Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidhariri | Hacker News Reader

"Over the next six years, police recorded over 1000 interactions with this man."

With holidays, that's conservatively an average of one interaction every 2 days. How is that possible? Am I the only one who finds that shocking?

View on HN

From the article, it sounds like they record every single innocuous interaction. The city portion of Charleston is fairly small, confined to a small peninsula. Given the small size and not-so-large population, there are actually quite a few well-known bums in the town that one would just run into every day or so walking to and from work, usually in one of the major areas of the city. So imagine if you've got cops working the streets, it's totally conceivable that one or more officers run into one of those guys several times a day.

Community policing. Beat cop. 1 a day is even possible. You should be alarmed if such cases stop being outliers and start approaching the mean i.e. papers please.

We don't know how far down the long tail that one person is.

How many people are having unwelcome weekly interaction with police?

That was my point, exactly. [edit: to be clear, that a beat cop may have to deal with a handful of local louts, for exmple. But not the entire neighborhood.]

Doesn't our Justice Department have people monitoring this sort of metric?

I would wager that most people who don't work in the criminal justice system and yet have weekly interactions with the police probably describe it as "unwelcome."

There's a possibility that he's a persistent prolific offender. A very small number of people require intense monitoring because they're involved in very many crimes.

But even then it seems like a very high number over a very long time.

And the other numbers - nearly a quarter of the population of the city - is a bizarrely high number.

he is an active snitch...almost surely a paid informant who supplements his street-hustle money with a little side job telling his cop buddies whats really happening on the streets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com