Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

Considering the truly abysmal track record of the social sciences [1], this seems at the very least understandable with regards to the "non-hard" sciences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

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.

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.

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.

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"

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

Ideally we could spend 100% on the long term but that is impractical.

This is an unproven assertion. You should provide evidence of it, because on its face it is a completely ludicrous claim. Rates of illicit drug activity, violent crime, etc are _not_ evenly distributed in society. Not even close.

> Exhibit B) Silicon Valley openly brags about microdosing acid to perform at work at their half million $ jobs. Overpolicing would ensnare them if overpolicing existed in that demographic and then they would be ineligible for jobs the rest of their life. If you cant be subsidized by your family then you have actual crime to consider. Guess where you will live too.

Quite simply, the reason people that microdose are not getting thrown in jail is because they're not doing the other things that would lead to them getting discovered, i.e. engaging in crime or driving a car with significant (meaning, more than a person can safely swallow to avoid arrest) quantities of lsd.

---

Just incase you try to pin a belief-set on me, I oppose the war on drugs, no-knock raids, and even speeding tickets completely and would entirely abolish them if I were the BFDL.

> 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)

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.

cutting police budget = less police

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.

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.

[1] - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/h...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1]: FBI murder statistics by race from 2018, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2018 was the latest year I could find such data on.

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.

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.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-bloomberg-st...

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!

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."

Thanks, I might look into it.

>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)

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.

We're talking about holding people after their sentence is done. That's not ok.

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.

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.

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.

I'd guess violent crime mostly "comes from" people calling 911, not from officers stumbling into rapes/mugging/murders/home invasions.

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...)

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.

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.

Your reply is rather aggressive for not apparent reason. As I said this is highly political in the middle of the current hysteria.

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.)

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.

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 :( )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop

In Germany we have no "predictive policing" to my knowledge, and even cameras and so on are used conservatively given how privacy sensitive we ware. Yet we've seen the exact same development over recent decades.

"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%.

Between '93 and '95 total USA crime rate dropped about 2% while in NYC it dropped 27%.

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.

This is fundamentally unscientific and will lead to stagnation at best, regression at worst, and progress only in the unlikely case. At some point we will have to reconcile the fact that the same mathematical and scientific techniques which we correctly apply to other sets of data produce unacceptable results any time models are conditioned on demographic data.

What then?

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.

And that's putting aside the question of whether it's right to deny people their rights in order to deter crime.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#Murders...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-c...

“In the 1970s and early ’80s, we built 70 percent of our subsidized units in the wealthiest white districts,” Myron Orfield said. “The metro’s affordable-housing plan was one of the best in the country.”

"Only three large metros where at least half the homes are within reach for young middle-class families also finish in the top 10 in the Harvard-Berkeley mobility study: Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis–St. Paul. The last is particularly remarkable. The Minneapolis–St. Paul metro area is richer by median household income than Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City (or New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles). Among residents under 35, the Twin Cities place in the top 10 for highest college-graduation rate, highest median earnings, and lowest poverty rate, according to the most recent census figures. And yet, according to the Center for Housing Policy, low-income families can rent a home and commute to work more affordably in Minneapolis–St. Paul than in all but one other major metro area (Washington, D.C.). Perhaps most impressive, the Twin Cities have the highest employment rate for 18-to-34-year-olds in the country."

"In 2008, Seoul imported a version of Minneapolis’s tax-sharing scheme. Since then, the gap in funding for social services among the city’s districts has narrowed. According to a 2012 analysis by Sun Ki Kwon, then a graduate student at the University of Kentucky, this has helped Seoul’s poorest communities grow their tax bases while only minimally affecting the city’s richest districts."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-mir...

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...

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.

My example occurred many moons ago before pot was decriminalized any where. I am old :)

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.

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.

- Drug offenses: 46%

- Weapons, Explosives, Arson: 20%

- Sex Offenses: 11%

- Extortion, Fraud, Bribery: 6%

- Immigration: 5%

- Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses: 5%

- Robbery: 3%

- Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses: 3%

So drugs vs (WEA + BLPO + R + HAAKO) is 46% vs 39%. Last I checked 46 > 39, so yeah we are talking about things like pot.

[0] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

__EDIT__: It appears that the parent has removed their comment, so let me add context. Here I'm responding to the parent's claim that you can outright dismiss drug related crimes because it is all about violent offenses. I'm just trying to show that drugs play a big role and thus dismissing them is naive.

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.

Look at arrest data, the former is exactly what we're talking about. Most of these cases of police brutality come from basically random stops that focus on such minor violations (turn signals, jaywalking, etc) or "your car/description matches a potential subject". See parent and weed usage vs who gets caught with weed.

Not to mention that you throw in rape/murder/assault into a sentence with vandalism. Police have a historically terrible track record with rapes in both processing cases as well as no record of stopping them. Police react to these incidents, not prevent them. The idea that police presence stops these is not supported either as when police reduced their presence in NYC neighborhoods, crime actually went down.[1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...

https://www.nytimes.com/article/who-was-elijah-mcclain.html

The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little to do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND local news sources.

Your last point seems to be the only real argument made but the majority of arrests have more to do with petty and drug related offenses as opposed to firearms according to the U.S. DoJ.

https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2

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.

Wherever you drive in America you will find drug abuse. But if you focus on any one area that leads to more arrests there, increasing their crime stats, leading to more policing, leading to more drug arrests, ...

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_and...

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services#:~:text=Thef....

The neighbourhood I grew up in was heavily mixed (along social strata) which prevented these problems from arising in the first place.