How to Predict Bad Cops in Chicago
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
A few rotten apples will ruin the whole barrel. Their rot encourages the rest of the apples to rot. A few bad apples can't be tolerated-- they have to be sorted out immediately or the whole barrel will be ruined and has to be thrown out.
I feel that it's an appropriate metaphor.
> The “few bad apples” theory of police violence posits that a small portion of the police force is ill-intentioned or inclined to misconduct or violence, while the majority of officers are good cops.
One of the middle paragraphs that I believe you are referring to:
> In addition to the outsize number of complaints, Kalven said, repeaters have broader, cultural impacts, both within and outside of the department. Within the department, repeaters might normalize misconduct toward residents, pushing other cops toward wrongdoing. Outside of the department, the behavior of these officers can turn the community against the police. “That’s what the ‘few bad apples’ theory doesn’t capture: the kind of compounding, metastasizing arms that flow from the impunity of bad cops,” Kalven said.
If the OP -- and the people that the OP cites -- has the correct interpretation of "bad apples", then the very point of examining the "bad apples theory" would be to capture the "kind of compounding, metastasizing arms that flow from the impunity of bad cops"...the way that quoted graf is phrased, it's as if the "bad apples theory" (and I think "theory" is being used incorrectly here, perhaps) were something different than the idea that bad apples cause the good apples to rot.
I skimmed the article twice but didn't see any chart, stat, or anecdote that alluded to examination of the impact of an officer on their precinct. That is, when a "bad apple" moves to a new precinct, does that precinct's rate of complaints increase in addition to the bad apple's expected rate of complaints?
The OP is mostly concerned with controlling for factors to argue that bad apples really are bad apples and not because they are in bad environments:
> Even after controlling for neighborhood, however, individual officers with more complaints in 2011-13 remained more likely to have complaints filed against them in 2014-15.
Which of course...is very important to analyze. But it seems straightforward to do a event-time analysis in which, after a major disciplinary incident, or even just a string of minor incidents, in which an officer is apparently unsanctioned, does that impact the rate of misconduct complaints among the other officers in the subsequent months? This could be applied to both bad officers who are being moved around (e.g. Prezbo-style as in "The Wire") or who, for whatever reason, don't get moved around.
"One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch, girl /
Oh, give it one more try /
Before you give up on love"
No matter how I look at it, I can't see any net good for voters when public employees unionize. Public employees are meant to serve the community they are employed in. The benefits of taking a government job are supposed to be in that you have a direct result in helping the communities around you; instead, the benefits most people see in government jobs are fat pensions and a bureaucracy that, if you're clever enough, you can get lost enough in to where you don't actually need to work to get paid. If anything ever hits the fan, you have multimillion-dollar, politically-connected attorneys ready to serve you.
In the case of police unions, it strengthens the "thin blue line" into a powerful bureaucracy that only looks out for the interests of its members, very often to the detriment of the people these public servants are supposed to be serving (and always in cases such as we've seen in Chicagoland recently.)
I would love counterexamples to this thought. I can't seem to find any of recent noteworthiness, but that could be due to the current anti-law-enforcement/anti-government streak getting pageviews in the news these days.
Two other non-union teaching gigs are preschool and college, and in both of those areas, the age distribution of teachers drops off precipitously at around 25 for preschool and 35 for college. My interpretation is that teaching has ceased to be a career. Disclaimer: I taught an engineering course at the nearby Big Ten university, but with no intention of doing it for more than one semester.
The teachers union doubtlessly protected the bad apples, but it also protected the good apples from things like wage erosion, gradually increasing workload, and getting blamed for outcomes that they can't control.
And I'm sure that education is in need of massive reform, but any reform will now have to be done with nobody interested in becoming a teacher.
I think that an unusual problem for public sector employees is that their wages are public knowledge, and as a result, are a target of resentment.
Going forward, I expect to see more of a relationship between pay and skill. As I said, the best teachers are the ones who are leaving.
Granted, I'm not wholeheartedly pro union, but I see some areas where unions have served a vital role with no obvious replacement. One is to function as a labor movement in general. The unions weren't perfect at it, but as the unions have been effectively defeated, nobody else has stepped up to speak for workers.
The other has been to make certain occupations -- such as teaching -- worth the risk of pursuing as a career, by providing a trustworthy career roadmap. Other countries provide such a roadmap through government oversight of education -- perhaps the state functions as a union in countries with more pro-labor governments. But our governments haven't stepped up to serve that role. Again, the teachers union wasn't perfect (most teachers believed that it needed to be reformed), but nobody has figured out an alternative way to make teaching career-worthy, or how to make schools work if teaching ceases to be a career.
The problem is that the police's advocate is so much more powerful than its opponents. An adversarial legal system like ours breaks down when the adversaries aren't close to evenly matched.
The benefit goes to the workers (not the voters, except inasmuch as the workers form a moderately large part of the voting public). The private sector consists of many organisations, while in the public sector there's basically a single employer and the employees NEED to unionise to bring about a balance with the powers of the employer.
Put it another way: imagine someone saying "I can't see any net good for voters when public employees aren't indentured slaves". Sure, the voters would get better value from public servants who didn't get paid and could be whipped into working faster, but that's not how we want to run society.
It can be incredibly frustrating to see unions fighting against progress and protecting their own against reasonable discipline. I'm not some union advocate (I'm a non-unionised private sector worker) - it would be great if members could take a more temperate line and bring their unions to a more reasonable position. But what the unions ARE isn't necessarily about bringing about ideal outcomes, it's about sheer exercise of power to fight the corner of their members.
The argument in favour of their existence is that it wouldn't be reasonable to prevent them, risking exposing their members to exploiting by power in the opposite direction.
I FOIA'd the same data twice and got rejected both times. Apparently the data was part of an active court case where ex cops were suing to get 4+ year old complaints deleted. It wasn't that surprising of an outcome, but... Damn.
the Obama administration has pushed for more cities to start publishing this data. While it's pretty light on standardization of formats between cities, it's still a step in the right direction. in the next year we're going to start seeing more cities publishing use of force data [1].
One neat example is Indiana's page here https://data.indy.gov/view/eg2v-uzn3 , though anonymized, you can still draw your own conclusions about things like race, sex, and age and how that plays into how willing the officer is to use force, and how far the force is taken
[1] https://www.socrata.com/socrata-and-white-house-partner-on-p...
Whatever your public-officials-facing evangelists are doing, they are doing it incredibly well, at a level that I would have never imagined when Socrata first popped up.
[1] http://www.compciv.org/homework/assignments/dallas-ois/
[1a] Another example of someone resorting to programming to collect this data (which is how I learned about its existence in the first place): https://github.com/dallasshooting/dallasshooting
[2] https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-D...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8v7lF5ttlQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h08jwjYVNAE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfLwdyMbSHE
As you can see, the cops, in true fascist form, take extremely unkindly to the concept of filing complaints. I highly doubt that the numbers used by 538 are inclusive, given how many complaints never make it to the official statistics or how many times citizens are abused and don't file a complaint for fear of further abuse.
To be fair, there's also not much data on which reports may be false, but who cares about mincing a minuscule percentage of the crystal clear data: the police in the US are a gang of criminals on the streets who are utterly out of control and have to be severely and immediately curbed/reduced for the sake of public safety. The cops can't stop slaughtering unarmed people. The cops can't stop seizing people's property. The cops won't stop covering up bad behavior of other cops. If one of a gang's members murders someone and the others cover it up, do we simper that it was only "one bad apple" and that the rest of the gang members are fine? No.
Whether in Chicago or elsewhere, the police are completely self servingly corrupt, and cover up for their fellows rather than clean house and support justice. I guarantee that there cannot be racial peace in this country without a public defeat being chalked for the police nationwide. The rest of us will benefit from such a defeat as well, of course.
http://ire.org/blog/on-the-road/2011/12/20/behind-story-trac...
> It is the cleanest set of data I have ever worked with. There was no big clean up with the data. Sometimes you get a data set and find out it has errors or wrong information. Everywhere we turned this data pointed us correctly...When we got the data I spent a week or more playing around with it – sorts and counts, which officers got written up the most number of times. Then I started looking at certain types of offenses, like “he had both a domestic violence and an excessive force.” From that I created a list of 150-200 officers. Once we had a nice healthy pool of targets we tried to find out more details on them by asking for the reports on the incidents.
> "This was a case where the government had this wonderful, informative dataset and they weren’t using it at all except to compile the information. I remember talking to one person at an office and saying: “How could you guys not know some of this? In five minutes of (SQL) queries you know everything about these officers?” They basically said it wasn't their job. That left a huge opportunity for us."
via the 538 article, this sentiment is repeated:
> The city had the tools to identify and curtail troublesome officers before Kalven pursued legal action. All of the complaints were stored within the department long before the Invisible Institute had access. As Kalven put it, “All the knowledge to transform the system existed within the system.”
edit: The 538 article is greatly appreciated...I didn't even know of the Citizens Police Data Project, and now I do...but skimming the dataset, I would take a different approach than the one implied in the 538 article title. A good data investigation doesn't have to come up with a statistical model for predicting bad behavior. A simple group-by-count is devastating enough. It is merely enough to show that with a simple aggregation of tabular data, we see that the majority of police officers are doing "fine" -- but that's not the point. The point is that when police officers are egregiously and repeatedly bad, there is apparently no institutional mechanism to root that out. And we have little reason to expect that to change if, God forbid, more and more police officers decide to go bad.
In other words, we can argue that Chicago cops are generally good/great. But the fact that we don't have as many cop-problems as we hypothetically could is a matter of luck and faith in human behavior and actions within a bureaucracy...Faith in the human spirit is a nice feel-good thing -- like believing the next shuttle will safely launch even though the Challenger just blew up -- but when it comes to public safety and justice, it is imperative to demand more. If the police loathe releasing disciplinary data (nevermind it being the law, of course), they should consider being a bit more proactive in policing themselves and removing the low-hanging bad apples.