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Comment by longtimegoogler | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

In the US, I believe the majority of states license law enforcement personnel so they couldn't easily move to another department.

> I think the answer is to filter police who may have tendency to violence and racism out of the police force.

If this solution ended up filtering out most black police, would racism be more or less of a problem than it is now?

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