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Comment by planetguy | Hacker News Reader

Their approach was to try to catch youth doing the right things and give them a Positive Ticket. The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. ... According to Clapham, youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half.

Really? I mean, really? I'm gonna have to see some extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim before I believe that having police go round giving out free movie tickets for not-littering is sufficient to reduce recidivism by an astonishing factor of seven. And I've never heard of it before.

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I was quite skeptical, but I just realized- you know what they are not doing when they are at the movies with friends? Committing crimes.

They're probably talking during the movie though. Frankly I think I'd rather have 'em out stealing cars.

They're going to burn in a very special level of hell. http://youtu.be/wNs21BiFA4Y?t=34s

My theory:

If they get very small prize for socially accepted behaviour, they cannot think they did sth socially accepted for that prize - that would mean they are cheap to buy. So they think they did it because they are the kind of guys, that do such things sometimes.

If I'm doing small acts of kindnes just because, it's hard to make this consistent with "fuck the others" attitude, stealing, etc. Easier to think I'm good guy overall, just made some mistakes before. Cognitive dissonance is a powerfull force.

But IANAP.

So what would happen when you stop giving out these Positive Tickets?

Yea, and http://www.positivetickets.com/ looks more like a promotional page for the book with no data.

Guy wrote a book about it and seems to have a good rep: http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-With-Law-Positive-ebook/dp/B0...

New to me too, but entirely consistent with other research I've read on crime prevention.

I believe the general principle, just not the actual numbers.

Another reason for skepticism: googling "ward clapham recidivism" I found a bunch of pages suggesting the recidivism rate dropped not to 8% but to 5%, an equally unsourced and implausible-sounding number.

Of course recidivism rates depend on what you're measuring, anyway. 70% of burglars are re-arrested for burglary within three years of release, while only 3% of rapists and 1% of murderers get re-arrested for the same crimes.

> 1% of murderers get re-arrested for the same crimes.

The latter may well be due to the combination of (1) murder is (mostly) a young man's crime and (2) murder sentences are typically long enough that folks aren't young when they're paroled/released.

Some people have made careers out of setting up incentive structures like this. Check out Aubrey Daniels.[1] He has a consulting company based around it.[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_Daniels#Discussion_of_Pe...

[2] http://aubreydaniels.com/services-overview

Well, they might be making it up, but presumably it would be really easy to check as it would be a matter of public record.

They've fired him anyways, apparently for suggesting that transit cops should ride in buses occasionally. http://taxpayer.com/blog/29-11-2011/bc-translink-lost-11-mil...

Wow.

So the Police Chief DARES to intimate that the Police should get on the transit buses to bust these thieves...

And they fire him!?!?!?

Just... Wow...

I can see why most police would just 'go with the flow'. They are not given the requisite latitude to implement innovative ideas with respect to their jobs. And frankly, boarding buses to bust freeloaders is not particularly innovative. It's just something that is usually not done.

Except that the article doesn't even imply that was why he was fired -- it merely says that his plans to put more police on buses have been squished since he was fired.

All I can find on the actual reasons he was fired is a nebulous "management style" bit http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=93d27fc9-b760-4cae...

I'm still trying to figure out the details of this guy's life and how the above story can possibly be correct. It seems like he was the chief only of the Vancouver transit police, right? So precisely which crime stats are we looking at, when we look at the recidivism rates?

Apparently he was the Superintendent for the Richmond RCMP who was appointed to the transit police in 2008-10: http://www.policeofficerleadership.com/rcmpdreamweaver.html

And I agree that the evidence certainly is not widely available.

edit: And oddly enough when I googled "ward clapham recidivism" your comment was the first result.

Actually, it just says the plan was scrapped because he was fired. All that means is he was the one in charge of the plan and nobody took it over after he left. That could have been the intent behind his firing, but it seems about as likely to be collateral damage.

You could be right.. all other sources were extremely tight lipped and would only state that it was down to a difference in philosophy. That was the only article I could find that actually had any indication of what sort of policies he was implementing there in the time leading up to him getting fired and so I am probably pretty guilty of making an inference based on far too little information.

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