Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?
Weed, fireworks on the 4th of July, teenagers fishing without licenses, there's all manner of things that are illegal at the state level yet locally accepted when done tastefully that the cops should not be ticketing people for because they people they serve generally do not support that.
If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's constantly enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable resulting in "man, that's bullshit" reactions from the people being ticketed then it will show in the aggregate stats and the chief will hopefully say tell him to knock it off and do something that has a higher ratio of public safety to pissing people off.
Literally every trade where customers rate performance has had to grapple with this. It's a solved problem. The real value add is using the ratings to compare members of the team, different types of interactions, etc, etc. Anyone who's ever managed or worked from a ticketing system should be familiar with this.
If the rest of the police force is doing the right thing and not modifying their behavior to get a better score then a single officer can always perform better than average by avoiding potentially negative encounters. This doesn't even get into differences in job duties/ patrol area that can totally skew the data even if every officer plays by the rules.
I and my coworkers can choose what tickets to grab out of the queue. Sure I could game it and only take easy ones but my boss would figure it out sooner or later. Salesmen can try and avoid customers that look like they might be a PITA, they mostly don't. It's really not a problem in practice.
>If the rest of the police force is doing the right thing and not modifying their behavior to get a better score then a single officer can always perform better than average by avoiding potentially negative encounters.
Why is that the "right thing"? The cops should be serving and protecting the people of the jurisdiction that employs them. And they should be enforcing the law as a means to this end.
The "potentially negative" encounters here are enforcement of laws that are considered unreasonable by the public. You're damn right I don't want the cops enforcing a state law on weed, or anything, when they know that a greater fraction of the locals consider said law unreasonable and would just give them a 0/5 for it.
>This doesn't even get into differences in job duties/ patrol area that can totally skew the data even if every officer plays by the rules.
They already deal with this stuff. Adding numbers and records doesn't make the problem different or worse.
Your boss has a list of all tickets. There is no list of all possible police interventions so it's going to be way less obvious when a policeman does it. Also salesmen avoiding undesirable customers absolutely is a problem. You just don't happen to be the type they ignore (e.g. obviously poor people)
> You're damn right I don't want the cops enforcing a state law on weed, or anything, when they know that a greater fraction of the locals consider said law unreasonable and would just give them a 0/5 for it.
It's not about what a greater fraction of the locals want though. It's about what the particular person they are contemplating enforcing a law against wants.
For most laws, the person breaking it will be the one that deem enforcement unreasonable. Someone speeding say the speed limit is unreasonably low. Someone driving a shitbox will think car regulations are unnecessary. Someone smoking weed will think drug laws are terrible. The problem is that these peoples are the ones that will give the rating and they won't go after the community consensus.
> Literally every trade where customers rate performance has had to grapple with this. It's a solved problem.
The problem is that police interactions are in nearly every case due to a bad situation. The "best case" is that you need to report a crime, but the police will need to enforce a law and the subject will usually not like this.
Exactly, if I get pulled over and issued a ticket for having a burnt out brake light, I'm not likely to actively thank and highly approve of the officer who just issued me a $100+ dollar ticket. The officer was well within the law to do so, and other citizens are safer after I get the light fixed, but emotionally I'm sure as heck going to be upset and want a little bit of passive-aggressive revenge. "Why did you pull me over and give me a ticket when I see much more dangerous cars on the road. Shouldn't you be focusing on bigger crimes?"
Maybe I'd leave a good review if the officer let me off with a warning, but officers would realize this and that would incentivize leniency. Not necessarily bad, but that could have unintended consequences.
Do you want to be healthy and strong in 15 years, or obese in 15 years?
Are your answers to the first compatible with your answers to the second? Even if they are, do you recognise that most people demonstrably don’t? That’s just an analogy, of course — most people want cops to be tough on criminals and recon at least one law (that their community chooses to keep) is dumb and they should be free to ignore it.
Imagine the town has absolute perfect police, who only every pull over dangerous people, only arrest criminals, and never harass or bother innocent people.
What would these perfect cops score as their ratings? Probably really low, because the only people who they interact with are going to be criminals and dangerous people, who will obviously hate the cops.
Of course, cops aren’t perfect, but my point is that you can’t use a system like this to determine that.
In ostensibly data-driven workplaces, the decision makers pick and choose which metrics to consider, influence how those metrics are measured, determine which exceptions and extenuating circumstances to consider, etc. The end result is often just as subjective as what you started with, except now the decision makers can conveniently pretend that the result comes from an objective process rather than their personal whims. It becomes a method for disclaiming responsibility.