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.
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.
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.
And what are the victims of violent crimes in those neighborhood do in the interim between the take resources from the already strained police departments and use them other for long-term measures? And I'm even assuming they even would have worthwhile results of course despite the premise that such programs would work is given in a matter of factly manner.
Put yourself in the shoes of an innocent PoC who's house just got robbed. Will not having cops available to your neighborhood to respond to the call make you feel more or less prejudiced against?
Will they derive that much comfort in knowing that maybe, in one or two generations thing MIGHT be slightly less bad.
And will the criminal elements, seeing the lowering in police response, not grow more bold and escalate?
People saying “defund the police” are not advocating the complete elimination of police forces; they’re advocating for the elimination of the 75-90% of things that police spend their time on that has zero or negative ROI for society. “Responding to legitimate crimes” is not one of those things.
Imagine arguing for a better world, instead of arguing about what your slogan means. You might be able to secure majority support for your policy proposal, instead of... checks YouGov poll again... 16% support, for the phrase "defund the police".
It’s also a nascent movement so it’s not surprising that many people don’t understand it. There are many successful policies that began with very low public support.
Yeah but the policy proposals spelled out earn actual majority support in polls, instead of tiny-minority support. It's a terrible self-defeating name/slogan.
I'm sorry but I find this kind of nitpicking in bad form. People are going out and taking action to bring attention to a problem in what is obviously the best way they can do so. If you have an idea about improving marketing, why not spend that energy helping/proposing something and volunteering?
Aside from that, I think there is more to consider than just what will appeal to public opinion; dry attempts to shift one’s words to match opinion polls is how many politicians lose elections by coming off as pandering. There is a sense of urgency and emotion in the original phrase that might be important in the broader picture and in the long term.
This solution urgently needs to be considered by San Francisco; the housing shortage will be immediately reversed and ASP will plummet, allowing POCs to populate the area, creating racial justice. https://www.zillow.com/minneapolis-mn/
> People saying “defund the police” are not advocating the complete elimination of police forces
And Minneapolis is absolutely not completely eliminating their police force.
Minneapolis council member Phillipe Cunningham said [1]:
> ”This isn't like, tomorrow we're not going to have a police department and we're going to have this huge gap," he said. "There will be intentional transition and investments and policies. I just want to make sure folks understand that there's not going to be suddenly no one to call when they need help.“
Councilman Jeremiah Ellison said [2]:
> “I don’t want there to be this confusion of just, that there’s going to be nobody doing anything, that there’s gonna be nobody solving murders. No,” Ellison said. “We’re going to absolutely make sure there are systems in place to address an active shooter situation, for example.”
In the link you just provided:
> Councilman Jeremiah Ellison, who represents North Minneapolis, said he would not frame what the Council was doing as defunding the police, but rather as “funding a different safety strategy.”
What concerns me is there are many people who are implying (if not outright saying) that people don’t want safety. And frankly that’s just silly. Every proposal I’ve seen has had community safety at its forefront. And a gradual shifting of funds towards alternatives to our (USians) current version of police does not mean that communities suddenly don’t value safety and stability.
Either way, Minneapolis is absolutely not going to eliminate their police departments, no matter how panicky certain news orgs try to make people. They’re going to actually, over time, dismantle their current clusterfuck which makes communities’ quality of life terrible, and actually implement real changes. What does this look like? We don’t know yet, but at least they’re doing more than empty platitudes. They readily say “We’re going to make mistakes along the way.” but at least they’re finally actually addressing the situation and willing to do the work.
This is from Obama's town hall on June 3rd. The speaker is on the city council in Minneapolis, which seems to be leading the charge on this issue.
*This isn't an example of an area that is actively dismantling their police force. But this person's view is that the target should be no police at all, not reduced police responsibilities.
Police should solve crime. Instead they are put in charge of everything that is not their job since there is no funding for mental health services, homeless, etc. etc.
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.
One starting observation I'd venture is those countries (and Canada) base their policing on Peelian principles, which establish a basis of policing and the relationship with the public. The US police culture had different roots.
Edit: for reference, the list of principles that were issued to each new police officer in London from 1829 onward.
1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions
3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public
4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force
5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by pandering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law
6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient
7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence
8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it
I find much wisdom there, and as I go down that list I find it hard not to think for each item of counter-anecdotes from the news about US policing in recent years.
The problem is that these principles work great in a homogeneous society where everyone has some kind of stake in the societal outcome. If you take people with a particular skin color and enslave them and otherwise systematically discriminate against them to varying degrees over the course of 400 years then these principles break down. It is going to take a long, long time -- probably multiple generations -- for American society to recover from 400 years of institutionalized racism.
The reality is that US police kill all races at shockingly high rates. Black people are killed at a higher rate, but they are a minority of those killed. The problem of the US police system is excessive use of force against all races, compounded by racism.
Take the UK for example. The UK also has a history of importing slaves, it also has minorities living in poor neighborhoods, it has a similar degree of income inequality as the US, but the rate at which UK police kill civilians is orders of magnitude lower. The UK has as many police killings in a quarter century as the US has in a month, despite having a fifth of the population.
The US police system’s approach seems to be to fight fire with fire, not prevent the fires in the first place. Hence the call to defund the police and invest in prevention. But I think defunding is only part, the police need to be retrained to prevent and deescalate, not to respond to all resistance with deadly force.
I think the problem starts long before the deadly force. It's not just the rate at which black people are killed, it's the rate at which they are harassed for minor offenses like jaywalking.
The UK isn’t a homogenous society like that and it also has hundreds of years of institutionalised racism to deal with. So I’m not sure that can be a reason why these principles wouldn’t work in the US.
Just to clarify: Canada could hardly be less homogenous and it works here. We call it a “cultural mosaic.” We even have a whole French province that demands special rules. We make it work... mostly alright. Our indigenous people’s are coming out of a few centuries of rough treatment though and there is a large and public reconciliation effort being made by the government and by many institutions. Hopefully the future will be better in that area
Dude you have it backwards because the police in the US historically functioned to support slavery.
I bet you didn’t intend it to be but your argument basically blames the victim, when it’s the oppressor who is guilty of a crime - not the oppressed.
It’s the fault of the oppressor for oppressing, that is the blocker to progress, not the response of the oppressed.
The police are what need to change because they were and are a core part of the problem.
Your other points may also have relevance, but are irrelevant until the root cause - which I describe above - is addressed.
If your point was that because of America’s history of racial violence and terror, we need to defund (as opposed to reform with Peelian principles) the police since they were a key component of that system, or something along those lines, then please forgive my mis-understanding :).
The guy was quite down on his time in Australia, and the aggressive policing he was expected to do. He contrasted that with his time in the UK and (particularly) in NZ the role seemed to allow more tolerance and leeway and was described by him as 'progressive'. The NZ police aim seemed to be to get compliance without police charges or fines by engaging in a less combative manner.
He described quite harsh measures taken for minor disruptive behaviour and property damage (eg graffiti) in Australia.
He had a low opinion of the way children were managed in all three countries. Police had little option but to lock young kids in cells when found out and about late at night in NZ. He had previously had the ability to get social services in the UK could house a child for a night. This was theoretically available in NZ, but never was in practice. So when they found a kid out in the small hours, if they couldn't find their caregivers, the kid had to go to a cell.
He was very down about this.
I left with the distinct impression that in order of severity of policing (for want of a better term) it went from a relatively relaxed and easy going NZ to UK then a quite severe and punitive Australia.
It would be interesting to know if this is borne out by others impressions/data.
Aside from a notable exception in the Australian Capital, it's worth noting that in Australia you have the Federal Police (AFP) which is responsible for policing federal offences, but the states are responsible for enactment and policing of most things that Americans would consider "everyday policing".
The main issue this represents in your story is that it's not correct for the most part to present an "Australian experience" of policing, as the laws and enforcement are state level matters (of which there are ~8). A level i think we're missing might be city-based law enforcement? Each state has its own laws, population, and police force. while it's true we're not going to have as much variation as say France vs Sierra Leone, policing in QLD/ACT/NSW/NT/VIC is liable to be fundamentally different. furthermore, we've got federal gun control, and in a federal welfare system that would almost look like a universal income to many American contexts (indeed, I recall one discussion I had recently with an online friend about where the UBI rates being discussed as impossible were effectively the ones our welfare system currently provides), notwithstanding the difference in practice between remote indigenous/rural/urban/ migrant law enforcement.
All this can make it somewhat frustrating drawing analogies between the American experience and the local one (and I'm not just talking about Americans drawing lessons from ours, I also mean Australians being influenced by portrayals of American law enforcement and issues in popular media/culture). I imagine that's just as frustrating as pretending that law enforcement is the same across a nation as diverse as America.
The officer had worked in Queensland, but I don’t know what branch or department. I hadn’t considered the various branches that they have. I also wouldn’t be considering his views (via me) as anything other than a possibly interesting anecdote.
So for those wanting to know a bit more context (I'm genuinely bemused that someone can get downvoted on HN for provided factual context that's relevant for comparing the various police systems, but whatever...), Queensland is a primarily tropical/humid-subtropical/semi-arid state marginally bigger than Alaska and ~three times the size of Texas. Its held to be "relatively conservative" (the most conservative by some, holding some 7 of the 10 most right-wing electorates in the country at last election) by Australian standards, and is weird from a demographics point of view because its a state (possibly the only one?) in Australia where the majority of the population lives outside of the metro capital city area, and from a politics point of view its remarkable because its the only unicameral state parliamentary system in the Australian federation.
The state had 32 years of unbroken rule by the national party of Australia, which ended, not coincidentally to the end of the rule or this topic, after an inquiry into police corruption at the end of the 80's. It is also no coincidence that the state was the founding site of Australia's one nation party. As you move further north you begin to have more isolation and contact with indigenous communities, but its also a diverse and complex state, hosting both the brisbane/gold-coast and cairns areas, hubs of tourism that ferment more "liberal-eco" attitudes in contrast to some of the rural/farming/conservative bents. There is a significant military/mining presence in the north, as well as a significant retiree community/attraction because of the climate/weather.
I'm trying to describe it as objectively as I can. Its also stunningly beautiful and I grew up there :P I'd joke and say to my american readers, it would be like using florida/texas/alabama/bahamas/california as representative of the practices of US policing, but that is an honestly terrible analogy.
NZ police hiring process is pretty selective. They encourage you to have a higher learning degree to fallback on if you get taken out physically. On top of that they select for personality traits and culture fit so they end up with quite a homogeneous group of people. (And no, that does not mean all white..)
My run ins with them are generally pretty decent, mj isnt legal in nz but if they catch you they're generally more annoyed youre not doing it at home. Because then they have to write you up.
Australian police are much more americanized, theyre far more interested in catching people out with sniffer dogs at train stations and the like. NZ you dont see this sort of thing because criminalizing drugs is well proven to be ineffective.
I would say the major difference is that nz cops arent armed by default. Their guns are locked in the boot of their car and takes some serious circumstances to get them drawn.
America it seems like all you need is a traffic stop at night.
I"ve lived in all 3 of those countries (although have never worked for the police). My experience is just as your friend describes.
The cops in Oz are truly awful! There was a recent scandal where cops were strip-searching teenage girls just for fun. Cops there will also spend more time fining people on bicycles that don't have a bell, than they would in any important crimes.
It differs a bit by state. Apparently NSW and Vic have it worst, although QLD is right up there. Of course in the nation's capital, Canberra, they have the soft ones.
The biggest reason why people join gangs is because they're there. It's a cultural problem above all else.
People like blaming it on poverty and lack of education funding and all kinds of other things. Yet compare former Soviet countries to the US. All of them spend less on education than the US does. Their populations are likely poorer than even the poor in the US. Their quality of life is lower, however, gangs aren't as big of an issue because they're not allowed to fester. The culture doesn't view gangs as something to aspire to. Being part of a gang isn't seen as "cool" by large groups of people nor is failing in education.
I do agree that a lack of education and subsequent opportunities is a large part of the problem, but it's probably not a lack of education funding that's causing it. Learning simply isn't considered "cool" by a lot of people. This puts them on a path with few opportunities, which leads to their kids having fewer opportunities.
What makes all of this even worse is that prisons in the US are breeding grounds for gangs. As long as things like that remain a part of society you won't be getting rid of gangs no matter how much money you throw at education.
While I acknowledge this (especially your last observation regarding the shameful state of U.S. prisons), and laugh at the ignorance of the claim that E.E. street gangs not having had easy access to firearms (they very much had, especially post-Yugoslav Wars), I still think that less policing has the potential to improve things.
Harsh policing would not change culture, even if it was done fairly, in the interest of community welfare. But U.S. policing is far from fair: U.S. police instill fear, rather than respect in the public, even in many moderately well-off areas that are free of street gangs. Legal and regulated prostitution, a definitive end to the drug war, would allow us to significantly defund the police, and pour those into efforts that could actually help. Moreover, this would decimate the revenue streams of many street gangs, which immediately reduces their "coolness factor".
There is some concern that most of the money freed up by this could end up poured into efforts that have a track record of not working. Alas, I think this is fairly likely, but it's no big loss: currently, all of that same money is being poured into different efforts that still definitely do not work. And if we get lucky, a fraction of the money may actually go to efforts that actually have a positive impact on cultural problems.
At least in Russia law enforcement and organized crime are fully integrated. People join police instead of gangs if the want to get into extortion and racket. When clans clash, you can see rooms full of money in a colonel’s house that would put a drug lord to shame. And prison culture might be getting less popular, but it still has a strong presence.
Ex soviet block street gangs dont have easy access to firearms. Yes real organized crime have all the cool toys but general street hustling punks not as much. Not so in the us
> The biggest reason why people join gangs is because they're there. It's a cultural problem above all else.
I'm going to challenge you to find a citation to back up this belief before you continue going through life believing it, because it's a dangerous one, rooted in ignorance, that causes racism.
to say that the reason people join gangs is cultural implies that it's a "bad culture" problem. the reality of why people join gangs is more complicated and includes overpolicing, economic deprivation, legacies of slavery and racism, and other factors. but if we say "it's just their culture" then we commit a fallacy that leads us to say "black people are doing this to themselves because of their bad qualities X,Y,Z", and we may also end up saying "black people are poor and disenfranchised for the same bad culture problems as lead them to form gangs". this is a classic fallacy, throughout human history, in which oppressed groups of people have their character impugned based on ignorant readings of the ways that they cope with and adapt to their situation, and thus are blamed for their own oppression
There is short term and long term crime prevention. Long term, you are absolutely, 100% right about how to decrease crime. In the short term though, it would be nice if my friends bikes would stop getting stolen and if aggressive drunk people on the local train couldn’t steal someone’s hat and then ask everyone on board “you gonna do something about it?” (neither are gang issues, I wanted to choose non-extreme but real examples).
Ideally we could spend 100% on the long term but that is impractical.
I don't think you can safely infer that absolute ("only") from the parent comment. Nevertheless...
1. Police are often a large percentage of a city budget, so if all city expenditures were decreased equally, it would inevitably look like the police were giving up more in absolute terms.
2. If the current solution to the problem is only more policing, then the only thing in the "solution to this problem" sub-budget that could be reduced is the police. In other words if X is the amount allocated to the problem and X is currently 100% police, it may be worth rebalancing X to a more diversified portfolio.
1. That's the only thing they suggested, and they framed it as either/or "If you have infinite funding, you can do both." (Implies we cant do both, because we obviously dont have infinite funding)
2. The overarching context of this conversation is about "defunding the police"
>If the current solution to the problem is only more policing
Is anyone seriously suggesting that? If so, its safe to discount these types of facile absolutist views ("we need more police to solve the problem" & "We need to eliminate the police to solve the problem")
Edit: I'd like to add thay I jusy reviewed my cities budget, and was surprised to see how large the law enforcement budget was compared to everything else. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
Police spending is inadequately large because the threat of a police walk-out scares city governments than the threat of any other department striking.
Most of our money doesn’t go to police. A search online reveals that in 2019 the US spent $300 billion on protection and security, which is police, fire department, and other related services. We spent $1.2 trillion on education.
> 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.
This may be utopian and fails the "perfect is the enemy of good" maxim. Meanwhile entire neighbourhoods if not cities (and sometimes entire countries) are anti-social, where the average resident has to suffer through a constant threat of violence.
What I think society needs is an rspec of government spending (I'm using rspec as it is clear, or should be, what that implies). Test driven government, in essence.
Society is varied across county, city, state and country lines, and we are in our infancy in understanding what policies work, when, where and why. Combine that with no overt expected outcome, i.e. do we expect this policy to have an absolute outcome (assert(absolute_wealth > X)) or if we want a comparative outcome (assert(relative_income > 0.77)), and we end up with arguments about spending that are judged by rhetoric rather than success or failure on what should be a knowable scale.
Being more overt in how society judges government spending, especially when the goal is a social good, gives us the best shot at spending more on effective interventions, and less on ineffective ones. I think it also helps mitigate the circus nature of politics, where politicians gain kudos simply for with their spending decisions, and are rarely held accountable to actual outcomes. Like TDD, it would by no means be a panacea, but it would be a step in the right direction.
While it true that a policy can be fantastic for society, but exacerbate inequalities (i.e. get better at extracted value from smart people), or be terrible for society but reduce inequality (just make sure everyone has nothing and job done), if we at least tested the policy along some overt lines, and threw out the very worst policies, I can't imagine social spending would have worse outcomes, if only until the loopholes are worked out.
One of the reasons is: They can't trust the police to come out and take the people who cause trouble out.
Neighbourhood gangs, esp in chicago are territorial and they try to "protect the neighbourhoods." (I think they do cause more problems) This came up during the riots earlier this month. The police were stretched way too thin. Gangs did stop the looters and rioters from extending into their neighbourhoods. (Deeper within Logan Square and Little Village were an example)
> 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".
The conversations aren't about less police, they're about defunding the police and putting that money to better use. If the police choose to reduce their numbers in order to afford riot gear, tear gas guns, armored personnel carriers, warrior training, and all the other BS well then there won't be armies of them assaulting the public.
> 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.
Throwing police at the problem of gang violence hasn't solved it. It hasn't made the neighborhoods safer. If overwhelming violence quelled violence, why has the Taliban outlasted two first world armies back by trillions of dollars?
> Throwing police at the problem of gang violence hasn't solved it. It hasn't made the neighborhoods safer.
That is not true. We have solid data from New York during the Giuliani era and more recently Camden, NJ. Whether or not we agree with how they accomplished that is another matter.
For example in New York a massive increase in arrests for nonviolent crime and much more proactively policing in order to check for warrants etc.
The truth is that nothing works in isolation. In New York we also saw a migration of younger professionals back into the city which reduced crime by forcing out poorer residents via gentrification.
The reality is that in any nation with a high prevalence of gun ownership combined with a large portion of the population without enough to provide for themselves and often, due to criminal records, no other choice but to commit crimes to provide for themselves.
People keep referring to the NY Giuliani era, but I think it's time to read Freakonomics and discover the true reason of the crime decreasing and it was definitely NOT Guiiliani's master-skills in public administration. Whatever grace he ever had, he lost it when he showed the world his true colours recently.
Some of the reduction on crime may have come at the cost of racially biased stop and frisk.
This data shows 9 out of 10 people stopped were innocent. It also heavily showed that black and latino people were stopped much more frequently.
https://www.nyclu.org/en/Stop-and-Frisk-data
How stop and frisk was used in the Guiliani era was a lot different than the Bloomberg era. The practice went to court early on and was found constitutional. During Bloomberg’s stint it was expanded dramatically and that’s when it went back to court and was declared unlawful.
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.
> > 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.
Are you trying to suggest that there are a large number of unreported, undiscovered murders in more affluent areas? Because that's one of the the kinds of violent crime that we're pretty sure happen disproportionately in poor or black communities. (you're more likely to be murdered if you're poor, and more likely to be murdered if you're black, with IIRC the richest 20% of blacks still being murdered more often than the poorest 20% of non-hispanic whites)
> Are you trying to suggest that there are a large number of unreported, undiscovered murders in more affluent areas?
No. I didn't mention murders - is there a reason you're focused on them?
I'm saying that the same forces the put poor communities of color at risk for crime also likely disrupt the collection of statistics in more wealthy & powerful communities. This is important because both sides of the ratio matter. I believe there's more crime in vulnerable communities and I believe that we likely over-estimate how much more. This generates statistics that support the over-policing of poor communities.
That makes sense, but that's also why I pulled out the absolutest statement about all violent crime.
I agree that murder is one of the crimes least likely to go unreported, but they are still subject to the same pressures (even if those pressures are less efficacious). I'd be interested to see, for instance, if the ratio of murders to missing people changes as you move up the socioeconomic ladder.
But there's another ratio - violent crimes per murder. If there's 100 assaults for every murder in wealthy white communities, and 100 assaults for every murder in poor black communities, that ALSO tells us something.
Murders are harder to skew. That means that you should focus MORE on those statistics, not less.
I agree, but I don't think the answer is pull the police out of predominantly black neighborhoods, which seems to be the motivation for shutting this program down.
Better training, more black officers, more rules around the use of force seem like better options. Of course, I don't really know what the people in these neighborhoods want so I am open to some alternatives, but ranting about predictive policing doesn't seem to solve much unless the answer really is defund the police.
I believe in positive reinforcement. As far as I know there are already more black people in the police squads in black neighbourhoods, but it can't hurt to get more in, especially in exposed areas. I don't believe in responding to higher crime rates with less police, however. The only alternative to that, is vigilantism. That will only lead to people buying weapons for personal protection, which will again only lead to more violence... On top of that, the violence due to "self protection" often takes the form of pure vengeance, and thus it is far more often illegitimate. People claim that more guns make people more polite, but why are there also more violence in gang neighbourhoods then? From my own culture, blood vengeance was for a time a necessary part of life due to the complete lack of law enforcement. It doesn't mean that life was "better" in any shape or form in the viking age, however. Far from it! Nay, it was with the advent of well organized local militias and police forces that my society became safe.
I think the answer is to filter police who may have tendency to violence and racism out of the police force. There have been police who violate rights and the police departments keep them on even after the department or city pays huge settlements.
From my understanding police are able to leave departments and not necessarily have their complaint history follow them to new departments. So if they have racked up complaints then they could move to a new department and essentially have a clean record.
> No, you never can with absolutely certainty, the question is how you distribute the costs of uncertainty. Leading with paramilitary enforcers in nearly all situations has consequences that people are not happy with, hence the defund/dismantle/abolish movement.
> The police are expected to deal with a whole community in a holistic way.
Which they manifestly fail to do effectively, for structural reasons. A paramilitary force with minimal entry education requirements whose training disproportionately focuses on the proper use of force to secure compliance is not a good general purpose community response tool.
since when do they use paramilitary forces "in nearly all situations" ? I think you're jumping the gun a bit on that statement.
The problem is that supposedly non-violent situations can turn violent or threatening very quickly. So, all officers need to be trained in use of force.
"Over 8,000 law enforcement agencies have utilized the 1033 program to access more than $6 billion worth of military equipment such as night-vision goggles, machine guns, armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, and military aircraft ...
... One study found that use of paramilitary-style teams by law enforcement increased by more than 1,400 percent since 1980."
Or, just apply your eyes and look at the photos of St. Louis police with sniper rifles trained on crowds of people during the Ferguson protests. One is here:
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.
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.
It would be perfectly possible to have people who are trained to preserve evidence who are not also traditional police. E.g. a medical examiner of some kind. You want someone to work with traumatized victims delicately, and a uniformed cop with a sidearm is not the ideal presence in that case. I don't want to get into suspect present/absent/whatever; but this type of crime isn't necessarily done by a random stranger in every case.
This hypothetical trained medical examiner won't be wearing a uniform? Seems like a uniform might be a good idea.
As to a sidearm – if I'd just been raped, someone showing up to protect me with a sidearm sounds like just the ticket.
Not sure what you are saying about a suspect not being a random stranger, that doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether or not the suspect is still there.
I'd love to hear from the folks who downvoted this, so I could improve this comment. Because there's a lot of empirical evidence that police departments (and our court system, to be fair - it's a social issue) historically have not handled rape cases well.
So, I'm all for reasonable discussion and receiving feedback about what was unclear or counterproductive in what I said.
But, I encourage future readers to take silence as a sign that people really didn't have any facts or logic to back up their side of the argument ; ).
Even though that might be a bit unfair, since it's not as if everyone is on here all the time.
But I think it's important for technologists - scientists, engineers, etc - to embrace their role in society at large and the power we have.
And part of that involves discussing social issues, as frustrating as some of us might find discussing these non-quantifiable fields.
Hey, it can't be worse than having to talk about the latest hot new addition to the JS ecosystem ;)
I agree for the mental health checks that there should be someone trained in mental health present, but you also need police present just in case the mentally ill person because combative, funding shouldn't be reduced, perhaps it should be increased to train police in handling the mentally ill or the police force should have professionals on the clock.
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?
In 2019, eight people were killed and 43 were injured in 25 school shooting incidents.
2018 was much worse with 37 kids killed in school shootings.
This is roughly the same as the number of unarmed black people shot and killed by police in the line of duty (at least this number has been trending downward for several years).
I agree, there's no standard definition. I grabbed the 8 / 43 number for 2019 here [1]. I see they have similar numebers as what I found for 2018 as well [2].
The 2018 numbers I was referencing was from this 10 year overview [3].
> 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.
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.
Because the cop showing up doesn't know before hand whether or not the motorist have a gun. There's a lot of other things they don't know. The person could be a drug/human trafficker, or have a warrant out for him. In which case, they are armed.
Domestic issues are often met with social workers where I'm from. They gain early detection and access, by registering and treating social issues such as poverty, health or mental related issues. A lot of people then have their lives changed for the better, so they never fall into crime. On a whole, this is good for society, since it gets the benefit of less crime and violence, and so society becomes safer. On top of that, our police is trained in peacefully settling most disputes, though they of course retain the monopoly on violence if need be.
It's Norway, though many European countries have similar policies. It's not cool to be met with social workers, though. It means you've basically failed at life.
> This is particularly problematic when it comes to arrests for crimes that are inherently 'selective' in their enforcement
All crimes are selective in enforcement; reporting, police response, and prosecution all, for all crimes, have both unintentional biases and deliberate prioritization and acts of discretion involved.
> 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".
Well, worrying to people who are invested in the biases of the present law enforcement structure, and who perceive it as working well for their interests.
> 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.
And yet they are where the movement is strongest.
> They face the very real threat of themselves or their loved ones being shot on the streets and statistically not by police.
And, even then, the police don't care, don't help, further traumatize the victims when thet get involved in crime in those neighborhoods at all, and still drain resources that could be used to deal with the problems producing crime out of the community via their voracious appetite for funding.
It seems like you’re just making sweeping generalizations in an effort to do ideological battle.
I think people in crime-ridden areas are generally very interested in seeing greater police presence, not less. [1] Studies have shown a larger police presence results in lower arrest rates and lower use of force.
And in the vast majority of cases where police are called to a scene they do in fact care deeply, and help effectively.
I think it’s easy to get caught up in tempest and start blaming a large group for the actions of a small minority. I’m no expert, but my understanding is we’ve done decades of studies and had decades of progress toward reducing violent crime, and increased funding for police has been a main pillar of that effort. Obama’s efforts to provide billions of dollars of police funding, for example, saw decreases in crime rates for cities that received the funding versus increases in cities that missed out.
I question your assertion that police are necessary to reduce violent crime. I’m sharing one reason below. Another is that the police have an atrocious record when it comes to dealing with one of the most violent crimes short of murder, which is rape.
“The Crisis Management System: this network deploys teams of credible messengers who mediate conflicts on the street and connect high-risk individuals to services that can reduce the long-term risk of violence. In the last three years, the Crisis Management System has contributed to a 15 percent decline in shootings in the 17 highest violence precincts in New York City.”
It got shut down. It sounds bad but you have to remember how violent some of the areas get on the West and South side (Garflied Park W+E, and Engelwood are all within the top 5)
So the black site is somehow justified by the fact that there is crime in the area? This makes no sense. The black site is itself illegal and an example of lawlessness. How is an Abu Gharib clone helping solve the gamg problem? Did Abu Gharib really help out the efforts in Iraq?
I don't know enough to advocate a solution in the "defund the police" debate and I agree that I don't have enough personal experience from my aeron chair (which, as you know, I was actually born in.)
But, excluding the less police argument, how is the prevalence of violent crime in low income African American neighborhoods a justification for predictive policing? Given the risk of propagating bias and a history of racist policing messing up the data, wouldn't it just be better to keep humans in charge? They've been disappointing recently but I still think they have potential.
Maybe it would be helpful if I put better links here. I didn't expect this comment to get so many responses and my link was a bit flippant. This research probably does a better job of explaining the position than I do.
Here's a Stanford survey from 2016 in Oakland that showed that African Americans are ~4.5x as likely to be stopped as whites despite representing a smaller percentage of the population, that they are 4x as likely to be handcuffed in a stop, 4x as likely to be searched in a stop and 2.5x as likely to be arrested in a stop (which is, as mentioned, 4.5x as likely to happen.): https://news.stanford.edu/2016/06/15/stanford-big-data-study...
I got interested in racist inference due to this Harvard paper that showed that google search ads were much more likely to suggest arrest records for African American names than white names: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.6822.pdf
I accepted that implicit bias is intrinsic and difficult to weed out when I heard about studies showing that resumes with African American names received much lower response rates than white names: https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...
I remember reading somewhere that this effect even persisted with African American studies professors selecting grad students. I can't find that paper but this HBS article describes the phenomenon and discusses how the response rate effect is even present when the company claims to promote diversity within the application: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
I also advocate for learned epistemic helplessness (https://scienceforsustainability.org/wiki/Epistemic_Learned_...) even if I don't always practice it well. I'm only claiming to have knowledge in the small area of predicting bad behavior using machine learning. It's probably best to find a person of color with personal experience and a better knowledge of the literature for anything else. Of course, you already know that. I hope you're doing well!
Original/parent comment for this conversation said:
> 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.
The contrary part:
> 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.
Original comment basically said "police are important to protect against violence in neighborhoods where there's a lot of it. W/the implication that said violence is gang violence.
The response argued that if we want to decrease or eliminate gang violence, we have to address the root issue, which is basically criminal neglect of neighborhoods (lack of schools, hospitals, entire communities systematically oppressed, disenfranchised, and neglected, etc) b/c of systemic racism.
'Conclusions. Relative “trauma deserts” with decreased access to immediate care were found in certain areas of Chicago and adversely affected mortality from GSWs. These results may inform decisions about trauma systems planning and funding.'
Where's the funding for hospitals where it's needed?
Or.
Let's look at the LA uprising (aka the LA riots). Let's look at Ferguson. Let's look at the riots in Baltimore. Those communities clearly had very strong feelings about the police.
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
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 :)
We're all on the same side here. We all want more opportunity and more safety for everyone, especially those who have the least of either. Talking past one another and not reading the best intentions behind each comment hinders that shared goal.
I'm not convinced that systemic poverty is the cause. Plenty of poorer counties and non urban, but just a poor, areas in the USA don't have these high violent crime rates.
Most of the poor countries you mention don't have an intentionally created underclass. The economic background and the tremendous intentional income/wealth inequality in the US adds a bit more complexity.
In most countries, you won't end up in jail because you make less than $X, the US penalizes being poor. The US jail population as a % of the world's total jailed population is a clear indicator.
Also its quite interesting that American whites commit crime at a higher rate than UK blacks. There is something systemic at work here.
It seems the few decades of gutting social safety nets compounded with the trend of shutting down schools to make funds available for policing and jail building created a pipeline directly to jail for the newly undereducated and poor. A pipeline with perverse incentives that helped corporations and the US government exploit almost free ($0.25/hr) domestic prison slave labor for weapons, defense, and general manufacturing.
Poverty includes more than just household income. In particular, many of the comparative areas you mention provide: safe schools, libraries, extended family resources. Population density is also a huge driver of violent crime rates.
Of course poverty isn't the only factor. But it's a hugely important one.
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.
> 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.
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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.
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":
> 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.
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
>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.
Counterargument, it's well documented and studied that policies like "stop and frisk" and to some degree traffic enforcement disproportionately target minorities. Most of the people in SV "microdosing on LSD" are not.
>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.
Part of the problem with addressing Sexism in policing is that "women commit violent/dangerous crimes less often than men" is a less obviously wrong statement, since there are actually really clear biological differences between the sexes, and those biological differences influence both strength and propensity towards competitive/violent engagement.
I am 100% not trying to defend this; I agree with you that there's a problem. But I've never actually seen much research that demonstrates that there's a problem, even when there obviously is one.
For instance, women can't rape men and it is instead legally classed as "forced envelopment" or something, so there's... very, very clearly a disparity, but almost no one ever hears about it. I can't think of any reliable central archive of information that isn't vividly a "Men's Rights Activist" website that screams 90s conspiracy theorists.
EDIT: If you do know of any useful sources for spreading the idea, I'd love to hear about them.
>since there are actually really clear biological differences between the sexes, and those biological differences influence both strength and propensity towards competitive/violent engagement.
If someone tried to make the same argument about populations of individuals (I specifically use population instead of race due to how race is socially constructed from populations), would people even glance at the evidence before condemning them? At best you'll get those saying the results are tainted due to how society treats people and thus you cannot make any definite claims about biological differences, which would apply just as well to behavioral differences between males and females. Actually, I do often enough see such a claim applied to gender differences as well, though primarily when dealing with something where males appear to be perform better on some metric.
At the core it shows that people are not consistently applying the logic to these situations, which leaves one to question what standard they actually are using and if we are even able to have an honest conversation as long as they do not admit (or maybe even remain unaware) of the other standard.
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.
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.
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?
> Are there actual, current examples of systemic racism where an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes?
If you removed all racists from the economy, black people as a demographic would still be at a huge disadvantage for a very long time (or forever?). The playing field might not level on it's own.
If a system starts out with biased functions and runs long enough so that the distribution of the state is biased, removing the biased functions doesn't necessarily guarantee the state will return back to an unbiased equilibrium.
Removing explicitly racist laws doesn't remove the biases embedded in the system from two hundred years of slavery and terrorism. There is a complex feedback loop of education, economics, and cultural attitudes that have locked the imbalances in.
Your idea of "justice" is based upon group membership, as unfortunately for many other people. I see absolutely no difference between a poor white person vs. a poor black person. Sure, there might be more poor black people, but so what? Do you seriously believe that rich white people would actively be trying to help poor white people and not poor black people? No, everybody wants riches for themselves, poor whites aren't given anything either.
This is what I tune out of the conversation whenever someone mentions "patriarchy" (the "modern" version, i.e. "men are in power" not "men own women") - I'm a man, but I've never received any benefit just because (most of) our presidents / businessmen are men (in fact, arguably (individual) women receive more benefits, because most of those men are heterosexuals).
I am a man and worked in fastfood during my studies.
I was offered a permanent contract immediatly after my first month, while there were also a lot of women with kids working there who had been on temp contracts for years. Probably because I could work at night; the mothers worked during schooltimes. Any time someone got pregnant, their contract was not renewed.
In this situation I had an advantage because of my gender. This was not because the business itself was specifically sexist, in fact almost all of management were women. Instead, the systems in place made it so that financially smart decisions negatively impacted women.
> Probably because I could work at night; the mothers worked during schooltimes.
I mean, sounds it literally wasn’t sexism, you were just a better worker.
Obviously, it’s a problem that society doesn’t value people having children. But that’s an orthogonal issue to sexism, I’m pretty sure that if a father couldn’t work nights, he’d be treated exactly the same. Ideally the society would subsidize people having kids, or businesses employing workers with kids, or something...
You have, it is just that these benefits are so ingrained in society that you didn't notice. That's what people mean when they talk about systemic issues.
the term “systemic racism”, to me, sounds like parts of the system are actively racist. your argument is true (black people are economically disadvantaged given history), but aren’t poor white people/latino people too?
how is a poor black person any worse off than a poor white person?
In many cases, I don't think you can separate "people" from "the system" because the system is a human construct in which human discretion is called upon repeatedly. For example, studies which show that young white children react more negatively to black faces compared to white faces - is this "the system"? Is is it "discretion"? I'm not sure you can differentiate the two.
It's also important to note that just because you fixed a racist practice, that doesn't immediately endow an underprivileged group with the full fruits of equality. For example, redlining may now be illegal in the United States, but middle class white Americans have been benefiting from nearly a hundred years' worth of wealth accumulation through housing that black Americans were locked out of. This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.
> This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.
What is the end goal here though? The most wealthy ethnicities in the US are Asian-Indians, Jewish and East-Asians. Is that also systemic racism (against Whites) and these groups should be knocked down?
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but if your implication is that I'm saying "(legal) progress towards racial equality is racist", then I'm not really sure how you got that from my comment. My point is simply that you can have greater legal equality and yet things that happened in the past can still cause racist outcomes in the present (see my example).
> For example, redlining may now be illegal in the United States, but middle class white Americans have been benefiting from nearly a hundred years' worth of wealth accumulation through housing that black Americans were locked out of. This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.
I think this is describing how the system includes momentum, and you're saying that the system (momentum) is producing racially-biased outcomes _without_ racist input today. That's true in the strictest, most technical sense, but is this supposed to be a motivation for reparations or something?
I don't think it's just the "strictest, most technical" sense. It's a significant example of how "if you took the people out of the system, you'd still get biased outcomes based on race." (or, if you prefer, an example of where "an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes")
Ok, I understand what you mean. Thanks for being considerate, I usually don't express my opinion in these discussions, hopefully I didn't come across very rudely.
This seems to fit with the charge that you are arguing momentum is racist. They were born in a poor household. That household is poorer than it would otherwise be because of racism in prior generations (but which no longer exists today) leading to a lack of inheritance among other things. This is your evidence of systemic racism.
Along those same lines I suppose we also suffer from systemic genocide, systemic famine, systemic war, and every other crappy thing that happened to people in history and were not somehow complete corrected for by a counter redistribution of wealth and status.
The problem with your counterexample ("systemic famine"/"systemic war"/etc.) is that those are one-off events in the past, and thus they don't cumulatively add up and compound to create very unequal outcomes today. A more appropriate hypothetical would be that the last 400 years of one's ancestors all experienced genocide, war, or other similarly "crappy" things.
Focusing on one piece at a time is how we do logic. You need to defend the weakest link in your case. Or are you suggesting that the various pieces of systemic racism are not themselves racism, until aggregated together?
As for one-off events, it seems like just a matter of degree, not principle. Though surely genocide continue to have negative affects on the victimized group to this day.
Regardless of whether you think it's a "weak link", this isn't a logical proof where you can disprove one statement rendering the entire proof invalid. Rather, you have to disprove each piece of evidence for systemic racism in order to disprove it exists.
Your argument is mostly "whataboutism" - you point out that terrible things have happened to groups of people in the past and those things have inter-generational effects. Of course it's true.
That being said, of course it's a matter of degree, but at that point you're just arguing semantics. Driving your car at 25mph vs 125mph is only a difference of degree, and yet one is totally permissible and the other is incredibly dangerous and would land you with a big fine. The key point here is that speeding becomes increasingly more dangerous as you drive faster, to the point that exceeding speed limits by a given amount becomes reckless driving because you're much more likely to cause injury and/or death to yourself and others. In the same way, racist systems create a compounding disadvantage that is almost impossible to rectify simply by changing the laws to make them "colorblind" in the modern day.
I'd call it reductio ad absurdum personally, an application of your logic elsewhere to reach absurd conclusions. And the existence of inter-generational effects are the undisputed facts I started with, not the conclusions reached via your logic, which are that the existence of these effects support the charge of systemic war/famine/etc. Whether it's just semantics depends on what you think the supposed existence of these "systemic evils" requires morally.
Not really. You've said that because the difference between the intergenerational harm caused by "other crappy things" and 400 years' worth of racism is only quantitative, the intergenerational effects of "other crappy things" ought to be considered systemic. Your logic implies that because driving your car at 5mph and 100mph is only a quantitative difference, driving at 5mph ought to be considered "speeding." Or because the difference between heating cold water 1 degree and 100 degrees is only quantitative, cold water heated 1 degree ought to be considered "steam." Quantitative differences eventually become qualitative differences; that much should be trivially obvious.
There are plenty, such as the influence of religion and customs instilled by people in the past. Many people are assigned these cultural norms from childhood.
For example, the normalized Western image of something like a caucasian Jesus or a caucasian Santa Clause influences ways of thinking and who we see as our cultural betters.
Would you agree at some point this country was systemically racist?
Surely you would agree during slavery it was?
I'm going to assume you agree, so then can you explain when systemic racism ended? And what caused it to end? Can you also help me understand how you are so sure that the negative impact to Black people while this country was systematically racist does not still hurt people today?
The logic of your argument seems to be: "There was slavery, so there was systemic racism." Am I right? Then you extruded that argument into: "Because there was slavery, there is also systemic racism today." This is quite a leap, especially considering that slavery was ended on a particular date due to a civil war. Since then, several settlements has been made with racism (systemic or otherwise), some of the most important ones being during the 60's. These settlements have come both in the form of physical changes to the law, but also in the form of a change to the general zeitgeist and in the attitude of most people towards racism. What is happening today, however, is purely the widspread misunderstanding and politization of facts and statistics. On the whole, crime is going down, but if you look at this table from the FBI, the bias does in fact seem to be biased towards whites and not blacks.[1] What do you think about that?
No I'm asking for you to tell me when systemic racism ended in this country because the crux of your argument is that it has ended and the effects of it historically don't linger today. Can you explain the fact the net worth of a typical white family is $171,000 and the typical net worth of a Black family is $17,150? Are Black people in this country inherently predisposed to making less money or are there systemic reasons for that?
It's odd you continue to focus on crime statistics, something I haven't mentioned at all, as a way to push back on the narrative of systemic racism. For anyone who is Black or a person of color, we know first hand systemic racism is much more than that.
> Can you explain the fact the net worth of a typical white family is $171,000 and the typical net worth of a Black family is $17,150?
how many young poor black mothers have children too early (16) with gang members who end up dying from gang violence? isn’t that a modern day common black narrative?
how is a poor white person any worse off than a poor black person? they have same access to all resources. it’s systemic poverty for poor people. it has nothing to do with blacks.
some blacks bootstrap themselves out and make it, most don’t. how broken is the system for those that make it out? not very.
>it’s systemic poverty for poor people. it has nothing to do with blacks.
This is a good point imo. Are they poor because they're black or because their family was poor before them?
I agree people put too much emphasis on more visible bias (ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation) and blame a lot of things which arguably may have originated from these bias, but are furthered by other factors (e.g. slow social mobility - all bias accounted for).
Maybe I'm wrong but wouldn't their interpretation of chattel slavery in America be that it wasn't the beginning of systemic racism in this country, but purely oppressive system that was exploited by racists? It seems like an odd distinction to make even if I agree that there exists systematic oppression against many groups in addition to systemic racism.
>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.
Even this just doesn't fully explain away systemic oppression that impacts people on a day-to-day basic like Black people not getting job interviews due to their name sounding Black or job offers because the interviewers have unconscious bias.
> Even this just doesn't fully explain away systemic oppression that impacts people on a day-to-day basic like Black people not getting job interviews due to their name sounding Black or job offers because the interviewers have unconscious bias.
In this scenario, is it not the racist individual (the interviewer) impacting minority success, rather than the system itself?
(I take no position here as to the existence of systemic racism. I'm just not certain the example you have brought supports your argument.)
good question. The individual is racist, but he/she is probably just racist in the same way that almost everyone is: the society that they grew up in created associations in his nervous system that black people are more likely to be incompetent, unprofessional, untrustworthy, or whatever. Furthermore, the individual may be conditioned by society to believe that certain innocuous elements of black culture or mannerisms somehow indicate an inferiority - they may consider black speech mannerisms as a sign of lower intelligence, or they may consider black styles of hair to be unprofessional. These are all part of a cultural system that stigmatizes blackness and black people. It's not the same kind of systemic racism as racist rules/bureaucracy, but it's still part of a system of racist beliefs and customs.
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.
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?
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.
>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"
It's not left out. It's well studied. It's not the only factor, but one of the big ones. The problem is, median black net worth is one-tenth that of median white net-worth. Why is that? You can come up with a bunch of near and intermediate causes, but they will all mostly boil down to systemic racism both past and present.
More specifically, government housing is only available in dense urban environments. As is public transportation and services within walking distance. The black population is much less likely to have any generational wealth (like a home or even an old car passed down to them) obviously due to historic racism. Then pile on the fact that urban areas are more heavily policed and the fact that over-policing seriously hinders economic prosperity, then you have a textbook definition of a vicious cycle.
I agree, at face value it seems obvious that wealth disparities among black americans are attributable to the history of slavery and segregation.
What I'm perplexed about though is this: if systemic racism is the default primary explanation for wealth disparities, how can we explain the even greater wealth disparities of Indian, Asian, and Jewish Americans compared to all other ethnic groups in the US?
>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.
Yes, but we only have evidence to believe that black people do on average commit more crime because they are convicted of more crime. The theory is that blacks commit the same or less crime but only convicted of it because of some type of predatory policing, but that is only a theory and there is no widespread studies or statistics to support this theory. It may well be true, but until there is proof we cannot assume that it is not the case.
I do appreciate the correction and it is an important distinction.
Recognizing the fact isn't racist (although one should qualify those facts with all the many factors not taken into account, like how much more likely a white person is to get away with the same crime). But acting on that data is definitely racist. It is punishing innocent people because other people that have a similar skin color have committed crimes.
Apparently it is, because all the other replies are gobsmacked that I even mentioned this. We're not discussing observations and observable facts anymore, we are creating a world where a certain side is right no matter what and straight statistics are false in they do not support that side. It doesn't even matter that I stated that treating individuals based on their race is immoral, there is no complexity or further discussion, even if that complexity and further discussion could actually be beneficial to solving problems the black community is facing.
Why is it racism? Racism is "unfounded belief based on race". A belief based in data does not sound like either racism or discrimination to me.
Of course assuming someone is guilty because he's statically more likely to commit a crime is wrong. There was a movie about this line of thinking [1] if you're interested, which is the extreme of predictive policing. I still think there are non-discriminatory ways to use predictive policing though.
I think you missed it the central point of the parent commenter. Take for instance, the fact that men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crime:
* Is it sexist to conclude that someone is a violent criminal just because they're a man? Yes.
* Is it sexist to say that a model predicting that men will commit 90% of violent crime isn't biased, with the reasoning that men on average commit way more violence than women? No.
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.
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.
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 ).
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).
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.
This would fix so much imo. It's starting (weed legalization), but going way too slow. People are still delusional about legal = good, illegal = bad, we just added one drug to the legal ones.
You can't just say this without actual proof. The George Floyd killing was a tragedy, but not proof of systemic racism. On top of this, the officer involved (who actually knew George Floyd prior to killing him) is being brought up on charges, which is the exact opposite of what happens in a system that has systemic racism.
"Inference (ML) predicts the future from the past. If the past is racist"
Predictive policing only gives you an idea of where crime might occur based on previous crimes happening in the area and other factual data.
Innocent people weren't being arrested in mass based on what the models tell them. Officers will send out a few more patrols to areas that historically have more crime based on these models and they will most likely arrest more as a result.
This is a good thing and actually reduces the crime rate. Removing all of these systems on top of making it harder for the average person to defend themselves with a firearm will only result in the loss of innocent life and encourage more crime in mostly minority areas of the country.
"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."
There is a bigger police presence in black neighborhoods because more crime happens there and as a result, more African Americans will be arrested.
If we want to stop this, we need to get to the root of the problem instead of blaming everything else.
Calling it 'systemic racism' is just another way of creating a bias against an entire group of people without having any actual proof to back it up. It also allows for the complete absolving of personal responsibility.
I feel like this is the beginning of the war on science because the results are politically incorrect.
It's like a new woke religion and if you question the god of racism, you will have your entire life taken away from you (job, friends, and family).
The only reason this nonsense persists is because the silent majority are too afraid to speak up and have everything taken away from them.
> the officer involved (who actually knew George Floyd prior to killing him) is being brought up on charges, which is the exact opposite of what happens in a system that has systemic racism.
How do you infer this? It could also be the result of the mass country-wide protests which are absolutely not the norm. It's not like the system automatically corrected for this issue.
>It could also be the result of the mass country-wide protests which are absolutely not the norm.
I think the parent is wrong on this point. The charges seem to be influenced by the mass protests. But I don't think that takes away from his point.
Also the way police treats police brutality and their immunity is very troublesome in the US. I don't think that's because of racism, more so because of a poor accountability system.
I don't disagree with your cited point but your citation (vox) is generally awful, this article included. Why are they using a BLM approval poll from January of this year to make a point about people not caring? They choose to bold that citation and then use the more recent statistic unbolded later. Seems pretty deliberate on their part.
Disclosure: I have been incarcerated in the United States for a drug crime. The sentence amounted to a three year stint and a 2 year parole for cannabis.
1. Cops arrest you based on success. If they can make sure you're a slam dunk at trial, then you're in handcuffs. Arresting the poorest black people will always result in a win for their career record. Simply put,racism is almost designed to be part of the system.
2. Bingo. Building more police stations in poor neighborhoods puts a jackboot to anyone who complains about the closures of public health clinics, social workers and psych wards. It can only ever be deemed a success because critics are 'superpredators' and not just incredibly poor or unfortunate. Political dissent from poverty gets bureaucratically disguised as rote criminality.
Cops at any level, even the sec, are incredible reticent about the idea of policing what they see as either too delicate, productive, or successful.
I’d just like to point out that the number of people who believe something has zero real bearing on that thing being true. I’m not saying it’s irrelevant in all avenues of study, but in terms of a thing being true, it is indeed irrelevant. So we have to be careful about shaming each other for not following the majority.
This is over intellectualizing and already hyped up topic. Predictive “ML” here is closer to an excel spreadsheet with crimes per block, sorted from largest to highest, with more police sent to the high ones. It’s not some weird deep net trained in secret crazy data.
More people get shot in some areas, so more police go there. That’s what they’re saying.
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.
I’m trying to figure out how PP is the problem. You send police to a high crime area and they incarcerate people that break the law. Let’s instead send the police to a zero crime area. The cops have an easy shift and arrest no one. That high crime area now has businesses and such moving out because they can’t afford the losses. They take the jobs with them. Now people in the area are unemployed and soon become homeless. Now you have a problem that is spiraling out of control. You think the people that are now left in that area are happy because their lives went from poor to shit? How is that helping?
> 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.
You started off with a really strong point but then immediately narrowed it down to race. The fundamental issue with this is, foremost, that such a system limits second chances and is used to discriminate against people with a criminal past. It's normalized in our society and shouldn't be.
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?
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.
A few facts to note: Blacks kill more blacks than any other race or ethinicity.[1] Blacks also kill more whites, than whites kill blacks in pure numbers.[1] When you factor in the size of the respective populations on a per capita ratio, then the numbers just get worse.[2] On a more positive note, though, crimes are reported to generally have gone down over the last few years. In fact there's nothing in the data to suggest that there is a systemically racist problem in the USA. If anything, the data has a bias towards whites...[1] As for the article from the clearly Left-biased Vox,[3] public opinion only reflects how poorly educated most people are about the matter.
If you think it's racist of me, a Sami minority person from Norway to say this—whose history also contains a lot of racism and atrocities systematically committed towards the Sami people—then please just excuse what I just said, and instead look at this black person saying just about the same exact thing.[4] Here's another slightly more famous black person wheighing in on the matter, with his opinion on what might be the cause of this tragedy.[5] Either way I don't believe in original sin, or that the current generation should atone for the sins of their fathers.
The sad fact that I'm forced to refer to black-only sources before anyone will believe me—a slightly racist thing to demand in the first place—should tell you how stigmatizing this discussion has become. Most people don't even dare to quote facts these days, and for good reason! Nevermind being banned from social media; people these days stand to lose their jobs if they have the wrong opinion! This is extremely chilling on the much needed democratic discussion on this topic. Thus I hope people will refrain from personal attacks or downvoting, and instead will use well researched factual sources to discuss the matter in a civil way.
You're making a lot of (intentional or not) dogwhistles. So let's dive in to a few of them:
> Blacks kill more blacks than any other race or ethinicity.[1] Blacks also kill more whites, than whites kill blacks in pure numbers.
Indeed, let's rephrase this: races in the US continue to be relatively segregated[0]. And crimes, even violent ones, are usually committed within-community. So the meme around "black on black violence" is a bit of a distraction unless you also are concerned about "white on white" violence. And if you are, organizations like stop the violence[1] do exist to address specifically violence within the black community.
So you start by stating true, but ultimately misleading claims that are often used to justify racial prejudice.
Then, you justify this opinion with two videos from black people. Neither Larry Elder nor Denzel Washington is an expert on incarceration or the US justice system. Larry Elder, in fact, is a right wing political pundit, so his income relies on his viewership. This calls into question his reliability. I'd suggest you watch the documentary 13th[2] or read up on these issues from actual experts.
But I'll spend some time breaking down his video:
He starts by noting that white men and black men are killed by police at around the same rate. This is, again true. But this means that Black people are killed at around 5 times the rate of White people. Then he restates the whole issue of black on black crime, which we've already discussed.
He then cites a paper from Roland G. Fryer[3], which I happen to be familiar with. It concludes
> On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after accounting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction.
These racial differences show more police violence towards minorities.
Elder then notes that police forces can be diverse, which is true but ultimately a distraction. He mentions the NYPD as an example of a highly diverse police force, but neglects to mention that the NYPD's Stop and Frisk policy was so problematic that it was deemed unconstitutional due to its discriminatory nature[4].
He then mentions that the Police-Public contact survey shows no evidence of police abuse against black people, but the Fryer paper Elder cites manages to reach the opposite conclusion: that based on the Police-Public contact survey, there is statistically significant evidence of greater police use of force against minority populations, even when controlling for a number of factors.
He then mentions his movie, Uncle Tom, which contains a number of "conservative thinkers", who are mostly pundits. It contains no academic experts. Compare to 13th, which includes interviewees from both political parties, as well as non-political subject matter experts. Uncle Tom peddles ultimately irrelevant facts, such as that the democratic party was historically in favor of slavery. This is true, but ignores the Southern Strategy[5], an explicit Republican strategy to gain support in the south by appealing to white fears about race in the wake of the civil rights movement. 13th goes into detail on this.
But you can see some of it in things like this[6] Lee Atwater quote (Atwater was a republican political strategist), where he essentially admits the racism at the core of the southern strategy, and the need to, over time, move from explicit and overt racism to more systematic changes that, while not explicitly racist, help white people at the expense of black people.
Edit: I actually forgot one thing Elder mentions, that no one cares when unarmed white people are shot by police. This isn't actually true: The Black Lives matter movement has a reasonably well documented history of raising some awareness about cases of police killing unarmed white people. For example, during BLM protests in the wake of Michael Brown's murder in 2014, Christian Roupe[11], a white kid from Georgia, was among the names of people killed by police violence mentioned at the protest. More recently, in the wake of Daniel Shaver's murder, BLM voices raised awareness[12].
Which leaves one more thing that Elder discusses: "black fathers", which is also what Denzel Washington discusses. So once again, go watch 13th, I'm basically repeating the things it says here.
In the Nixon/Reagan era, "Law and Order" politics[7] became a central issue. Most notably, the "War on Drugs". Through this, laws were passed that disproportionately keep black people in prison, notably around crack vs. powder cocaine. But even with other drugs like marijuana, where white and black people use and historically used cannabis at the same rate, but black people are 3x more likely to be arrested for cannabis use[8] even today, and as a result literally tens of thousands of young black men are in prison for things that aren't a crime.
Those disproportionate arrest rates, combined with some of those other crime laws from the "Law and Order" era mean that someone who never commits a violent crime can end up a felon or even behind bars for life. Those people are disproportionately likely to be black men, especially young black men. Young black men who should be forming families but who can't because they're being put behind bars for crimes that white people commit at equivalent rates.
That, combined with historical issues like redlining[9] and housing policies that prevented black communities from building generational wealth[10] mean that it's difficult, if not impossible, for black fathers to create stable homes. They don't have the generational wealth that white households do, not as a result of their actions, but instead due to years of explicit government policy that directly prevented their parents generation from accumulating wealth. Then, of course, they're overpoliced and sent to prison which can prevent them from doing important and economically stabilizing things like attending college, or even in some cases completing high school, and acquiring decent jobs.
And this cycle is self-reinforcing. Without the ability for the current generation to create stable households, the next generation won't have wealth to build off of and will continue to be unstable. And so the cycle will continue. That's why we call it "systemic".
Hope that helps inform you about these issues. I'm also happy to break down why some of the things you've done generally won't engender you much sympathy and will result in you being accused of "dogwhistle" racism. But I'll only dive into that rhetorical analysis if you specifically request it.
[10]: https://youtu.be/AGUwcs9qJXY?t=240, covers redlining and generational wealth issues, but the whole video is great and, it should be noted, is made by a Christian who I believe identifies as conservative. It overlaps a lot with 13th, but 13th covers a few more recent things about the US prison industrial complex and contains more firsthand accounts and interviews.
While not the author of the post you are responding to, I really appreciate this response. I have largely spent my life believing one way on these issues and have tried to be more open minded regarding my basic assumptions about American society. You taking the time to respond in such a thoughtful manner and tone and providing good information to dig deeper on helps me tremendously.
I worked my way through your post backwards, as it helps cut down on the number of heuristic based cognitive stop points. Just wanted to point out a few things that stood out.
>On dogwhistles.
I'm tired of hearing this term thrown about. This word more than any other cements the ostracization of those who have fundamentally different slices of world view from you into the social space of "I can't be bothered to try to convince you or build a bridge across the gap of our misunderstanding."
Are there hopeless cases? Yes, Absolutely. I consider myself a socially liberally inclined sort of fellow who embraces a "do as thou wilt, but don't break anything" attitude toward life. The don't break anything part being tacked on there in recent years based on immersion in and attempts to understand where more conservative mindsets come from. Believe it or not, conservative != racist. It doesn't equal stone wall, What it does encompass is a way of evaluating the world and proposed changes in terms of harmful malbehaviors that may be introduced. Whether you like it or not, you must appreciate that force at work to bridge the gap with a conservative. Show them you thought about it, took it seriously, and have means to minimize harms and you can get them on board.
Call everything they say a dogwhistle and paint them all as racists, and you will be amazed at how tightly ranks close.
>on the Fryer paper...
Haven't read it yet, but I'll give it a go. No comment til then.
>Uncle Tom and lack of academic experts
Thank God the world isn't run solely by academics, and statisticians! Give two statisticians the same set of data, and they'll generate two different models and stories for the same damn thing, and clearly there has been absolutely nothing like any sort of reproducibility crisis is the social sciences or economics fields, nor have their been controversies with the academic environment being gamed through innumerable submissions of low quality irreproducible papers!
Oh wait! Yes there has! If you've spent any amount of time here you should have more than a few to sample from.
Besides which, appeal to authority, while useful in fact discovery, does not score rhetorical points. Often for reasons alluded to above, and no, I'm not an anti-intellectual. I've been around the block more than once and I've seen some shit. Not the least of which is black holing of narratively inconvenient yet legitimate papers.
(See David Shor's recent cancelling).
The fact is politics is not just about facts or the collection/interpretation thereof. Politics at it's core is about building something that works for everyone involved, without overly burdening any party unduly. Now where American politics may legitimately have a problem is that the first time a felony occurs, a person is discounted from the political equation effectively even after they have played their debt to society and served their sentence. That the taint of the felony persists so long after an official sentence is served, and that full rights are not restored automatically to that of a citizen in good standing, and that there is no semblance or measures, or protections in this age of interconnected databases to protect anyone unfortunate enough to have picked up that felon label, seems absolutely problematic to me. However, that stands as a political necessity, since in a purported land of the free, there is the assumption that no one else carries the blame for the choices you've made but you and your lonesome. Furthermore, I don't think anyone has ever stopped to actually consider what would happen if a non-trivial fraction of the population was booted out of the political limelight entirely, because there is an implicit assumption the world is better off without accommodating the "demonstrably morally bankrupt" holding the reins of power. Not my view, but an observation of one of the terminus points of the Overton window in my experience, and one I don't see much point in arguing with beyond in the sense that we have an imperfect, by men justice system, so it sure does seem rather odd that there is no clean process for handling reintegration back into society. That's getting into completely different areas of how our political system and incentives are screwed up, but nevertheless, the point to take away is, the direct route in politics is frequently not the most expedient.
>Lee Atwater et al.
Well, seems to be a self-correcting problem does it not? Redlining is getting the scrutiny it deserves as well as myriad other forms of proxies for racism like Euclidean zoning; and no, the black community are not the only ones who noticed the gem of zoning laws contributing to continued segregation, I assure you. It just tends to take a while for people to hit that point in life where they've got other things nailed down enough to start asking juicy questions like "What's up with this zoning stuff anyway?" Like it or not, not everybody is terribly tuned to the difficulties of shaping public policy for resource consumption.
>on black fathers
So are you saying early adulthood incarceration causes bad fathers? Because I can see a case being made by many people for that causality to be the other way around.
>on greater likelyhhod of being arrested for marijuana abuse.
Don't know about anyone else, but when I was growing up and still in the primary grades (when marijuana based crackdowns was generally considered worthwhile), I always found it interesting that there were two distinct usage groups. Those who'd light one up in front of God and everyone, and those who'd do it somewhere private, and generally not when they were busy doing something for someone else. Furthermore, a large number of marijuana related cases I've heard of tend to result from consent being given to search a vehicle containing it, or from someone having hotboxed, and generated plenty of probable cause for an officer to suspect driving under the influence. The fact that it's practically a boutique charge (much like most firearm regulation charges are treated as) used to sweeten the list of crimes to be potentially prosecuted for never really helped matters. Point is, the disproportionate arrest rate of black vs. White may come down not on racial divides, but consumption pattern lines and ability to meld into the environment, and capacity to adhere to patterns of behavior that do not escalate you into the limelight of being noticed. A police officer's primary evaluation loop involves working out what isn't right given their environment. I'm willing to wager that cops would love to just let "endemic" crime slide, but that's not really an option given their need to act with integrity. Remember, statistics only reflect those who got caught. Those who didn't are, to the limited resources of the justice system, not worth going after. Does this infuriate me? Yes. I want white collar crime to be gone after with the assumed exuberance the police allegedly demonstrate going after people of color. That's reality though. The constraints of what we can get done are necessarily bounded by that which we can do.
>redlining/housing & the War on Drugs.
The war on drugs was in general aimed at the principle destabilizers of public order at the time; hippies/anti-war Protestors and the civil rights movement. If you're really annoyed the legacy still exists today, I'd advise you to read up on the concept of legislative sunset dates, and how their mandated inclusion forces choices in terms of prioritization of laws worth keeping on the books.(1/2)
> On dogwhistles. I'm tired of hearing this term thrown about.
Did you get the impression from my comments that I couldn't be bothered to build the bridge across the gap of our misunderstanding? Telling people that there are rhetorical issues with how they will be perceived is valuable. It is, in fact, exactly what you frame your post as doing.
> Besides which, appeal to authority
As an aside, you should read up on "appeal to authority". Appeal to authority isn't really a logical fallacy. Appeal to false authority is. Which is to say appealing to someone who has no real reason to claim authority on a subject. Like Denzel Washington.
Broadening this, we now notice a pattern of you pointing out rhetorical devices that I use in a negative light, when you and those I'm responding to use the same devices. I ask why? It's certainly not constructive.
> The fact is politics is not just about facts or the collection/interpretation thereof
I agree! You should tell that to GP!
> Now where American politics may legitimately have a problem is that the first time a felony occurs
Again on the rhetoric bit, be careful with phrases like this. It implies that other problems are less legitimate. You're trying to build bridges here, remember. Belittling the legitimate concerns of the other doesn't do that.
This isn't to say that you're wrong to bring up this concern. It is a legitimate issue. But your phrasing here frames other issues as illegitimate. Is that your intent?
> However, that stands as a political necessity, since in a purported land of the free, there is the assumption that no one else carries the blame for the choices you've made but you and your lonesome.
Indeed, this is the great American mistake that recent activism hopes to highlight. It is the recognition of de facto discrimination, that despite supposed equality under the law, different groups are treated differently by the humans who apply the justice system.
> Well, seems to be a self-correcting problem does it not?
I'm not sure what your point is here. That we've recognized a problem doesn't mean that it isn't hurting people. Recognizing that a problem exists often a necessary, but also always insufficient, step in fixing it. These mistakes of the prior generations are actively harming people right now. Saying that the problem will eventually self correct because people notice it is both naive and probably not true even in the long run without a concerted effort, and does nothing to address the people harmed right now.
> the black community are not the only ones who noticed the gem of zoning laws contributing to continued segregation
I'm not sure why this matters. Could you elaborate on why you included this comment.
> Don't know about anyone else, but when I was growing up and still in the primary grades (when marijuana based crackdowns was generally considered worthwhile)
Note that I'm not talking about history in my statistics. I'm talking about data from the last 5 years. Today, right now black people are 3x more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana use.
> A police officer's primary evaluation loop involves working out what isn't right given their environment.
This is where stop and frisk data is useful. In NYC stop and frisk didn't result in a decrease in violent or property crime. What it did result in was young black men being stopped and searched for no (literally, they were stopped without probable cause which is why the policy was stopped by the courts) reason. So a white person and a black person engaging in exactly the same behavior, the black person was multiple times more likely to be stopped.
> I'm willing to wager that cops would love to just let "endemic" crime slide, but that's not really an option given their need to act with integrity.
This is actually the exact opposite of what the data shows. Police are given wide leeway to use their judgement and escalate. And when given these leeway, they "require less suspicion to search black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers"[0]. This pattern ties in with the one from the Fryer paper: police have a higher baseline suspicion of minority individuals and as a result require less evidence to consider them a threat (and therefore to escalate physically) or to be engaging in criminal behavior (resulting in a search or in NYC a stop and frisk).
> Those who didn't are, to the limited resources of the justice system, not worth going after
Right, this is what I mean when I say systemic discrimination. It's easier to get a conviction against a poor black person than a rich white person. Therefore police have systematic incentives to engage with black people. They're at least as likely to find contraband, the person is more likely to be poor and therefore more likely to be convicted. It's not clear why you're bringing this up. Like yes, these are problems that need to be addressed. They're problems that are actively raised by activists at this very moment. It's not news to me, and it's certainly not good.
We shouldn't excuse systems that encourage discrimination because it's more economical. We should dismantle those systems.
> I'd advise you to read up on the concept of legislative sunset dates, and how their mandated inclusion forces choices in terms of prioritization of laws worth keeping on the books.
I'm familiar. These don't help the people being harmed right now by these existing systems of oppression. Saying "well we should change how we write future laws" doesn't address the injustice in existing laws.
> That cycle you describe sounds pretty pan-racial to me.
Most of it is (the police discrimination part isn't, but the economic factors are). What you seem to have missed is the history. The reason that we're here now is due to explicit racial discrimination in prior generations. So the pan-racial factors will continue to perpetuate the harms of racism unless we take explicit steps to stop them.
> I still see people from some of the shittiest circumstances become absolutely great people in their own right
Sure, there's some level of agency. But now's a good time to remember that Black men (and as a result black families) enjoy much less economic mobility than white men[1]. In this case it doesn't matter what the causes are. The effect is that, controlling for other factors, it's harder for a black person to escape bad circumstances than it is for a white person. So even in a statement like this, you're glossing over racial inequality.
> That's what kills me right now. BLM has the gall to think it's just black people who suffer.
They really don't. See my comments about Christian Roupe and Daniel Shaver. But importantly, even if they were, there are unique ways in which black people suffer. Denying that there is naive. And those specific ways of suffering need to be addressed before we can have true racial equality. Yes there are economic issues that cause everyone to suffer. And yes, those issues should be addressed. But addressing only those issues will still leave black people disadvantaged.
This is implicitly an "All Lives Matter" argument. Black people are drawing attention to issues that disproportionately affect them, and instead of saying "oh yes, you're right", your response is to say "but look at all these other people who are suffering". So what? That other people are suffering doesn't change the unique modes of suffering due to race.
> your suffering isn't intentional on anyone's part, but arises due to synergism's you aren't even aware of yet,
Yes, this is what "systematic" means. This isn't news to anyone.
> There were extensive attempts made to have their voices heard before the only reasonable choice of action fell to armed conflict.
I'm not sure what your point is. Do you think people haven't been peacefully protesting these things for decades? That people haven't been trying to pass legislation to fix these issues for years? They have. We just haven't been paying attention (or worse punishing them), until now. Colin Kaepernick? Progressive politicians have been working to reverse broken windows policing since its inception.
> Wanton unrestrained violence, and trying to topple the culture that made your act of protest possible will get no one anywhere.
Destruction of property as a form of protest marked the beginning of the American revolution. The property was destroyed because other attempts to enact change had failed. Destroying property got people to pay attention. Many people were not fans of the political unrest. Sure sounds familiar.
There was one difference though: the American revolution was led, by and large, by people in the upper class. Washington was the richest man in America. Many of the revolutionaries held political office or bureaucratic posts in the British system. They were all wealthy white property owners, members of the eventual voting class. Their challenge wasn't to get the ruling class to recognize their issues, they were the ruling class. It was to get the lower class to fight in a war that for many didn't improve their situation.
But most people aren't taught that in school either, because US history builds a cult of personality around the founding fathers. One that tearing down these statues caused me to do more research on. I learned a lot. And I keep learning a lot. Here's an example from today[2]. Would I have learned that Wilson was an avowed white supremacist without the sequence of events involving toppling of statues? Perhaps. Would I have learned it today? No. I expect many other people are the same way.
(2/2)
>And this cycle is self-reinforcing. Without the ability for the current generation to create stable households, the next generation won't have wealth to build off of and will continue to be unstable. And so the cycle will continue. That's why we call it "systemic".
That cycle you describe sounds pretty pan-racial to me. I know many friends in the position of not being able to offer their children the facade of stability that their parent or parents offered them if any at all. I still see people from some of the shittiest circumstances become absolutely great people in their own right, and see other people who haven't suffered a want in their life become miserable, shallow, ugly people.
That's what kills me right now. BLM has the gall to think it's just black people who suffer. It isn't whataboutism, it's about growing up enough to realize the system is about more than you, or your in-group, and that maybe in the grand scheme of things, your suffering isn't intentional on anyone's part, but arises due to synergism's you aren't even aware of yet, then coming out of that rough to learn lesson that if the system is that tilted against you, it's all the more reason to work hard, thrive and succeed in spite of it that then the rest of the world will take you seriously. You and your in-group must be the paragons of the change you want to see. Wanton unrestrained violence, and trying to topple the culture that made your act of protest possible will get no one anywhere. Otherwise you simply undermine the efforts of the decent folk who are trying to make positive change happen.
I'll stop now, as this composition has eaten up far too much of my day, but I at least hope that you understand a bunch of links and sources does not a rhetorical argument make. You have to be willing to understand that virtue exists on all sides of a controversial topic. You also have to be fundamentally willing to accept that the change that may be possible may fall far short of your expectations.
And before anyone else tries to say the Founding Fathers don't seem overly concerned with doing that, you're also dead wrong. There were extensive attempts made to have their voices heard before the only reasonable choice of action fell to armed conflict. Even then, each and every one of those men going into it it knew they would have to become some of the most well versed individuals of the era in terms of having a grasp of Statecraft to have a shot at surviving the aftermath. I see nothing resembling that sort of commitment in our political arena today.
Anyway... That took way more of my day than I was setting out to expend, so I think I'll leave it there. I'm probably getting Randy any way.
"You're making a lot of (intentional or not) dogwhistles."
And you're not, of course...
"races in the US continue to be relatively segregated[0]."
Yes, similar groups, culturally or otherwise, tend to want to live among their own. Is this a problem?
"crimes, even violent ones, are usually committed within-community."
Of course.
"So the meme around "black on black violence" is a bit of a distraction unless you also are concerned about "white on white" violence."
I disagree. The most logical thing to do, is to look closer at the groups that actually commit the most crime, if you want to fight that crime. You have to remember that the decision to do something illegal is individual, so you have to put the blame where the blame is due. You can't blame the system, because it's equal for everyone. And if it's not, well, then you have to prove that it's unfair, and so far haven't really been very persuasive. This doesn't make white-on-white violence unimportant. Only less important thatn black-on-black violence under this discussion.
"organizations like stop the violence[1] do exist to address specifically violence within the black community."
Has it helped? I think we both agree on the answer here.
"So you start by stating true, but ultimately misleading claims that are often used to justify racial prejudice."
Make up your mind, please! Are the facts "true" or not? Facts are just facts, man. It's how you respond to them that matters. And by the way, facts aren't "claims." The fact that blacks kill most blacks isn't a claim; it's a fact! The proof is in the pudding, as it where, or in this case in the FBI statistics.
Look, if one group pesters you daily, and tries to steal your candy, then yeah, you're probably justified in being somewhat prejudiced against them, no matter the colour of their skin...
But guess what, if one groups steals and murders way more than another group, then probably this will cause the authorities to look closer at that group. Sadly this will also lead to more false positives being produced when the police finally starts doing their job. Of course, it's easy to label that as "institutional racism," especially when there's political power and money in it, but let's face it, it's really just an excuse, and a poor one at that.
"you justify this opinion with two videos from black people."
Of course I do. Otherwise you'd just call me a racist. I assume you're now going to do your best to discredit these two gentlemen instead of answering the facts...
"Neither Larry Elder nor Denzel Washington is an expert on incarceration or the US justice system."
But you are, of course...
"Larry Elder, in fact, is a right wing political pundit, so his income relies on his viewership. This calls into question his reliability."
Yes, only left wing pundits like yourself have the monopoly on truth, I see... Look, I have no horse in this race, but I can only assume that you're a flaming Democrat. :D
"I'd suggest you watch the documentary 13th[2] or read up on these issues from actual experts."
> He starts by noting that white men and black men are killed by police at around the same rate. This is, again true. But this means that Black people are killed at around 5 times the rate of White people.
> These racial differences show more police violence towards minorities.
Naturally. Don't you think it's completely logical that people who also commit far mor crimes, also get into far more tussles with the police? Probably find a way for your community to become more law abiding and peaceful, and this will stop being an issue all by itself!
One way to do it, is to ask for policies that open up for more social community work, where the first responder to economical, drug related or abusive behaviour stops being the police, but rather a social worker, or some other community representative. It's just a suggestion. Should be right down your lane since you are a left winger!
If you can get democratic traction for something like this, which is far more fruitful than playin the blame game, I think it would help crime go down greatly. It's basically what is done in my own country, and while the system isn't perfect, it's preferable to storming communities with police all the time; a thing that naturally causes some legitimate outrage, though it's not necessarily due to racism.
This way of doing things isn't free, however—and let's face it, Norway is filthy rich—so you can assume there will be pushback on how it should be funded, especially from the Right. Then there's the fact that Norway is a far smaller and more close-knit society in general. But then so are most ethnicly homogeneous neighbourhoods. I still think it's an idea to at least explore. And I also think these ideas are far more preferable to the Right than tearing down statues.
> Elder then notes that police forces can be diverse, which is true but ultimately a distraction.
No, it's not. I means there's a far less chance that the police are racist.
> He mentions the NYPD as an example of a highly diverse police force, but neglects to mention that the NYPD's Stop and Frisk policy was so problematic that it was deemed unconstitutional due to its discriminatory nature[4].
Dude, what has the obviously political and administrative policy of "stop and frisk" to do with the racial composition of NY cops? I'll tell you: Nothing! They'd have to carry out that policy whether they were all black, all white, or diverse to the point of employing martians!
Either way, don't you think it's a little unfair to try to pin political policies on the police force? In fact, then Mayor Bloomberg (D) had the power to stop the frisking policy in New York at any point, but instead he chose to defended it.[1] And for good reason, because AFAIK it was wildly successful, and made New York a lot safer for most people.
> He then mentions that the Police-Public contact survey shows no evidence of police abuse against black people, but the Fryer paper Elder cites manages to reach the opposite conclusion: that based on the Police-Public contact survey, there is statistically significant evidence of greater police use of force against minority populations, even when controlling for a number of factors.
That's because there is no opposite here... Abuse ≠ Legitimate use of force.
> He then mentions his movie, Uncle Tom, which contains a number of "conservative thinkers", who are mostly pundits. It contains no academic experts.
Of course. All academic experts of the Right are just pundits. I get it...
> [It] ignores the Southern Strategy[5], an explicit Republican strategy to gain support in the south by appealing to white fears about race in the wake of the civil rights movement. 13th goes into detail on this.
Were these fears unfounded then? Obviously the numbers show that blacks do indeed kill far more whites than whites kill blacks, both per capita and in pure numbers. Again, facts, not claims. Do you think that shouldn't be a cause for consern? Man, lives are literally at stake!
> Dude, what has the obviously political and administrative policy of "stop and frisk" to do with the racial composition of NY cops? I'll tell you: Nothing!
That's exactly my point. When I said that Larry Elder's video mentions a number of true but irrelevant facts, this is what I meant. The fact that the police force is relatively diverse doesn't actually matter if the policies and culture of the police perpetuate systemic injustice and violence.
> And for good reason, because AFAIK it was wildly successful, and made New York a lot safer for most people.
Not really, crime in NYC didn't fall at a rate particularly faster than anywhere else. Freakonomics has a good chapter on this that suggests that the general drop in crime may have been caused by social policies across the US that helped stabilize the black community, notably the legalization of Abortion. Yeah, the legalization of Abortion in 1973 caused a drop in crime in the mid 90s.
> Naturally. Don't you think it's completely logical that people who also commit far mor crimes, also get into far more tussles with the police?
No, because the study controlled for other factors including violence of the person the police was interacting with. The conclusion of the paper (which if you'd read, you'd already know) was that police were more likely to escalate force with a black person compared to a white person exhibiting the same behavior. The caveat to this was that as the level of force increased, the racial disparity decreased. So while police were significantly much more likely to grab or manhandle a black person than a white person (again, controlling for the behavior), they were only mildly more likely to tase a black person and statically equivalently likely to shoot people of all races.
> That's because there is no opposite here... Abuse ≠ Legitimate use of force.
No, like I said this was controlling for the behavior of the civilian. So police were more likely to use force on black people for exhibiting the same behavior.
It's also worth mentioning here that crime is in many ways socially constructed. And the US justice system does a lot of things to make poor (and especially poor black) people admit to crimes that they didn't commit[0].
District Attorneys and police work together to put the most people behind bars (in some cases because they have quotas to meet, again watch 13th for more here), and they can do so most effectively by overpolicing poor communities.
This is for two reasons, one, yes, those communities often have more crime occurring in them, but two the people in them can't defend themselves. So if you're innocent put charged with a crime, you are forced to take a plea bargain or be stuck in jail (unless you can afford bail, which affluent people can, but poor people can't). So you admit to a crime which you didn't commit just so that you can get out of jail and maintain your employment.
Notice how this means that even innocent people are admitting to crimes they didn't commit, because it's actually in their best interest to do so. Notice how this means that crime numbers in some of these over-policed communities could be artificially inflated since even people are admitting to crimes they didn't commit.
> One way to do it, is to ask for policies that open up for more social community work, where the first responder to economical, drug related or abusive behaviour stops being the police, but rather a social worker, or some other community representative. It's just a suggestion. Should be right down your lane since you are a left winger!
Yes, this is the entire idea of Defund The Police, an idea being pushed by BlackLivesMatter[1].
> Were these fears unfounded then?
It doesn't matter. People being afraid isn't an excuse to enact literally explicitly racist laws.
> [Atwater] (F) essentially admits the racism at the core of the southern strategy, and the need to, over time, move from explicit and overt racism to more systematic changes that, while not explicitly racist, help white people at the expense of black people.
Well, that's a pretty tall claim! All it lacks is a "what about Atwater" at the start. I can play that game too, pal. What about Biden's racist remarks? Man, I call strawman! What's some quaint southern strategy from the 70's to do with the current FBI dataset on racial crime anyway? And who even is this Atwater-dude? I see he used to play with B.B King tho, so he can't be all bad, right? :D
> I actually forgot one thing Elder mentions, that no one cares when unarmed white people are shot by police. This isn't actually true: (...)
Dude, we all know what BLM is about, and it's not whites...
> laws were passed that disproportionately keep black people in prison, notably around crack vs. powder cocaine.
"Laws were passed..." This sounds awfully like an excuse—again—due to the fact (not claim) that blacks statistically commit more crimes anyway.
I note that a lot of states are currently relaxing their stance on Marijuana, though. Hopefully this will lead to fewer people being arrested for petty things like posession.
I think it's horrible to incarcerate people merely for possessing small amounts of illegal substances, especially if it's for a long time. More likely that is due to addiction, rather than trying to push it. And addiction requires treatment and care, not incarceration. Both treatment and incercerations cost money though, so IMHO it's better to spend it on treating the thing, rather then employing a tactic that is proven to be ineffective (i.e. higher or harsher sentences for petty crimes).
On the other hand, crack and cocaine really does destroy lives, so going harsh on it, is IMHO the only right thing to do. I mean, ruining your own life is one thing, but it's quite another to ruin the lives of someone else, and that is what pushing drugs does. That is why I think pushing drugs should always incurr the full wrath of society.
But then it's probably better to go after the big guys, rather than scoring easy points for your unit's stats by going ofter small fry. It might look good on paper, but throwing addicts in jail doesn't really solve the problem. For that you need to find the big fish, which is sadly a lot harder and costly to do. And sometimes those guys are well connected too. Either way, this is pretty tangential to the topic we're discussing.
The fact is, you're individually responsible for following the law. And it's illegal to use certain substances for good reason. When people then still go ahead and use illegal substances, despite knowing the law full well, then you can't really blame that on the system. You can't really blame the law for making black kids fatherless! The only guys responsible for that, are the fathers themselves, in that case, because what they did is inexcusable.
The fact is, they did have alternatives, but chose not to take them. That is how they ended up behind bars, and not the other way around. Perhaps you can blame that on bad culture, but then man the fuck up and do something about that culture then, and don't blame others for your own failure.
In fact, by blaming "the law," or "policies" or "whites" or "unfairness," you really only end up communicating that blacks are inferiour. On top of that, such behaviour naturally incurrs some legitimate prejudice, because why should you respect someone who themselves communicate that they are weaker than others? I mean, if that's really the case, then it's probably better to ask for help, rather than playing the blame game.
The only logical answer here, is to do like Denzel, and demand that blacks take back their own pride, and start fixing their own lives. Because that's the only way they'll also garner respect from others. And guess what, in todays America, they have all the opportunity to do just that! Hell, if you go into politics, you can even become the next president now! So stop playing the victim card and take back your pride! Then notice how people will immediatly start respecting you more. People who have self-respect of their own, and not pussies who bend the knee to avoid trouble at every corner.
I'll remind you that you asked for us to have this discussion in a respectful manner. You don't seem to be doing that. So I'll just leave you with a few questions to ponder:
If Black people and White people use cannabis at the same rate, why are Black people more than 3x more likely to be arrested for marijuana use?
> The only guys responsible for that, are the fathers themselves, in that case, because what they did is inexcusable.
So given the above fact (that black people are more likely to be punished for the same crimes), you're saying that it is ultimately black people's responsibility to be more law abiding than white people?
> On top of that, such behaviour naturally incurrs some legitimate prejudice, because why should you respect someone who themselves communicate that they are weaker than others?
How does saying "the cards are stacked against us" imply weakness? Again, based on the facts, you want Black people to hold themselves to a higher standard than white people to stay out of the justice system. You're asking them to work harder. How is them recognizing that they are held to a higher standard recognizing some kind of weakness?
> What's some quaint southern strategy from the 70's to do with the current FBI dataset on racial crime anyway?
Do you think drug laws passed in the 70s, but which are still on the books today, and which define what is criminal might influence the statistics on crime today?
Do you think it might be worth looking at the disparate impact of some of those laws if people admitted that the strategy at the time was to pass laws that had negative impact on certain communities?
> you that you asked for us to have this discussion in a respectful manner. You don't seem to be doing that.
Do you think this is respectful: "You're making a lot of (intentional or not) dogwhistles"?
You might not believe it, but I actually do respect you. That's why I'm not treating you like a snowflake, and instead answering in kind. But also because you deserve to hear the truth.
> If Black people and White people use cannabis at the same rate, why are Black people more than 3x more likely to be arrested for marijuana use?
I don't buy the equivalence. Obviously, if blacks sell more drugs, then they will also be more closely followed by cops. This is certainly the case in Norway, where there are far less native drug pushers than non-Westerners, for instance. On top of that, if they already are followed more by cops, why aren't they changing their bad habits?
> So given the above fact (that black people are more likely to be punished for the same crimes), you're saying that it is ultimately black people's responsibility to be more law abiding than white people?
There is no "more" in this equation. Either you abide by the law, or you don't. And if you don't, then there can be consequences. If there is already more police present in your community, because more crimes are being committed there, then yeah, you'll get caught more often for committing those crimes. That isn't unfair. That is a consequence of you doing something illegal.
Does this mean that more whites probably get away with smoking pot? Probably. But then they commit far less crimes anyway.
> How does saying "the cards are stacked against us" imply weakness?
Because they're not saying that "the cards are stacked against us". They're instead claiming victimhood, spesifically at the hands of whites, as an excuse for committing more crimes, and doing more murders than any other community, and most of all among themselves. The fact is, that they have every opportunity to not commit those crimes, and instead become productive members of society. Nobody is forcing them to pick up that gun, that blunt or that screwdriver. Not even the policies you claim are so unfairly targetted at them. It's just not true. And so the only conclusion you can draw from such moaning, is that they are weaker and softer than other men, and so they probably don't deserve as much respect. The only way to turn that around, is to suck it up and accept responsibility for their own lives. Then added respect, and peace and prosperity, will effortlessly follow.
> Again, based on the facts, you want Black people to hold themselves to a higher standard than white people to stay out of the justice system.
No. Just a high enough standard to don't do drugs, don't do crime, and don't murder people, and instead be productive members of society. It's not exactly rocket science.
> You're asking them to work harder.
No, I don't. I'm merely asking them to follow the law, and stop pandering to a destructive and self-victimizing culture.
> How is them recognizing that they are held to a higher standard recognizing some kind of weakness?
That's not true. I'm holding them to the same standard as everyone else. Anything else would indeed be racism. Or wait, are you suggesting that blacks should be held to a lower standard than the rest of the communy then?
> Do you think drug laws passed in the 70s, but which are still on the books today, and which define what is criminal might influence the statistics on crime today?
Do you think the earth is revolving around the sun?
> Do you think it might be worth looking at the disparate impact of some of those laws if people admitted that the strategy at the time was to pass laws that had negative impact on certain communities?
All laws should always be reviewed and amended if they aren't serving the purpose they were originally made to serve. Why aren't BLM protesting these laws, then, and lobbying to have them changed, instead of tearing down statues? That is, if these laws really aren't serving their purpose. As I said before, pushing drugs still seriously and adversely affects the lives of others, and people doing that deserve the full wrath of the law.
> Do you think this is respectful: "You're making a lot of (intentional or not) dogwhistles"?
Absolutely! I'd certainly want to know if there were connotations to my words that could offend people or cause them to misconstrue my words.
> But also because you deserve to hear the truth.
I also want to make want to make something very clear before continuing: I have done nothing but correct you so far. There is no truth you have revealed to me. You have opinions that are based in misinformation, and I'm doing my best to correctly inform you. This is not a comment on you personally. We all are misinformed about things. But this isn't and hasn't been a debate. It's been me giving you information you didn't have before. I haven't been exposed to anything I haven't heard before. I'm spending my time trying to educate you and others, because I think that's a worthwhile thing to do.
> Does this mean that more whites probably get away with smoking pot? Probably. But then they commit far less crimes anyway.
No, that's the point I've made 3x now: the rates of marijuana use are basically the same (technically they're slightly higher) among white Americans. In other words, white people are committing, per capita, more drug crime, but being arrested 3x less per capita. That isn't the same standard.
And keep in mind here I'm only focusing on the crime of drug use. Nothing else. You keep mentioning murder and violent crime, but there is no reason that someone else choosing to murder people should affect how likely or not I am to be prosecuted for smoking weed.
> Because they're not saying that "the cards are stacked against us".
Yes they are. Saying that laws are enforced unequally is saying the cards are stacked against them.
> Just a high enough standard to don't do drugs, don't do crime, and don't murder people, and instead be productive members of society.
But again, this isn't the standard you're holding white members of society to. So you're holding black members of society to a higher standard.
> I'm merely asking them to follow the law
But you're not asking white members of society to follow the law. They can break the same laws you want black people to follow without facing consequences.
> I'm holding them to the same standard as everyone else. Anything else would indeed be racism. Or wait, are you suggesting that blacks should be held to a lower standard than the rest of the communy then?
No, I'm suggesting that they should be held to the same standard.
You can claim that you just want everyone to follow the law, but the reality is that the laws are enforced unevenly. Again, for crimes that we know white and black people commit at the same rate, black people are arrested 3x more often. You are asking black people to commit 3x less crime to be treated equally under the laws. That is a far higher standard for one race than another.
Let me perhaps explain this one more way. Let's compare exactly two people. One black, one white. If we hold them to the same standard, we would expect that if they committed the same number of criminal acts over their lifetime they would be arrested the same number of times. Anything else is a different standard. They are currently held to a different, higher standard. This should change.
> I'm holding them to the same standard as everyone else. Anything else would indeed be racism. Or wait, are you suggesting that blacks should be held to a lower standard than the rest of the communy then?
They are. Organizations are more than capable of doing multiple things.
But it's worth mentioning that many people have learned a ton about US history in the past month or so due to these actions. US history is whitewashed (both literally and figuratively) when taught in most schools. Even the idea that the civil war was fought over slavery is not always taught to some kids.
Similarly, the US forms a sort of cult of personality around various historical figures: the founding fathers, Lincoln, etc. These people did good things for the nation, yes, but weren't without fault. Washington for example owned hundreds of slaves, and even abused legal loopholes in laws he helped pass to maintain ownership of his slaves[0].
When we ignore the flaws and negative aspects of our history, and the normalization of oppression that is laced into the history of the US, it's much easier to pretend that things were, and are, better than reality. It's still possible to admire people's good acts in context, in museums for example. But cults of personality and cults of nationalism don't help anyone. And tearing them down helped encourage me and may others to learn some more history.
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.
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.
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.)
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s not argument ad populum, it’s actually arguing that you should feel excluded or discomforted not being in majority.
Anyway, I think the systemic racism discussion isn’t so clear and requires heavy analysis to get it right, you can’t hand wave it, and I’d love to have a nice discussion, but not so much to have it here.
> 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.
> 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.
> >"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.
> 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.
This comment reminds me of something I saw earlier this morning. A bunch of redlining maps in various cities in California.
Made think of something other than, Black and Hispanic people couldn't get loans in the neighborhoods they lived in. Yadda yadda.
The flipside is whites couldn't get loans in those neighborhoods either. Which meant if you were a middle class white person you couldn't buy a cheaper house in a mixed neighborhood. You were pretty much forced to buy in a neighborhood where covenants excluded Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.
The system was designed to enhance segregation.
More to your point when you have system that explicitly or implicitly categorizes people and uses that to single them out of punishment or harassment that's group punishment. That's usually considered a no no by civilized people.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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:
> 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.
Wondering the same thing. I guess we are to assume that there was no stolen car, but then why wouldn't the author just state that? And in fact, wouldn't that warrant more than a reprimand?
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.
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.
I think you misinterpreted my comment, friend. I never said or impled that cops don't pull people over for speeding. I said they don't target a single individual and follow them around waiting for them to speed. This was the part of the parent comment I was responding to:
>Putting someone under watch
That does not mean following a single individual a cop may encounter on the road that looks sketchy and wait for them to speed. It means staking out outside "Joe Blow who lives as 12345 Address St."'s house because Joe Blow is part of a demographic that is predicted to be more likely to be involved with gang activity, and waiting for him to get in his car and speed. The difference is an "unknown" or "random" individual vs. a "known" or "pre-planned" individual, because that is what the parent comment was discussing. I apologize if my original comment was unclear! I say this respectfully, it may be beneficial to more carefully examine the context of comments so that discussions may be more productive in the future.
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.
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.
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.
It would seem farfetched to suggest that this is a widespread issue. And yet it would seem farfetched to suggest that cops would just kill someone for the fuck of it, and yet here we are.
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."
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.
> It's really hard for me to believe that gut feeling is better than data.
This is exactly the problem. People assume that data means something by virtue of it being data.
Having a judge make a decision based on gut feelings might not be any more accurate, but at least people wouldn't assume that it was accurate. People would look at it and realize that it was arbitrary. If the data isn't giving good results, then at least we should use a system that makes that fact obvious.
> 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%
At a certain point, it would be just as accurate, and far more honest, for us to just flip a few coins. Get it out in the open what we're doing. Get rid of the built-in assumptions people have that the system is fair or predictive just because it's based on data. Make observers live with the fact that it's arbitrary.
And if you want to use that argument for a parole hearing that's... I can accept that as an argument. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand the reasons someone might have for holding that position.
We're talking about holding people after their sentence is done. That's not ok.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
IDK about the others but maybe we don’t bring up Minority Report because that system actually worked for the most time. It took a major conspiracy by the chief of police himself to make it frame Tom Cruise’s character. Other than that, murder was basically nonexistent and people were happy.
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.
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%.
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.
PredPol is headquartered there: "PredPol Inc, the Santa Cruz-headquartered firm that pioneered the technology, said that it supported the city resolution’s requirement that predictive policing “will not perpetuate bias”, among other criteria."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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?
> 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?
There's a difference between a team of academics/statisticians analyzing policing and crime data and then debating the resulting conclusions, and a widespread set of predictive policing tools that are designed to be used by feet on the ground. The former is great! and important. The latter is the problem.
> 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.
The entire point I'm trying to make is that it's very _difficult_ to figure out what your data biases are because usually the data is _all you have_. My point isn't that I have "special knowledge" about where the biases are. I do not have any such special knowledge. Domain experts will have more "special knowledge" and by that I mean through their experience they will have hopefully learned difficult lessons about the limitations of certain types of data available to them, but even they will not have perfect knowledge about where all of the biases in their data are.
> for example, what is the bias in incoming 911 calls?
again, I do not know! Do you? Do you feel 100% sure to say that the propensity of someone to dial 911 would not be dependent on socioeconomic factors, or on the nature of the crime, or on the alleged perpetrator? Do white people feel more comfortable calling 911 on black or brown people than black or brown people calling 911 at all?
You can try to correct for certain biases if you have access to all of the relevant info (e.g. in the above example, we could in fact try to answer this question if (1) we had the actual background rate of crimes being committed, independent of 911 calls, (2) all of the relevant information (e.g. race/income of caller and perpetrator, the crime type, etc.), and even then we would be missing other biases that we may not be consciously trying to "correct" for). But even this is subject to lots of error (how do we get the actual baseline level of crimes? hint: you can't), and will miss other factors that we haven't thought of.
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!
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.
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?
You are talking about theory, GP is talking about the actual computer systems that police have today. And in fact GP already made good suggestions for bridging the gap:
> far stricter processes should be in place, more similar to getting approval for a new airplane or medicine
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.
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.
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.
"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%.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Are we assuming that police arrests and citations for carrying an illegal knife actually reduce or deter knife crime? Because I don't believe that it does.
--Same as you, just using knives as an example because I agree that they should not be illegal. (And a lot more could be said about certain types of knives being illegal and others not and the idea that certain racial groups or gangs might be more likely to carry that certain type, crack vs cocaine anyone?) But you could replace knives with any type of crime.--
But the reality is that we have a system that will over-prosecute and over-charge people for small crimes which causes a disruption to a lower income person's already precarious situation. Putting through a system full of violence, inhumanity, and other people that are in for much worse and then releasing them back to that same community with a do-not-hire sign permanently around their neck (a felony). After which they are likely to turn to crime to survive.
So while I agree that looking at knife crime data would make more sense than looking at arrests in the scope of the data conversation, the idea that heavy handed policing and a messed up "justice" system will likely create negative pressure on the long term for crime in that community, then the data is sort of moot.
Additionally, the conversation in this mini-documentary pointed to the fact that police were/are incentivized (at least in his Detroit precinct) to "get their statistics". So they would gravitate to these poorer, black neighborhoods because they could stop and hassle low income minorities without repercussion a lot easier than a white middle class neighborhood where people were less likely to even be walking outside and more likely to file complaints for police harassment.
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.
Burn qualified immunity to the ground and salt the earth. This would be the simplest way to keep police accountable for their behavior. It would also imply a massive change in how policing is done (demilitarization), so that's two big wins.
We can lay a lot of the rotten police problem in the USA, and the world, at the fact that the accountability just isn't there.
I always thought only hiring police officers from the area being policed was a good start.
I don't mean that if you hire someone they have to move into the district. I mean that your pool of hires is the people who have already lived in the district for a particular amount of time (years).
The locals know what laws not to enforce and how to gain the trust of the community.
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.
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.
All of that is personal bias enforced by police. None of that can be balanced out for, and I don't understand how that's in the scope of this conversation, to be honest. With predictive police distribution (for lack of a better term), which would be placing patrols in high criminal areas (and for the sake of argument, let's put this at victim crimes, like sexual assault - tend to happen when bars let out around the most bar dense areas), an increased police presence putting patrols there would by there very nature reduce some sexual assault and drunk driving, statistically. People would be more likely to call an Uber, out of shear fear based reaction, and less likely to dump out into the street and beat the crap out of each other or sexually assault a woman in public. This is all done unconsciously anyway, but weights can be adjusted on a machine model int predictive modeling to try and remove the race bias out as much as possible, where as when such predictive modeling is done inside an officer's mind, unconscious bias is an ever present problem where weights cannot be adjusted as easily, if at all. If that makes sense.
A machine model of police deployment just makes for a more transparent model, so long as it isn't kept as a black box, or referred to as strictly "AI". If we arm our society with basic understanding of statistical maths and scientific grounding, they'll stop looking at these things as magic and relying on anecdotal experience. No offense meant.
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.
> 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?
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.
Disproportionate policing of a demographic is going to lead to disproportionate application of the law, both spurious and justified, to that demographic.
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.
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?
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.
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 :( )
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.
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.
If explanation, reasoning and thought processes are required then make them part of the job description. A detective who can't explain his action is unfit for the job. A software which can't explain it's recomendations is unfit for the job.
Btw, explanations given to judges have nothing to do with what really happend. A detective can tell a lie and the software will pick the explanation which is most likely to be acepted by the judges.
>and often the algorithms behind it are secret
and the algorithms used in brains are open source?
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?
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.
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.
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]
> 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.
I've had this conversation before and no one has been able to defend their position outside of "there's a book with this title" or "but weed though".
Even looking at the reviews of that book, it seems like the author doesn't even argue the title. It's just specific cases of people getting screwed over in court. (Which of course happens, I'm not arguing against that.)
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.
> Bias is when ML sees something not relevant as a pattern and uses it as a feature to determine the future.
This alone does not fit the definition of statistical bias. Statistics is not capable of proving causation. So a completely trivial fact or feature can be a great estimator nonetheless. Of course if the system changes then you have a problem (with or without a causal model).
If historic data is warped by police of course, then you're using a biased sample and will indeed get a biased estimate that way. But if you correctly use randomly sampled data and a method that has been mathematically-proven to be unbiased, then if your model says to deny loans based on race, you would likely make fewer bad loans more by following it versus ignoring this information.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”?
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:
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.)
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'.
The Elijah McClain case makes me very sad; not only for everything listed in the article, but also because he was a skinny, nerdy kid like most of my friends (and many of this site's readers, I imagine).
Just a regular guy going about his business, and he is murdered (and I don't use that term lightly) by the very people sworn to "protect and serve" him.
__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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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".
> 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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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".
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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."
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Yea I couldn't figure it out. The context of the thread was which way the causality goes from density of policing to level of crime. What were you saying then?
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.
"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.
> 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).
It's not just a question of "going straight" - most "criminals" aren't professionals who have to make a discrete decision to stop their hypothetical "life of crime." Even if we ignore the types of "crime" that essentially involve engaging in normal behavior and being unlucky enough to get caught (ex. jaywalking, driving after having a few drinks at happy hour, or smoking marijuana) and look at violent crime, you'll find that a significant percentage of that is the result of social/psychological/economic instability and is directed at those within the social network of the individual involved. Many of these crimes are so-called "crimes of passion" or the result of some form of mental illness - in neither case is an individual likely to stop, think carefully, and rationally conclude that committing a violent crime is in their best interest.
You can lock someone like that up to prevent them from repeating actions that harm those around them, but you can only do that retroactively (which does little in material terms for victims). Given that less than half of crimes committed each year (including violent crime) are even reported to the police, and that a majority of crimes which are reported to the police aren't solved, it seems much more proactive to work towards a solution that prevents people from ending up in the type of situation that produces criminals to begin with. Proactive policing can easily be at odds with that goal if it throws petty criminals into unmanageable situations that preclude them from having a "normal" life. We can't forget that poverty itself is hugely correlated with crime.
> But I'm not convinced that looking the other way at violent crime is at all the right approach.
I don't think anyone is proposing "looking the other way" with regard to violent crime. I'm certainly not. I think it would be beneficial to make prisons more humane, in that it would increase the chance of rehabilitating them, but I don't think enacting some real-life version of "The Purge" is a reasonable course of action.
> However, there is no way this is the main causal link between policing & crime.
Oh, I definitely agree. My intention was to point out an edge case, not imply that police are the main source of crime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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, ...
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.
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.
>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.
"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.
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):
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
No, if you dispute that the plumber did not do the work correctly, it is not theft of services. Theft of services is for a subset of fraudulent behavior.
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.
> Living in a country with an extremely efficient police department is not fun either. See: China and Singapore.
I lived in Singapore it was one of the best times of my life. But you know what? I never even saw the police there. I can't even tell you how their uniform or cars look like. But also I didn't smoke pot or vandalised; I respected the rules that that community set up.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Honestly, for all the money that they spend on cops and these high tech programs, there is a much simpler solution.
Give the poor people money!
Give them a safe place to live. Pay for their rent, or offset it with some rental assistance. Give them jobs. Give their children education, so that they can grow up to get better jobs. Give them medical care, so that they can stay healthy. Give them access to healthy foods so that they can eat healthy.
Stop arresting people for stupid things. And dismantle the Prison Industrial Governing System.
Have a heart already.
It’s really not a difficult problem to solve.
This is not a problem that requires advanced technology. It is a societal problem, that requires all of society to solve it.
America needs to spread the wealth. America needs to be more inclusive. Not exclusive!
Back before computers were a thing in most people's homes, let alone pockets, police would plot on a map the crime reports of the past year and assign more patrols to areas with a high density of crime.
Is this practice now banned? Because this is predictive policing, albeit in a crude form. Presumably it just means computerized predictive policing, but it still seems odd that people see to think that analyzing past patterns of crime to better allocate police is something novel.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This should be obvious to people, I hope. The fact that you might break a law is obviously not evidence that you broke the law. This is common sense. Predictive policing is a joke concept.
Devil's Advocate: Assuming predictive policing actually worked...How much racism (or classism) is tolerable versus how much of a cut in crime?
Extreme case: Would we accept 1 racist interaction for 1000 cases where predictive policing solved the case?
Realistic case: Would we accept 1 racist interaction for 10 cases where predictive policing solved the case?
My point: We know about implicit and institutional racism being VERY hard to erase...can we live with a small amount of it in return for a much more effective police force?
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.
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.
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.
I’ve thought about something. I’m pretty sure that being single can really do some damages to you, or having a poor family more easily leads to you becoming a criminal. I’ve once heard someone saying that if everybody could get hooked then there would be no terrorism. Does it mean we should invest in surveillance and monitoring of people who are poor and single? Or should we instead fund aids, universal healthcare, free education or even UBI.
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.
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.
This is big mistake, because being able to reason about past facts and making assumptions about the feature is a skill that sets man apart from the rest of nature. If you fall into a purely reactive mode you won't likely create great things and stability, because firemen are always too busy.
Isn't predictive policing actually two different things combined into one? 1. Predict crime 2. Police. I could imagine a near infinite permutation of actions one could take at step 2 that don't boil down to "policing".
There are definitely techniques that could be used to modify this. over sampling of cases when dealing with unbalanced class problems is one technique. No reason to throw out the baby with the bath water
Predictive has always been used. You can predict a lot of things based on data even on your own. A certain neighborhood downtown could have more criminals. Just tip if the iceberg here
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
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.
> "low-income, ethnic minority neighbourhoods have historically been over-policed so the data shows them as crime hotspots, leading to the deployment of more police to those areas."
This is wrong. They've been under-policed. And the unwillingness to not lie about that, let alone understand why that is, is why "predictive policing" is disliked. It's also why the rhetorical trick of "systemic racism" is necessary to elide the fact that racism is rare today and justify why politicians are attacking & dismantling functioning institutions rather than fix the underlying issue.
Does anyone seriously claim that suburbs like Beachwood, OH and Palo Alto, CA and Everett, WA would discover a bunch of undetected rapes, gun violence, robberies, and murders if they were "over-policed" like low-income black neighborhoods? No, they don't. Because that would be too silly of a claim to make directly to anyone who has lived in such a place.
There's a humane chain of logic we must follow here. Do we think slavery, red-lining, drugs & drug-enforcement, and the collapse of rising working class wages have hurt African-American well-being? Yes. Does poverty correlate with crime? Yes. Does poverty correlate with African-American neighborhoods? Yes. Ok, so we can admit that African Americans account for a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime in the United States without disrespecting how black communities got to this point or worrying that this simple, obvious conclusion is driven by racism.
This is trivially produced from well-done statistical research. If you control for either poverty rates or crime rates, you recover the same rate of police use of lethal force for both whites and blacks.
"Oh, well, the data sets from the past may be biased with racism"
13% of the population accounts for between 40-50% of the homicides, year over year. Alright - How large do you think purely unfounded biases account for that? Half? Even then, you have both 1) A LE agencies either falsifying or mishandling data on a massive scale, a monumental scandal in itself and 2)a population accounting for 2x rather than 3-4x their expected homicide rate. Not a huge improvement. I don't feel like the claims of "warped data" deserve this much respect because the people who make them never give the same thought to the much more obvious conclusion - The data is true, but I do.
ML is disliked here because it doesn't lie. Politicians cannot torture or cajole logistic regression to lie because it doesn't have a career, it doesn't need a promotion, it just graphs the truth. But more than this, they dislike it because it indicts them for not doing more, and more meaningful and honest things, to actually improve the lot of African-Americans in this country. The first step to doing that is being honest.
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.
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...