, jailed, for
| disgracing the profession.
| sneak wrote:
| I think rather than saying "well, MOST people aren't that
| racist", we would do well to recognize that bias exists in
| everyone and simply build systems to detect when it affects
| job performance, proactively, rather than retroactively
| reacting to reporter/demonstrated bad behavior.
|
| Police in the US have failed to hold themselves to a higher
| standard, therefore a better system that understands that
| police officers are humans like anyone else (and likely to
| fail to be unbiased like anyone else) would be a welcome
| replacement.
|
| It's absolutely going to happen, everything from
| microaggressions and profiling, all the way up to lynching
| (all of which we've seen in HD video many times in the last
| quarter). The current "just get rid of the bad ones" approach
| is plainly insufficient.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Predictive policing is an idea gone totally wrong (predictably).
|
| Data can tell us what, when and where to keep an eye at, it can
| help us highlight roots of criminal activity (social inequality,
| bad schools, unsustainable business practices, pollution[1,2,3],
| non-restorative penal system, police corruption, etc). but it can
| never rightfully justify treating any given person as a dangerous
| criminal or even a suspect.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565624
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21193609
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9140942
| kadabra9 wrote:
| Honest question here.
|
| Are these neighborhoods "over policed" because their residents
| commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes
| because their neighborhood is "over policed"?
| danans wrote:
| > Are these neighborhoods "over policed" because their
| residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more
| crimes because their neighborhood is "over policed"?
|
| Your question is flawed because it omits too many variables,
| including the racial differences in what is enforced as a
| crime, the endemic poverty and resulting tattered social fabric
| in high crime neighborhoods that pushes residents - especially
| younger ones - into situations where committing crime becomes
| an ever more "rational" choice.
| nodox92 wrote:
| Stats for Part I offenses are based on incidents reported to
| the police, not arrests made by the police. These offenses
| include homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, rape,
| theft, etc. This is how cities typically measure their crime
| rate and how high crime areas are identified.
|
| Stats for Part II offenses are based on arrests only. These
| offenses include minor assaults, fraud, forgery, drugs crimes,
| prostitution, weapon violations, loitering, etc. A large subset
| of Part II offenses do not have a specific victim so the stats
| are driven by police enforcement.
| 14 wrote:
| The problem as I see it is if you watch someone long enough
| they will break some law eventually, be it minor, which can
| then escalate things. For example if the person could not
| afford a fine they may end up in jail. So now you have to
| police disproportionately patrolling these neighbourhoods
| pulling people over. It's unfair and certainly leads to
| hardships for some. Next a big issue I have is what defines a
| "crime" as they say? Because a poor man selling a bag of
| marijuana on the corner to make some grocery money will go to
| jail if caught but the business man can pay the fee and open a
| dispensary and profit immune to police. A poor man soliciting
| sex off the street jail, a rich man hiring an escort no issues.
| So they laws are discriminatory and the "crimes" these
| communities are supposedly breaking is questionable.
| tsieling wrote:
| More crimes are documented because of extra policing, but that
| is different from whether more crimes are committed. Crimes of
| different degrees are happening all around, but if you look
| particularly in one area that is where you'll see crime.
| jasonv wrote:
| We have data on the incarceration rates of Americans as a
| whole, versus other countries.
|
| I think the current activist climate is in response to the fact
| that the status quo is built on the premise that all that
| befalls the troubled populations in the US is always because
| they deserve it, and they brought it upon themselves. And
| therefore, all the prevailing cultural/ policing/ political/
| fiscal positions that have been in response to these conditions
| are reasonable.
|
| That doesn't seem reasonable to me.
| clawedjird wrote:
| In a hyper-connected world awash with data, holding such a
| perspective seems akin believing that the earth is flat.
| rhizome wrote:
| That's called the Just-World Hypothesis, and I don't know
| that anybody professes it as a policy framework, though
| regular people do and I think it could be said to underlie a
| lot of prejudices and bigotries in people who _do_ affect
| public policy, but it has to be hidden unless you 're Steve
| King (R-IA). Victim-blaming is very common in the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
| augustt wrote:
| Of course it depends on which troubled population. For rural
| white poor people all their problems are framed as being from
| external uncontrollable pressures - they're losing jobs
| because of globalization, they're in an opioid epidemic
| because of pharma. Their struggles are not just dismissed as
| personal responsibility failures.
| wigl wrote:
| Grew up in Harlem though not black.
|
| While I'm sure there are good police out there, broken windows
| policies effectively act as a safe haven for a subset of cops
| to enforce arbitrary (usually racial) bias whenever they feel
| like it. There's no impetus to actually do the neighborhood
| policing they claim aspire to--just a universal excuse to
| allocate resources and attention in the name of making
| neighborhoods "safe".
|
| Metric gaming is real. Ex. strapped for money or not meeting
| your quota? Stop some drunk teens on a weekend night before the
| end of your shift and you can make time and a half because your
| lookup is "still processing" well past 5 PM. End up writing a
| citation for the kids, tell yourself that they can afford it,
| tell them that they should be grateful, and wash your hands
| clean of it all because you're doing "neighborhood policing".
|
| What if there's an actual crime to report in these
| neighborhoods?
|
| Two squad cars pulled up to my building. The first thing said
| to me: "OK who was it? Black? Hispanic?"
|
| They have me ride with them as they stopped every non-white
| group of kids, at least 30 over the course of ~2 hours despite
| my repeated remarks that no one had actually seen the
| perpetrator(s). I wanted to back out at this point, but they
| had to have a case to justify their time. Frustrated, they took
| me back to the station and had me go through a photo book of
| juvenile delinquents in the neighborhood they had compiled. It
| was photos of entirely black and hispanic youth captioned by
| their name, address (at which they could be arrested), and some
| minor crime that was enough to put them in the book. They were
| practically begging me to just point out any dark face. I just
| wanted to report a stolen phone.
| ericjang wrote:
| This is horrific. When did this happen? Was this in Harlem?
| wigl wrote:
| 9-10 years ago. Spanish Harlem during peak stop and frisk
| era/doctrine.
|
| What I remember most was how routine it all was for
| everyone involved. Driver would sometimes pull the car up
| on kids drug raid style, swerving into the sidewalk. They'd
| turn on the high-beams and within a few words and seconds,
| it was a pop-up police lineup.
|
| The only description of the suspects was this: a group of
| kids, one of them was wearing a bright hoodie. No one had
| even seen their faces. I was adamant about this as well but
| these cops didn't believe me. They instead kept asking me
| to "be real" with them and that I shouldn't "feel the need
| to be PC" around them. They acted as if I was self-
| censoring for virtue signalling instead of being honest. I
| just wanted them to log my IMEI and keep a lookout for my
| phone on CL/eBay because they had been doing press releases
| about it at the time. Apparently that was the less
| accessible option.
|
| It scares me to think how much negative impact that one
| group of police might've had. When I think about how
| frustrated they became when I told them the truth over and
| over. Maybe they're used to more central park Karen type of
| crime reports.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I used to sit on my friends porch when I was in college before
| pot was legalized, smoking. We are white people in a white
| area. If we had been black I have no doubt the increased police
| presence would have resulted in us getting arrested. There are
| tons of other stupid things I did when younger where if there
| had been more cops around I would have gone to jail. More
| police means more people are arrested for the same crimes
| committed with impunity in less policed areas.
|
| In addition the fact that you can be arrested for resisting
| arrest means that if a police officer wants to arrest you they
| can do so and create a crime afterwards. Recent headlines have
| shown very vividly how police actively encourage and look for
| confrontations hoping to spark a reaction. In a high crime
| area, everyone is a criminal in much the same way everything
| looks like a nail to a hammer.
|
| Imagine if this man had actually actively resisted the officer:
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/24/man-su...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Edit: This was not a well-thought out post lol and I'm
| deleting it.
| webkike wrote:
| I've been to plenty of protests in low income areas, and
| the push to defund the police is coming from them, not the
| higher income areas.
| mc32 wrote:
| A question to ask is what are the demographics? Is the
| support a plurality, old people, young people,
| homeowners, a silent majority a vocal minority, do we
| know?
| webkike wrote:
| Seemed to me to be made up of a wide variety of
| demographics, but organized by respected community
| leaders who typically are homeowners in the areas they
| live.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I hear what you are saying but disagree to a point. How
| many of these people getting arrested for the serious
| crimes have pre existing arrests / convictions for minor
| crimes? Once you have a couple of minor arrests and you are
| in the system, finding a career and advancing yourself
| becomes increasingly difficult. I would make an uneducated
| assumption that if they had not gotten the minor
| infractions and had a future perhaps the major infractions
| would not have happened. With that said there are always
| going to be bad people that require police intervention.
| Further adding to this if you grow up in an environment
| where there is a high criminal element you may be more
| predisposed to it, starting with minor infractions like
| marijuana use and then you are arrested and the self
| fulfilling prophecy repeats.
|
| Massively increased policing has created the environment in
| which many of these people are born and turn to crime. If
| you are constantly treated like a criminal, you may come to
| think of yourself as one.
| xd wrote:
| In the UK we have what's know as youth offending
| services, the main aim of which is to keep youths out of
| the courts and criminal system by utilising more
| appropriate methods of disposal for minor offences like
| drug possession.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| This seems like a great idea. We should not be
| essentially damning people to a much more challenging
| life due to youthful indiscretions. Obviously some crimes
| are worse than others.
| [deleted]
| xd wrote:
| I agree up until you say "few good people living in those
| neighbourhoods" it's the other way around .. you'd be
| amazed at how few people are generally responsible for
| crime in any given area.
| godelski wrote:
| Except we are [0]. Here's the breakdown of why people are
| in jail (numbers rounded)
|
| - Drug offenses: 46%
|
| - Weapons, Explosives, Arson: 20%
|
| - Sex Offenses: 11%
|
| - Extortion, Fraud, Bribery: 6%
|
| - Immigration: 5%
|
| - Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses: 5%
|
| - Robbery: 3%
|
| - Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses: 3%
|
| So drugs vs (WEA + BLPO + R + HAAKO) is 46% vs 39%. Last I
| checked 46 > 39, so yeah we are talking about things like
| pot.
|
| [0] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_
| offen...
|
| __EDIT__: It appears that the parent has removed their
| comment, so let me add context. Here I'm responding to the
| parent's claim that you can outright dismiss drug related
| crimes because it is all about violent offenses. I'm just
| trying to show that drugs play a big role and thus
| dismissing them is naive.
| tmoravec wrote:
| Is that global statistics or statistics for "over
| policed" neighbourhoods the article and discussion is
| about?
| godelski wrote:
| > Is that global statistics or statistics for "over
| policed" neighbourhoods the article and discussion is
| about?
|
| Neither, it is US statistics.
|
| Getting specifically the "over policed neighborhoods"
| statistics is a little trickier but when you do some
| location of arrest lookups you do see a higher percentage
| of arrests coming from those neighborhoods, so it would
| make for a reasonable assumption that those neighborhoods
| are a representative demographic of this dataset (if
| you're drawing from two jars and you draw 80% from one
| jar and 20% from the second jar, the marbles you have is
| a better representation of the contents of the first jar
| than they are of the second jar).
| daenz wrote:
| It is mind-blowing how misleading this is. You should
| really consider editing your post. The majority of people
| in state prisons are there for VIOLENT CRIMES, and the
| plurality of people in local jails are there for violent
| crimes.
|
| https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
| godelski wrote:
| But you're also missing the point. I was responding to a
| comment that said we should dismiss drug related crimes.
| Maybe that is missing now that the person removed that
| comment but essentially they said
|
| > we're not talking about drug, we're talking about
| violent crime.
|
| So my response was more in the lines of "we can't dismiss
| drugs when they are a big factor."
|
| Note: this is also why HN tries to prevent editing,
| because now the context of what I was responding to is
| completely lost.
| daenz wrote:
| >Here's the breakdown of why people are in jail:
|
| Your stats are not why people are in jail nor prison.
| Your stats represent an extremely narrow selection of
| prisoners meeting the "federal" criteria. Your
| information is misleading to make it look like most
| people in jail are due to drug offenses, which is
| factually untrue.
| godelski wrote:
| My point is that outright dismissing drug related charges
| is ludicrous. But it appears that the parent edited their
| comment to the point of removal so this context was lost.
| I have edited my response to clarify.
| kortilla wrote:
| > so yeah we are talking about things like pot.
|
| Only if you want to talk about the non-violent half to
| paint a picture that it's pointless.
|
| For the sake of discussion, assume pot is legal and those
| drug arrests didn't happen. Low income areas still have
| higher rates of violent crime.
|
| Is your argument that drug criminalization is causing
| other violent crimes?
| godelski wrote:
| My point is dismissing drugs from the equation is dumb
| when it makes up almost half the convictions.
| catalogia wrote:
| Drug criminalization causes some but certainly not all
| violent crime.
| cestith wrote:
| Creating an unregulated black market for which there is
| high demand always increases violent crime.
| MikeAmelung wrote:
| Don't even know why I'm going to bother, but most of
| those drug offenses are trafficking crack/cocaine and
| meth, a large percentage of them also involve weapons.
| It's not people who were smoking weed on the porch.
|
| https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
| basch wrote:
| Back to the preventive vs reactive. If you legalize all
| drugs, sell the harsh drugs in a controlled setting, the
| existing black markets would be destroyed. This argument
| will continue to be a circle, if we are saying "x people
| arrested" but "y shouldnt be a crime in the first place"
| "well y has to be illegal, look how much x we have."
|
| All of the money put into cops, lawyers, prosecution,
| sentencing, prison, parole, etc could be put into
| tackling the consequences of legal use.
|
| All of the money currently flowing into the black market,
| into gangs, into crime and violence causers, would try
| up.
| godelski wrote:
| You're being very selective. Federal prison only accounts
| for 22.3% of drug offending inmates[0]. Specifically in
| jails -- where 74% of occupants are not currently charged
| -- possession accounts for 56% of drug related offenses.
| Drugs accounts for 21% of occupants, (23% of convictions,
| 25.5% of non-convicted). In state prisons possession
| accounts for 25.5% of drug related offenses and 3.5% of
| the total state prison.
|
| Jails, County, State, and Federal prisons are all
| different. It would definitely make sense that the more
| serious convictions, especially with harder drugs, goes
| to federal. That's kinda the point of federal...
|
| [0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 4 in 10 arrests are marijuana related of those "As has
| long been the case, around nine-in-ten U.S. marijuana
| arrests are for possessing the drug, rather than selling
| or manufacturing it."
|
| How many of those that graduated to crack/meth etc.
| started out with simple marijuana arrests?
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/22/four-in-
| ten...
| MikeAmelung wrote:
| I don't know, I was just pointing out the fact that
| people in federal prison are not there for smoking weed
| on the porch. I don't have the numbers handy, but I would
| guess that a vast majority of the marijuana arrests in
| your article result in a fine or probation at the very
| most.
|
| Which I happen to agree is a waste of resources and
| probably does more harm than good by getting people
| started "in the system".
| godelski wrote:
| The difference is looking at federal prisons vs arrests
| and other prisons. Federal is for more egregious crimes,
| so it would make sense that less of them are for pot and
| more for harsher drugs.
|
| It is difficult, but we have to try to be aware of the
| biases in the data we have. I should have mentioned in my
| first post that those were just federal stats. But I try
| to break down more in another comment state and jails,
| specifically about possession statistics.
| treis wrote:
| These are federal offenses only. Most crime is prosecuted
| at the state level and the majority of that isn't drug
| offenses.
|
| And the people in federal prison for drugs don't get
| there by smoking pot on their front porch. They're mostly
| there for trafficking.
| godelski wrote:
| That's a good point. I did address the other levels here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655174 but it was
| harder to find more of a breakdown in the data.
| iguy wrote:
| I don't have a link handy but it's around 15% of the
| total prison population who are in for drug offences.
| daenz wrote:
| I do have a link handy:
| https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
| iguy wrote:
| Thanks! So between 10 & 20% are in for drugs -- the lower
| figure if I try to exclude trafficking (although roughly,
| as they don't always break it down). And this means "in
| for nothing harder than drugs" since they are counting by
| the worst conviction.
| drhayes9 wrote:
| > We're talking rape, burglary, murder, vandalism, and
| assault... Conversely, low-income neighborhoods have tons
| of hardcore crime like I've described.
|
| Tons?
|
| Rape seems an unnecessarily emotional grab here, since most
| rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows and
| aren't restricted by income.
|
| Vandalism happens everywhere as well.
|
| > It's always the people in the white upper-class
| neighborhoods who think the police are the problem.
|
| My mom grew up poor and told me to not trust the police and
| certainly not let them in the house without a warrant.
|
| > ...because they celebrate...
|
| Who is "they", in this context?
|
| "Tons." "Always." "They." Your language suggests an agenda
| that you're presenting in absolutes.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| I agree. The use of 'they' to refer to a group of people
| is very problematic.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I was more upset that the parent was implying that his
| neighborhood would have equal arrest numbers if the
| police had been more present on account of his pot
| smoking. I hope everyone can see what a stupid argument
| that is and that's the hill I'm willing to die on here.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think maybe you're missing the point? I don't think the
| parent was implying that there'd be equal arrest numbers.
|
| The difference is that if you send all the cops to the
| "bad neighborhoods", then the "good neighborhoods" get
| away with a lot of crime, even if that crime is low-
| level.
|
| Let's say all neighborhoods have 100 instances of low-
| level crime per day. A so-called "bad" neighborhood --
| where most of the cops get sent to -- also has instances
| of much worse crime.
|
| The end result of this officer allocation scheme is that
| people get arrested in the "bad" neighborhood for a mix
| of low-level crime and worse crime. But pretty much no
| one at all gets arrested in the "good" neighborhood,
| because there's basically no police presence there. So
| maybe you see in the "good" neighborhood a handful of
| arrests for those 100 instances of low-level crime, but
| in the "bad" neighborhood you see 60 arrests for that
| similar crime. (You _also_ see arrests for more severe
| crime, but that 's not the point.)
|
| I'm of course making up numbers here, but regardless of
| the magnitude of the numbers, even if they differ between
| neighborhoods, the percentage of crime handled ends up
| being much lower in the "good" neighborhoods because of
| the simple fact that police aren't there to handle it.
| Sure, they'll come out if called, but response time is
| longer, and they have very little ability to see things
| happening in real-time.
|
| Meanwhile, if you feed this data into your algorithm, it
| will start to believe that there's basically no low-level
| crime in the "good" neighborhoods -- even though it's the
| same! -- so it prioritizes those neighborhoods even less.
|
| If you feed an algorithm bad data, it will only give you
| more bad data. And it becomes worse when you act on that
| data and feed it more results based on that bad data.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > There are tons of other stupid things I did when
| younger where if there had been more cops around I would
| have gone to jail.
|
| That's what the person you replied to said. Not that more
| police would have been more arrests based on (just) their
| pot smoking, but on other behavior as well. I saw a lot
| of vandalism that led to kids being dragged by their ears
| back to their parents in middle-class neighborhoods, that
| would've resulted in arrests (even for misdemeanors) for
| kids in poor neighborhoods (where I've also lived and
| seen this difference).
|
| In white neighborhoods small crimes would lead to police
| dragging the kid home, in minority neighborhoods they'd
| end up with a misdemeanor record (at least). All of this
| creates a bias in the algorithms which generally assume
| that someone with a criminal record of some sort is going
| to be a higher risk individual (which is probably a safe
| assumption for many crimes), but it is biased because
| people aren't charged with crimes at equal rates due to
| the biases in the existing system that these algorithms
| are more likely to exacerbate than alleviate. Now that
| the minority community has a thicker criminal record, the
| policing in that neighborhood continues to go up which
| continues to create increased conflict between the police
| and residents as the police end up arresting people for
| increasingly minor offenses, along with the major ones.
|
| A lack of policing or difference in attitude of the
| police in poor and/or minority communities versus middle-
| class/wealthy and/or white communities is very much
| present in the US (and probably the world). This leads
| algorithms like those under discussion to end up
| inheriting the same or similar biases, whether the
| developers and marketers intended it or not.
| adjkant wrote:
| That very specific qualm doesn't mean that increased
| police presence helps though in the higher crime
| neighborhood. See my previous response, but basically all
| things can be true.
|
| It can (and evidence supports that) at ac basic level:
|
| 1. There are more crimes committed in one neighborhood
| than another
|
| 2. Increasing police presence in the higher crime
| neighborhood does not decrease the occurrence of such
| crimes
|
| 3. Increased police presence leads to unjustified
| disproportionate enforcement of smaller violations being
| broken equally by both neighborhoods
|
| Your original reply goes much farther than simply
| claiming less natural crime, and then adds a lot of
| armchair sociology without backing. When you ask
| rhetorical questions and follow with "I don't know", you
| are implying without evidence and it's not a constructive
| argument that appears in good faith.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Given a long enough timeline of increased arrests, police
| presence and assumption of guilt, why would my
| neighborhood not eventually have the same number of
| arrests and crime. Unless your argument is that there is
| something physically different in the other neighborhood
| that drives them towards crime. If that's your argument
| and I am having a hard time seeing what else it could be
| then I think we are done here.
| kortilla wrote:
| Of course poor neighborhoods are going to have higher
| crime. Unless you have been truly poor you won't
| understand the sense of desperation that can lead to bad
| decisions.
|
| You grow up in a food scarce household with a parent
| addicted to painkillers with no guidance on what a path
| to a successful future is and crime becomes a lot more
| palatable. Getting in the game starts to look like the
| only possible way to "make it".
| Digit-Al wrote:
| I agree. Every time there is an article like this you get
| the same arguments, the same discussions, and the same
| comments. Back and forth, back and forth, over and over
| again.
|
| But if you actually bother to do some reading on the
| subject the conclusions are overwhelmingly clear. Over
| and over again social programs show very clearly that if
| you improve education and give people better
| opportunities to escape the poverty trap and better
| themselves you reduce crime.
|
| The formula is simple really: if you give people
| opportunities to make an honest living then they will,
| for the most part, make an honest living; if you don't
| give people the opportunity to make an honest living then
| they will, for the most part, make a dishonest living.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I agree with you but my question is does increased police
| presence lead to a poor neighborhood. Take for example a
| middle class white neighborhood. If there was a sudden
| and very visible increased presence over years, arresting
| people for minor offences, watching everyone and
| questioning everyone, would that neighborhood become a
| poor neighborhood. I think it would. I think people who
| could would move out, property values would drop and the
| people who could not move out would have a higher
| predisposition to crime as they were worked into the
| system.
| adjkant wrote:
| > We're not taking about specious arguments like pot
| arrests and improper turn signals. We're talking rape,
| burglary, murder, vandalism, and assault.
|
| Look at arrest data, the former is exactly what we're
| talking about. Most of these cases of police brutality come
| from basically random stops that focus on such minor
| violations (turn signals, jaywalking, etc) or "your
| car/description matches a potential subject". See parent
| and weed usage vs who gets caught with weed.
|
| Not to mention that you throw in rape/murder/assault into a
| sentence with vandalism. Police have a historically
| terrible track record with rapes in both processing cases
| as well as no record of stopping them. Police react to
| these incidents, not prevent them. The idea that police
| presence stops these is not supported either as when police
| reduced their presence in NYC neighborhoods, crime actually
| went down.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-
| proacti...
| mistersquid wrote:
| The report you linked to is astonishing, not just for the
| violence committed against someone who, at the time he was
| questioned, was not in violation of the law, but also for the
| degree of force used considering the crime being
| investigated.
|
| To wit:
|
| > wrongly detained him after identifying him as a suspect in
| a panhandling case.
|
| Slammed to the ground for being suspected of panhandling? (To
| my mind, panhandling is akin to free speech.)
| ruddct wrote:
| Wait until you hear about Elijiah McClain, who was tackled
| then choked/injected with ketamine until he went into
| cardiac arrest and was eventually pronounced brain-dead. He
| had 911 called on him for walking while 'looking sketchy'.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/article/who-was-elijah-mcclain.html
| eanzenberg wrote:
| Unfortunately, law and order has to be standardized for
| everybody, regardless of background. Pot was decriminalized
| in many states already. Are there other things you would like
| to decriminalize? There are avenues for those, but it's not a
| fast turn-around, those things take time.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The law is standardized for everyone, its enforcement that
| is the issue. There are clear differences in enforcement
| for different races and different wealth levels.
|
| My example occurred many moons ago before pot was
| decriminalized any where. I am old :)
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> The law is standardized for everyone_
|
| https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-
| fed...
| rodiger wrote:
| As unjust as the results/motivation of this are, the law
| itself does not vary based on the person committing it.
| [deleted]
| eanzenberg wrote:
| Yes agreed, enforcement has to be standardized as well.
| Justice should be blind, except to the law. The pendulum
| swinging though has me worried, where dangerous crimes
| are currently unenforced.
| zo1 wrote:
| The knee-jerk reaction against policing _will_ cause more
| harm than good, all in the name of some nebulous "long
| term" outcome that is borderline undefinable.
|
| Some knee-jerk reactions that we're seeing or
| considering"
|
| 1. Banning facial recognition.
|
| 2. Banning predictive policing (this article).
|
| 3. Defunding police departments
|
| 4. California's ACA5 amendment that seeks to remove anti-
| discrimination laws, allowing racial and gender
| discrimination.
| cryptoz wrote:
| In our society, everyone is a lawbreaker. There are so many
| laws that surely everyone is guilty of breaking _some_ law.
| This results in police being able to discriminate by
| selectively enforcing laws. Since everyone is probably
| doing something illegal, police do racist things by
| profiling people who are 'probably doing [something
| illegal]' without _sounding_ racist.
|
| It's a common pattern in societies where the laws are so
| invasive and numerous that everyone breaks them. We need
| reasonable laws that are _equally and fully enforced_ to
| reduce this particular outlet of racism.
| ihumanable wrote:
| One of the things I recently started thinking about is
| how most of the "wacky hijinks" in TV Shows and Movies
| would almost definitely result in your arrest today.
|
| Many of the "innocent pranks" and "fun times" that my
| grandparents and parents would tell me about from their
| youth, also have components that have been made illegal
| now.
|
| Almost every Senior Prank has some component of B&E /
| vandalism.
|
| I've just found it odd how the media we consume seems to
| exist in this completely different world, where baristas
| live in massive apartments they could never afford and
| most of the fun and excitement of the story comes from
| situations that in real life would most likely end in
| your arrest.
|
| It seems like decades of being "tough on crime" and
| having a "war on drugs" has created a society where
| everyone is always breaking some law. That means that we
| are all at the mercy of Law Enforcement officers as they
| use their "professional discretion" to decide who is
| breaking it enough.
|
| This is an older article but still relevant as ever
| https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/03/how-the-
| suprem...
|
| Do you have an air freshener in your car, the police can
| pull you over for it. Then claim they smell alcohol or
| marijuana and search your person and vehicle. As long as
| they stopped you "in good faith" because they thought,
| even incorrectly, that they could stop you for obstructed
| view, then it's cool with the courts.
|
| It seems like we are overdue for a correction. While
| every crime statistic has pointed to the fact that we
| live in the safest time in history, we continue with
| zero-tolerance tough-on-crime policy making that does
| nothing to make us safer.
| floren wrote:
| You don't even need an air freshener in the car. On a
| Friday night you could very well get pulled over because
| "your tail-lights weren't on" e.g. the cop is fishing for
| a DUI even though you were driving fine. When you turn
| out not to be drunk, the cop writes you a ticket but _don
| 't worry_, all you have to do is show up at traffic court
| to get it cleared! Never mind that the car's light switch
| was set to "auto" the whole time and if the headlights
| were on, the taillights were also on...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's important to be correct about the particular nature
| of the injustice: the police aren't profiling people who
| are _probably doing something illegal_. To the extent
| that police do profile (I don 't think it's a question
| that they do, only to what extent), their profiling is
| based on who they perceive to be the most likely of
| committing _the worst_ offenses, not simply "who is
| likely to be doing anything illegal at all".
|
| That said, even if black Americans are more likely to
| commit these worst of offenses (as reported by victims),
| it's still unjust because any given black individual may
| not be guilty and doesn't deserve increased scrutiny
| based on the color of their skin--justice ought to be
| colorblind and individualistic.
|
| _That_ said, not everything that appears to be profiling
| is actually profiling. Police are deployed more densely
| to areas with high violent crime, and these areas tend to
| skew black. That means they 're more likely to witness
| more minor offenses as well. The racial disparity here
| isn't due to profiling, its due to the high incidence of
| violent crime in certain predominately-minority
| communities. This is an important distinction because it
| determines the best course of action to solve the
| disparity problem--if the problem is mostly attributable
| to police profiling, then fixing profiling is the most
| urgent problem. If it's due to high incidence of violence
| in communities, then the best solutions will be various
| anti-violence programs and keeping violent offenders off
| of the streets (and ideally rehabilitating them).
| zo1 wrote:
| That sort of nuance is almost never brought to the fore,
| unfortunately. Right now, public policy and media-
| attention seems to be entirely driven by empathy and
| outrage.
| cataphract wrote:
| So if at a given time it's impossible to investigate all
| burglaries where the amount stolen is less than $200,
| should we make them all legal?
|
| Discretion in deciding which crimes to investigate is
| always necessary. Discretion on charging and guilty pleas
| seem much more problematic to me.
| wwright wrote:
| Equally and fully enforcing laws seems about as likely as
| equally and fully eliminating bugs from all software to
| me
| cryptoz wrote:
| Look at the efforts put into reducing bugs in software:
| how much money is spent on that, new paradigms are
| creating to reduce bugs, linters are written and used,
| etc.
|
| What are the specific, and large-scale efforts made to
| make the law and enforcement more equal?
|
| We could at least _try_ as hard as software bugs - rather
| than the current situation where the scale is tipped in
| the other way (ie there are numerous incentives to
| introduce 'bugs' into the system and not many to take
| them out)
| wwright wrote:
| Oh, definitely agreed - just trying to illustrate that we
| have to design a society that accounts for the inevitable
| failures in enforcement as well.
| alexashka wrote:
| It's a false dichotomy.
|
| Point a) Some neighbourhoods have more police in them, because
| they have more criminal activity. They are almost always poor
| neighbourhoods. We want there to be more police, the same way
| we want more doctors in places where the sick people are
| (hospitals).
|
| Point b) Police officers have mandatory quotas - to fulfill
| those quotas, they go to places where they're more likely to
| make arrests, the same way fishermen go fishing where the fish
| are more likely to be.
|
| Because police work based on quotas, they'll bust people for
| whatever is easiest to catch while satisfying the quota
| criteria.
|
| If you want to be informed on this subject in more detail, the
| best resource I've found is interviews with Dr Michael Wood, he
| has a youtube channel and has been on Joe Rogan a couple of
| times.
| antoncohen wrote:
| There are a few things going on. One is that police can choose
| what crimes to enforce, and city police tend to enforce crimes
| committed by lower income people. For example lower income
| people are more likely to be street level drug dealers, other
| crimes are more likely to be committed by higher income people.
|
| Then in looking for dealers, police go to lower income
| neighborhoods. If you look for something you will end up
| finding it, if you don't look you won't find it. This leads to
| things like pretext traffic stops, where someone is stopped for
| a minor violation that wouldn't normally get someone stopped.
| The police can then detect something else, like the smell of
| drugs or drug paraphernalia in the car, which they use as cause
| to search the car. In searching the car they find something
| that can lead to criminal charges.
|
| This leads to lower income people receiving fines for minor
| traffic violations, and minor drug violations, at a higher rate
| the higher income people. The same lower income people struggle
| to pay those fines more, which puts them in a worse place,
| possibly leading to more desperate crimes.
|
| Policing is punitive, and doesn't help solve underlying
| problems. Imprisoning and fining poor people doesn't help them
| or society.
|
| I don't think this is as much of a racial issue as people make
| it out to be, it just happens that in the US the low income
| urban housing projects are predominantly non-white. Low income
| people in rural areas are less likely to be over policed
| because there are physically less police per squeal mile in
| rural areas. And with less people in rural areas, things are
| more likely to go unnoticed.
|
| If you look at somewhere like the UK, where low income urban
| council estates (housing projects) are often predominantly
| white, you see the same over policing, profiling, and pretext
| stops. But instead of profiling young black males in hoodies
| driving around a lower income neighborhood, they profile young
| white males in hoodies driving around a lower income
| neighborhood.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Given that the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the
| world, I'm going to go with the latter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This might be true for certain kinds of crime (possession or
| sale of drugs). We know it's not true for many other kinds of
| crime (especially violent crime) because these communities
| report crimes at a higher rate and because the murder rate in
| these communities is much higher. Crime reports and murder
| rates aren't functions of police presence (they don't depend
| on police stumbling upon a crime in progress). There are also
| more shootings, stabbings, assaults, etc as reported by
| healthcare officials.
|
| (I shouldn't have to say this, but none of my argument above
| suggests that the US incarceration rate is ideal or otherwise
| not a problem).
| Miner49er wrote:
| I think the real answer is both. The fact is, lower income
| neighborhoods do have more crime. That's just common sense.
| People do what they have to to survive.
|
| This results in heavier policing, which then creates a cycle.
| You put people in prison for a felony, and when they come out
| they don't have many options. They're in a worse place then
| when they went in. Not many places hire prior felons. So then
| they end up committing crime again and going back. For more on
| this google "incarceration cycle" or similar.
|
| This also obviously has a bad effect on future generations.
| Kids are growing up on a single income cause one of their
| parents are in jail, and that makes it more likely they'll too
| eventually be forced to enter crime.
|
| I believe, and the data shows this, that the vast majority of
| people don't commit crime because they want to. They do it
| because they feel like they don't have any other good options.
|
| The only real way to break this cycle is try to do things
| besides policing and incarcerating. Focus on rehabilitation and
| social services. The initial investment will likely need to be
| huge, but in the long run, I think it would pay off.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >The fact is, lower income neighborhoods do have more crime.
| That's just common sense.
|
| Not so fast. Middle class areas might commit more felony drug
| crimes (marijuana possession).
| rickyplouis wrote:
| For some some petty crimes (running red lights, not socially
| distancing, etc..), all neighborhoods actually commit them at a
| fairly consistent rate, but it is not enforced consistently.
|
| For instance, here in Chicago it is common to find people not
| following the social distancing rules, but predominately white
| neighborhoods largely get a pass while black and brown
| neighborhoods get enforced.
|
| So to answer your question, the crimes are occurring everywhere
| but statistically speaking black and brown people are more
| likely to face penalties for crime while white people are not.
|
| https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/05/26/chicago-police-only-...
|
| This also applies to parking tickets
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-mayoral-...
|
| and jaywalking
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/in-ch...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Your source (a blog with a pretty transparent agenda) didn't
| mention that the neighborhoods commit them at a fairly
| consistent rate, it only said that Chance The Rapper said
| that he saw people at Millennium Park not social distancing.
| Chance omitted that police broke up the crowd at Millennium
| Park as well:
|
| > Monday protesters in Millennium Park were dispersed by
| police after gathering too closely as well.
|
| - https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-
| injure...
|
| Your blog post _did_ say that our mayor (who is herself black
| and lesbian--for those who find these identities more
| credible--and who has been very consistently outspoken about
| her concerns about racially disparate outcomes with respect
| to COVID) denied disproportionate enforcement in black
| communities:
|
| > The reality is the Chicago Police Department is active and
| engaged all over the city and doing it with an eye toward
| equity, and I would have it no other way as mayor of this
| city," Lightfoot said. "I can tell you, based upon the
| statistics we've been keeping for weeks, those dispersal
| orders are happening all over the city -- and yes, in white
| areas, in Latinx areas, in moneyed areas of the city.
|
| As for disparities in the number of arrests, if this isn't
| driven by an increase in quantity, size, or density of
| gatherings in minority neighborhoods, it's probably driven by
| an increase in brandished firearms, gunshots, etc:
| https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-police-officers-
| injure....
|
| Anyway, this is all anecdata from late March which was very
| early days for the whole COVID debacle.
| rickyplouis wrote:
| The Block Club is a local non-profit news organization, it
| seems a bit disingenuous to delegitimize them by calling
| them a "blog with a pretty transparent agenda".
|
| The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little to
| do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and
| bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of
| denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND
| local news sources.
|
| Your last point seems to be the only real argument made but
| the majority of arrests have more to do with petty and drug
| related offenses as opposed to firearms according to the
| U.S. DoJ.
|
| https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > The Block Club is a local non-profit news organization,
| it seems a bit disingenuous to delegitimize them by
| calling them a "blog with a pretty transparent agenda".
|
| We can agree to disagree I guess. They're not exactly
| subtle about their biases, but then again, neither are
| mainstream media outlets these days.
|
| > The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little
| to do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and
| bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of
| denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND
| local news sources.
|
| Is this satire? Of course the mayor's identities have
| nothing to do with the claim--as I said, I put that in
| there to head off predictable identitarian rebuttals. The
| mayor's identity would only "invalidate" Chance's claims
| if you believed that the racial, etc identity of the
| claimant is paramount and the content of the claims is
| unimportant--this would be textbook bigotry so I'm sure
| this wasn't where you were going. No, Chance's claim is
| invalid because it's an anecdote and one which is
| incorrect at that (per local news sources as well as the
| mayor, anyway).
|
| > Your last point seems to be the only real argument made
| but the majority of arrests have more to do with petty
| and drug related offenses as opposed to firearms
| according to the U.S. DoJ.
|
| I don't see what that has to do with Chicago's covid
| experience.
| mtgp1000 wrote:
| Only one answer is socially acceptable, regardless of what
| statistics indicate. And we are building a dangerous world by
| going down this unscientific path.
|
| I am genuinely concerned that this will bleed into ML science
| and we may find ourselves collectively pursuing a rabbit hole
| of bad science in a vain attempt to reconcile empirical data
| with ideology.
| baddox wrote:
| Note that even you only mentioned whether answers are
| socially acceptable (in your view), not which one is true.
| mtgp1000 wrote:
| That's the fundamental problem. We are ruling out possible
| results in advance, based on arbitrary social conventions,
| not data.
|
| This is fundamentally unscientific and will lead to
| stagnation at best, regression at worst, and progress only
| in the unlikely case. At some point we will have to
| reconcile the fact that the same mathematical and
| scientific techniques which we correctly apply to other
| sets of data produce unacceptable results any time models
| are conditioned on demographic data.
|
| What then?
| narrator wrote:
| This preference for ideology instead of data reminds me of
| weird stuff that would happen with science in the Soviet
| Union. You had things in the Soviet Union like Lysenkoism[1]
| where a kook got power and explained his science in
| ideological terms and his theories, unsupported by data, were
| adopted and defended to the detriment of agricultural
| production. Workers adopted the theories because people were
| so afraid of criticizing the dominant ideology that they
| adopted whatever "science" was mandated in order to avoid
| being purged. Disagreement with official science was
| considered proof that one was a political subversive.
|
| "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or
| imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the
| campaign to suppress scientific opponents."
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
| jxramos wrote:
| > Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000
| mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and
| numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to
| suppress scientific opponents.
|
| Wow, so what sort of rationale can we make of this? Is the
| logic, "Stalin supports bunk science theory", "other
| scientists critique said theory", "therefore they
| indirectly critique Stalin and reduce his
| legitimacy/credibility"? Something like that? Are
| politicians expected to grasp every scientific thing they
| must evaluate accurately? Why wouldn't they accept and
| admit 'yah maybe we got this one wrong, sorry honest
| mistake' than to go out and murder folks. That seems widely
| overreactive.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| When you get a paranoid murderous psychopath like Stalin
| in power, "rationale" may be stretching it.
|
| But I think it went something like this. Marx was
| "scientific" - Marx had created a "science" of economics
| and sociology, and it was the official truth of the USSR.
| If some crank could show that his crackpot theory of
| agriculture was the logical consequence of Marxism's
| established truth, then it too had to be the official
| truth of the USSR. The science was settled; all that was
| left was for everyone to fall in line and implement it.
| Anyone who opposed that was both unscientific and
| unpatriotic.
|
| Except the science was objectively wrong, and
| implementing it resulted in disaster.
| vangelis wrote:
| Only 13 percent of the population, you say?
| danielhlockard wrote:
| I would argue that non-white neighborhoods are policed heavier,
| and as a consequence they "catch more criminals" in those
| neighborhoods.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| This appears to be the primary concern raised in the article.
| But surely data scientists could put in guards against this,
| such as weighting the crime count versus the time spent
| policing the area? In fact, presumably any functional
| predictive policing system must already do that, else you'd
| just tend towards policing one area incredibly intensively.
|
| If they are concerned about the police arrest stats or racism
| biasing the data set, they could keep the input to something
| hard to interfere with, like where murders occur or where
| crimes are reported by the public, rather than where arrests
| occur.
|
| My opinion is that predictive policing does need regulation,
| but banning it entirely, to me, seems like an overreaction
| that will over time result in much less effective use of
| police resources. I suppose time will tell.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Violent crime can be measured by victims rather than
| criminals, e.g. where do homicides occur?
| eanzenberg wrote:
| Do these neighborhoods commit more violent crime, rapes and
| murders?
| dx87 wrote:
| That wouldn't explain things like murder and other violent
| crimes. It's not like people are regularly getting murdered
| in the suburbs, but nobody bothered to check.
| skciva wrote:
| I think there are a lot of factors that go into a persons
| environment that influence something like murder rates.
|
| Also, depending on what you consider a violent crime, lack
| of reporting / local police department's doing something
| about the report can very well have skew crime rates in
| certain areas.
| dx87 wrote:
| Agreed, I don't think those neighborhoods just happen to
| have a bunch of violent people, but I keep seeing people
| make the naive agument that the difference in crime rate
| for those areas is caused by police presence. I remember
| after the protests in Baltimore that the police stopped
| doing as much proactive policing, and people who lived in
| the bad neighborhoods were complaining that the police
| weren't doing enough to prevent crime in their
| neighborhoods. There are underlying social issues that
| need to be dealt with that won't be fixed by removing
| police.
| iguy wrote:
| More policing may indeed catch more minor crimes that would
| otherwise go unobserved.
|
| But the morgue has a pretty close to 100% set of data on
| murder victims. It's hard to argue that those are caused by
| catching more criminals. (And in fact, murders in high-crime
| neighborhoods are _less_ likely to be solved. If anything,
| murders are caused by this _failure_ to catch first-time
| murderers, before their second go. Their victims are also,
| usually, residents of the same bad neighborhoods.)
| baddox wrote:
| But how does the level of policing in an area affect murder
| rates? I don't know the answer, but from statistics I've
| seen, it seems pretty clear that police are not exactly
| great at solving murders.
| iguy wrote:
| Are you seriously claiming that the presence of police
| increases the murder rate? Or are you actually asking to
| know by what mechanisms policing can prevent murders?
|
| Once you are talking about _solving_ a murder, clearly
| that one was not prevented. It may draw detectives to the
| neighborhood looking for clues. It 's pretty hard to
| argue that the causality runs from these detectives to
| the murder though.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| It is hard to solve a crime when your main witness is
| only accessible trough Ouija board
| remarkEon wrote:
| You should ask some homicide detectives why that is.
| clawedjird wrote:
| This is somewhat tangential to your point, but I think
| catching more "criminals" (I.e. people who break laws,
| which is virtually everyone at some point - though many
| won't even realize it and are unlikely to face
| consequences) can certainly lead to an increase in crime.
| In the US, at least, contact with the criminal justice
| system can significantly reduce social and economic
| opportunities and increase the likelihood that an
| individual will engage in future criminal activity.
| iguy wrote:
| "catch[ing] more criminals" was a quote from above. But I
| used it when discussing murder, not jaywalking.
|
| I agree that being locked up once surely makes going
| straight harder (because employers are wary) and going
| crooked easier (as you now have more contacts). This is a
| real problem we should try to address. But I'm not
| convinced that looking the other way at violent crime is
| at all the right approach.
|
| However, there is no way this is the main causal link
| between policing & crime. It's like suggesting that the
| birth rate is caused by hiring more schoolteachers in a
| neighborhood, ignoring the obvious fact that the city
| hires them (largely) based on observed need.
| basch wrote:
| or crime is a function of income inequality, and ways to fight
| it are police (reactive) or preventative social spending
| (proactive.) it's like arguing over fire departments vs
| electrical code. neglecting the latter leads to more of the
| former.
|
| Even things like urban planning, where you put your low income
| housing. If you build low income housing in high income areas,
| it prevents ghettos from forming.
| rectang wrote:
| > _or crime is a function of income inequality_
|
| That depends how you measure. The total value of wage theft
| in the US is comparable to the total value of all other
| property theft combined.
|
| https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft
|
| Rich people commit lots of crime. They just get away with it
| more often than poor people, because rich people are under-
| policed.
| eanzenberg wrote:
| Is there evidence for this though? The great crime decline in
| cities like NYC were due to increased policing and the
| "broken window" policy, along with stop & frisk.
| [deleted]
| rgoddard wrote:
| The drop in crime happened nationwide during this same time
| in places which did not include NYC. [1] The timing of this
| seemed to have been more coincidental with the drop in
| crime.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-
| windows-poli...
| basch wrote:
| Minneapolis. Seoul.
|
| "In the 1970s and early '80s, we built 70 percent of our
| subsidized units in the wealthiest white districts," Myron
| Orfield said. "The metro's affordable-housing plan was one
| of the best in the country."
|
| "Only three large metros where at least half the homes are
| within reach for young middle-class families also finish in
| the top 10 in the Harvard-Berkeley mobility study: Salt
| Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The last
| is particularly remarkable. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro
| area is richer by median household income than Pittsburgh
| or Salt Lake City (or New York, or Chicago, or Los
| Angeles). Among residents under 35, the Twin Cities place
| in the top 10 for highest college-graduation rate, highest
| median earnings, and lowest poverty rate, according to the
| most recent census figures. And yet, according to the
| Center for Housing Policy, low-income families can rent a
| home and commute to work more affordably in Minneapolis-St.
| Paul than in all but one other major metro area
| (Washington, D.C.). Perhaps most impressive, the Twin
| Cities have the highest employment rate for 18-to-34-year-
| olds in the country."
|
| "In 2008, Seoul imported a version of Minneapolis's tax-
| sharing scheme. Since then, the gap in funding for social
| services among the city's districts has narrowed. According
| to a 2012 analysis by Sun Ki Kwon, then a graduate student
| at the University of Kentucky, this has helped Seoul's
| poorest communities grow their tax bases while only
| minimally affecting the city's richest districts."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-
| mir...
| erichocean wrote:
| Are you suggesting Minneapolis is a...success story? I
| honestly can't tell, but if so, BLM would like a word...
| basch wrote:
| Did you read the article. Minneapolis, for close to 50
| years, has been an example of how to do low income
| housing better than everyone else. Policy within the last
| decade has eroded this gain. It has gotten worse since
| these policies have rolled back.
|
| Is it perfect? No. Does low income housing alone prevent
| police from fracturing families and communities by
| enforcing drug law? No.
| clawedjird wrote:
| Is there evidence for your claim? My impression was that
| the impact of those approaches/policies was found to be
| non-existent to relatively small (in terms of reducing
| crime, that is - they probably had a significant negative
| impact on the quality of life of the groups most affected
| by them).
| thenewwazoo wrote:
| That is what its proponents would want you to believe,
| except that it's not borne out by evidence. There were
| similar drops in other cities that didn't violate the civil
| rights of the citizens.
|
| And that's putting aside the question of whether it's right
| to deny people their rights in order to deter crime.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm of the impression that NYC experienced steeper
| decreases than other cities? I'll have to look into this
| more. Do you have any resources to recommend? (thank you
| for distinguishing between "did it work" and "was it
| ethical"--it's so tedious when these are conflated).
| eanzenberg wrote:
| It's a challenging problem, but the way things are
| currently going, do you want a 70's NYC in 2020+?
| sambull wrote:
| We only use lead in aviation fuels now.. so probably not.
| kortilla wrote:
| In case anyone misses this reference, there is a claim
| that the cause of all of the violence was exposure to
| lead on a society wide scale.
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-
| exposur...
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Which other cities are you referring to in particular?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Literally every city in America, regardless of their
| approach to policing, has experienced a massive drop in
| crime rates from 1990 forward. This tends to undermine
| arguments that broken windows or stop-and-frisk are
| effective policies.
|
| https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/
| erichocean wrote:
| > _Literally every city in America, regardless of their
| approach to policing, has experienced a massive drop in
| crime rates from 1990 forward._
|
| I've never heard of anyone arguing that policing did not
| increase nationwide in the 90s. All of the data we have
| suggests otherwise, and pushing back on that is basically
| the entire point of the recent BLM protests.
|
| One simple way we know crime was more aggressively
| enforced in EVERY city beginning in the early 90s is
| because so many more people were locked up during that
| time period (just review the incarceration rates).
| jeffbee wrote:
| I'm not sure that your conclusion of universality can be
| supported by the evidence. For example Middlesex County,
| Massachusetts has had roughly flat incarceration rate for
| decades.
|
| https://github.com/vera-institute/incarceration_trends
| erichocean wrote:
| The _median_ household income in Middlesex is over $100K
| (that 's where Harvard is located, right next to MIT).
| Incarcerations were also flat in Martha's Vineyard, but
| so what?
|
| My priors say Middlesex wouldn't show increased rates of
| incarceration regardless of the amount of policing, the
| passage of three-strikes laws, the passage of the Clinton
| crime bill, etc. due to the demographics of the area.
| What do your prior's say?
|
| Universality (to me) means "more criminals were
| incarcerated everywhere we expected them to be (based on
| demographics) and regardless of changes in local policies
| or funding, because there was a nationwide push to
| increase incarceration rates in the 90s." Do you mean
| something else by "universality"? Maybe we just disagree
| over definitions or something.
| jeffbee wrote:
| And yet, the crime rate in that county (and in Cambridge
| and Lowell) reflects the same plunging nature as the rest
| of the state and nation, since 1990 peak.
|
| Take the big CSV from the github I posted, combine it
| with the FBI UCR data, and try to find a correlation
| between incarceration rate and crime rate.
| erichocean wrote:
| I have, it's the main topic I study. I've just never met
| anyone with the view that increased incarcerations rates
| are not associated with decreases in crime (specifically,
| violent crime), and I don't think the data supports that
| either. I literally have no idea how you came to that
| conclusion given the stats available to researchers over
| the last 40 years.
|
| I'm not suggesting that there aren't _other_ ways to
| decrease crime besides incarceration, there are many
| possibilities. But I don 't think there's any data
| showing that incarcerating criminals doesn't reduce
| (violent) crime.
|
| So I'll just assume we agree in general, and that our
| definitions are different somehow, since we seem to be
| looking at the same datasets.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's clear that incarceration rates are associated with
| falling violent crime, to the extent that one went up and
| the other went down, but the existence of large
| jurisdictions that enjoyed the latter without the former
| casts doubt on the idea of causation.
| wanderr wrote:
| I was under the impression that this is more likely related
| to the reduction in lead in the air. At first glance that
| seems plausible. See murders by year[1] and the presence of
| lead[2], the timelines seem to match.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#Mu
| rders...
|
| [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-
| lead-c...
| cosmodisk wrote:
| To some degree. Compare London and Paris: both large,
| multicultural cities.In Paris, the separation between rich
| and poor is very clear when it comes to housing location.In
| London, social housing is often buit even in very expensive
| areas. London doesn't have no go zones, however,
| large,purpose built social housing estates sometimes become
| 'city within the city' and the bigger the estate,the bigger
| the problems.
| david422 wrote:
| I believe Freakonomics ascribed this to abortion- an
| unwanted generation of people that never were, and
| subsequently a drop in crime.
| mtgp1000 wrote:
| Crime is a function of far more than just income inequality.
| If you perform your regressions on this single variable and
| then attempt to extrapolate those results to make policy,
| you're going to end up spending a lot of money without
| solving anything. Worse is that you'll potentially put
| millions of lives at risk.
|
| If we want to solve problems in society we must be prepared
| to acknowledge all of their potential causes.
|
| I have spent my entire adult life, some 15 years, in pursuit
| of objective inquiry and this is a hill that I am willing to
| die on, or be martyred when it inevitably costs me my job.
| clawedjird wrote:
| I don't think many people are arguing that income
| inequality is the only variable in the crime equation. What
| factors do you think are generally underemphasized today?
| cameronh90 wrote:
| While this is absolutely true, I'm not sure it's a reasonable
| argument for defunding the police today. You wouldn't defund
| the fire department today, because in ten years buildings
| will average a better standard. The social issues need to be
| dealt with first, which could take some years.
|
| On the other hand, that the police have become what appears
| to be a poorly trained, violent militia is indeed a problem
| that should be dealt with today. Perhaps by defunding. I
| don't know...
| baddox wrote:
| If fire departments were carrying out the same injustices
| as police, then it would be pretty reasonable to push for
| the same massive changes in fire departments.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Of course there needs to be massive changes in the
| police, I'm just not sure the GP's argument justifies it.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| This is not an "honest question". It's an intentional attempt
| to give equal weight to a fundamentally racist hypothesis to
| its alternatives.
|
| If you want to posit that low-income, black communities are
| inherently violent and need violence to keep them in line then
| at least don't be coward with your views.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The answer, in general (and this is a bad place to generalize
| because it really varies from place-to-place), is "yes."
|
| The correlation between poverty and higher crime is real, and
| the police find more crime in places they're looking than in
| places they don't.
| chippy wrote:
| its an honest question but it is not possible to give an honest
| answer currently.
| joshgel wrote:
| I'm trying to learn more about this. What I am reading suggests
| this is the wrong frame. What if all the money spent over-
| policing these neighborhoods was instead spent on social
| services to support the people living there? Would that
| decrease the crime rate more or less than the policing?
|
| I'm not sure, but I'm becoming more convinced by this line of
| argument...
| alacombe wrote:
| Food for thought, more than 50% of the federal budget is
| already spent on social services.
| indigochill wrote:
| I'm curious what your source is for that, because that's
| pretty remarkable, especially given the outcry about out-
| of-control military spending.
| benjaminmarks wrote:
| Arbitrarily citing https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-
| budget/policy-basics-w...
|
| The bulk of social services spending is social security
| and medicare, which _each_ account for somewhere between
| 20-30% of federal spending. Military spending is closer
| to 15-20% of the federal budget
| brchr wrote:
| There are some semantic issues, e.g., the distinction
| between "mandatory" and "discretionary" expenditures, but
| the data is pretty easy to explore.
|
| Essentially you are "both right". > 50% of total spending
| is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Whether that
| is "social services" is another semantic question.
|
| And > 50% of the discretionary budget is defense.
|
| But have a look for yourself: e.g., https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Whether that is "social services" is another semantic
| question.
|
| This is puzzling to me. I don't think I've ever heard
| anyone argue that social security, medicare, and medicaid
| aren't social services. As far as I'm aware, everyone
| agrees that these are all social services. I would be
| curious to hear arguments for excluding it from the
| "social services" rubric.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Food for thought, that factoid doesn't say anything.
|
| For multiple reasons actually:
|
| From the fact that we could be spending any arbitrary
| percentage and it wouldn't mean it was enough...
|
| To the fact your 50% number doesn't map to 50% spent of the
| type of social services they meant. Just because it Social
| Security has the word social in it doesn't mean it's
| helping the way these social services would...
| jtolmar wrote:
| Police are funded by the municipal or county government,
| not the fed
| erichocean wrote:
| > _Police are funded by the municipal or county
| government, not the fed_
|
| It's not that black and white, because...
|
| Police _slush funds_ are funded (indirectly) by the
| federal government--drug search and seizures are passed
| off to the feds to prosecute (because many states have
| laws banning the practice), and the feds shares a portion
| of the value seized back with the local police
| department. Win-win.
| Loughla wrote:
| I need any legitimate citation for that.
| fastball wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budge
| t
| fastball wrote:
| I thought that this book[1] was an enlightening read into the
| topic.
|
| It outlined that the conventional thinking about crime falls
| into two broad categories: "heroes/villains" (there are bad
| people that just do bad and need to be stopped) vs.
| "victims/survivors" (criminals are effectively created by
| poor circumstances / just want to feed their families, etc).
|
| The author argues (with research to back it up) that the
| truth is neither / both / there are other factors at play, on
| of the more interesting factors just being "opportunity".
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Criminal-Truth-About-People-
| Things/...
| danans wrote:
| I don't think your comment should be downvoted (perhaps
| something about the book/author itself?). The
| heroes/villains trope has been heavily overplayed by US
| culture and before 2016, by politicians of all stripes.
|
| I've heard the police department captains in the area I
| live describe the scenario as a "war", "wolves and sheep",
| etc.
|
| That's not to say there aren't really heroic cops or that
| there aren't really bad criminals, either. But the idea
| that either of them exist and act independently from their
| surrounding context, whether that is a corrupt police union
| or an impoverished struggling community, is very
| shortsighted.
|
| If anything, that set of tropes needs to be taken down
| several notches, and the corruption and poverty/inequality
| need to be addressed directly. We've tried the approach of
| militarization of police and mass-imprisonment for non-
| violent offenses. It hasn't worked.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| This seems like a knee jerk reaction to the current political
| climate. "Predictive policing" has a scary sounding name but it
| is really just "efficient resource allocation". If there is a
| crime hotspot, shouldn't there be more police on hand to enforce
| the law there? Why have them idly patrol other areas? If someone
| has a history of crime and is being released, shouldn't they be
| monitored to ensure the public's safety, especially if there is a
| risk of recidivism?
|
| The line of thinking I find dangerous in the article is that
| differences in _outcomes_ are seen as racist. That doesn 't make
| sense to me. If more people of race X commit crimes, and more
| members of that race are therefore subjected to legal
| consequences, then that is not necessarily a racist situation. If
| race isn't an input factor into these algorithms, the algorithms
| are not racist.
| rickyplouis wrote:
| Thought it would be relevant but a few years back California was
| also in the news for building a gang database of children as
| young as one year old (for which they've since acknowledged as a
| mistake).
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calgang-california-gang-databas...
|
| The phrasing of "predictive policing" sounds fairly harmless, but
| in practice it is a way of finding out which kids are going to be
| future criminals, thus robbing them of their self-determination.
| tehjoker wrote:
| In practice, it's a method of entrenching racist practice.
| Certain groups are profiled and criminalized, and therefore
| have criminal records so more police are sent to predicted "hot
| zones" which results in a feedback loop.
|
| What is never said is that crimes are socially determined.
| Which is more harmful? Shoplifting by a poor person or wage
| theft by a business owner? Clearly the latter as an actual
| person who can't afford it is harmed. Wage theft is hugely more
| prevalent but is treated as a civil issue rather than a crime.
| Poor people trying to get one over on the system that
| impoverishes them lands them in jail while the people that own
| the society get away with doing whatever they want.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm just not sure this makes the point you think it does.
| There are certainly some who see crime as a morally neutral
| way to "get one over on the system that impoverishes them",
| but most people find this to be an abhorrent viewpoint and
| have no interest in accommodating it.
| tehjoker wrote:
| That's the viewpoint of someone that benefits from the
| system. Of course it's abhorrent if you think it works as
| its inimical to the functioning of the system.
| clawedjird wrote:
| _I'm not who you responded to, FYI._
|
| That said, crimes are simply whatever those in power deem
| them to be. Not only does this imply an obvious disconnect
| between legality and morality, but for groups not
| adequately represented by those in power, it can make
| living within the law virtually impossible. Take the gay
| community, for example. It was only in 2003 that the US
| Supreme Court struck down state laws banning sex between
| same-sex partners. At the time, 14 states still had such
| laws on the books - 11 _still_ do today (even though
| they're now unenforceable, they've resulted in multiple
| arrests since the 2003 ruling).
|
| A few decades earlier, gay sex was essentially illegal
| throughout the entire US. Do you have any interest in
| accommodating the viewpoint that gay Americans being gay
| Americans before the past 20-50 years (depending on the
| state they resides in) were morally acceptable, despite
| habitually engaging in criminal activity? Or would that be
| considered abhorrent?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I certainly am skeptical of the idea of victimless
| crimes, for the reasons you say. But theft isn't a
| victimless crime, even if you're stealing from a large
| corporation and not a mom-and-pop store. I think it's
| hard to seriously engage with the idea that theft might
| not be a bad thing.
| kortilla wrote:
| Wage theft is treated as a civil issue because it's not
| actually "theft" despite its name. It's not a business taking
| money away from someone, it's the business failing to pay
| money for a contractual obligation.
|
| Do you want a failure to pay your plumber to be prosecuted as
| theft?
| QuotedForTruth wrote:
| It already is. Its called theft of services. Never seen it
| applied to a conventional employee though, but why
| shouldn't it be?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services#:~:text=The
| f....
| zelly wrote:
| Living in a country with an inefficient police department is not
| fun. Ask anyone from you know who came from Cuba, Brazil,
| Honduras, Venezuela, or South Africa.
|
| Living in a country with an extremely efficient police department
| is not fun either. See: China and Singapore.
|
| There is a balance. Banning soulless social credit-tier stuff
| like this is a good step in the right direction. Another problem
| with stuff like "predictive policing" is that everyone knows a
| hypothetical 100% enforcement of the law would put almost
| everybody in prison; there are too many laws on the books in the
| USA. The first laws that come to mind are about the drug war.
| (Even cops are drug (steroid) addicts, so they themselves would
| go to prison too under 100% enforcement.) I don't use drugs, not
| even alcohol, but if someone thinks some white powder is going to
| make them happy or selling it would put food on the table then
| they should not be brutalized by the state for it.
|
| ML and mass surveillance is going to actually allow 100%
| enforcement of laws, so it's time to have this discussion and
| redo the criminal code.
| TimesOldRoman wrote:
| I'd be curious to see how the software accounts for a self-
| fulfilling prophecy of "you always find what you are looking
| for".
| chippy wrote:
| For policing if you are looking for "what areas have most
| violent street crime" - if for are actually looking for those
| areas to devote resources to and you use actual data, then you
| will devote resources to areas which suffer actual violent
| street crime.
|
| if instead of using actual data and finding what you are
| looking for - the alternative is using reports from the
| population (unless theres some other metric you would like to
| use? tweets?) And this means that richer and more privileged
| people will report more as they have 1) more confidence and
| trust in the police 2) more resources to lose from criminals
| 3)cultural reasons, and in their own areas which means that you
| will devote resources to areas which have the more reports and
| more attention from the police. This is basically how policing
| worked before 25 years ago.
|
| There is a very big, clear, and obvious reason why using data
| to base policing decisions on is better than using no data at
| all, especially as most people will think that the police has
| inherent biases. Data can remove biases
| jmpman wrote:
| Does this mean that the cops can't camp out in a bar's parking
| lot at 2am, watching drunks walk to their cars? Seems like
| they're predicting that bar parking lots routinely have drunk
| drivers at 2am....
|
| If a resident gets a drunk driving ticket due to the above
| strategy, can their conviction get dismissed because cops weren't
| patrolling using a Cryptographically secure random number
| generator?
|
| Please let me know when a lawyer first uses that defense. Always
| looking for a good laugh.
| Havoc wrote:
| >to send officers to target chronic offenders, or identifying
| places where crime may occur.
|
| Those are two very different things in my mind.
|
| Targeting individuals is very Minority Report and definitely not
| cool.
|
| Focusing on problematic areas seems like good policing common
| sense though? A bit like the local nightclub near me has a police
| car chilling in front of it every Friday night because there are
| always drunks slugging it out.
| QuotedForTruth wrote:
| Are they actually focusing on problematic areas or just areas
| that they previously focused on? Wherever the most police
| resources are spent, you will have the most crime. That then
| justifies spending more resources there. The algorithm may not
| be racist, but it is guaranteed to perpetuate our objectively
| racist policing of the past.
| sfj wrote:
| > The algorithm may not be racist, but it is guaranteed to
| perpetuate our objectively racist policing of the past.
|
| Depends on how the algorithm is formulated. If it's based on
| number of crimes found, _by policeman_ , by hour, then this
| would eliminate that concern (vs just number of crimes per
| hour).
| seaish wrote:
| They usually use past crime to determine the problematic areas,
| and this past crime is a source of bias. If there's any sort of
| racism in the system, problematic areas will turn into areas of
| specific race. Races and especially income levels aren't spread
| evenly across Santa Cruz or any city.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| If cars are being broken into on a specific block at a rate
| higher than average for a precinct are you suggesting that it
| is 'bias' to focus resources onto that block?
|
| Or are you referring to places where formerly
| charged/convicted persons live/hang out? Here I'd agree,
| punishment should end at the end of the sentence/fine and
| people deserve the benefit of the doubt/presumption of non-
| recidivism.
|
| I'd also posit that many problematic areas _are_ areas of a
| specific race and caution that a policy of under-policing
| these areas to avoid appearing racist will be disastrous to
| public safety and order.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Drug use is consistently found to be about equal between
| White and Black Americans, or higher among White Americans.
| Yet arrests and sentences for drug use are far more
| frequent for Black Americans than for White Americans,
| presumably because higher policing.
|
| Wherever you drive in America you will find drug abuse. But
| if you focus on any one area that leads to more arrests
| there, increasing their crime stats, leading to more
| policing, leading to more drug arrests, ...
|
| https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_an
| d...
| ReptileMan wrote:
| It is complicated at best.
|
| I think that in most jurisdictions seriously planing a crime is
| a crime in itself.
|
| >A bit like the local nightclub near me has a police car
| chilling in front of it every Friday night because there are
| always drunks slugging it out.
|
| And what happens when said policemen block the entrance of the
| club and start patting down everyone leaving for pico or weed?
|
| A police presence can calm down an area, but also can be used
| to harass the population there.
|
| Rules of engagement matter.
| Havoc wrote:
| >what happens when said policemen block the entrance of the
| club
|
| Why on earth would they do that?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| I have no idea, but some people are worried about that kind
| of behavior.
| linuxftw wrote:
| The system is truly evil. There are so many non crimes that are
| enforced, then in the process of enforcement, the police escalate
| situations. Drinking a cold beer in public on a hot day? That's
| illegal. So, they're going to reach out and grab your arm, you
| reflexively pull away. Okay, now you just assaulted a police
| officer. That's your 3rd felony charge, life's over for you.
|
| Using software to find easy targets like this, it's despicable.
| pootpucker wrote:
| Claims in article are contradictory to the real life use cases of
| facial recognition tech, see: "The Best Algorithms Struggle to
| Recognize Black Faces Equally":
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni...
|
| In reference to: "Understanding how predictive policing and
| facial recognition can be disportionately biased against people
| of color, we officially banned the use of these technologies in
| the city of Santa Cruz," Mayor Justin Cummings said on Wednesday.
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