Committing resources to quality of life improvements? Good
75% of enforcement done in neighborhoods of "color"? Yikes
CIA-backed data analysis firm Palantir Technologies? Dear god
It seems like it's kind of a trap. If you agree with the frame of the article, then you have to conclude that either 1. We passed those laws to make our neighborhoods better, but minorities and the lower classes don't deserve that, so we should ignore some set of laws there, and that totally won't become apartheid or 2. Maybe all of these nanny-state laws made by wannabe social engineers aren't such a good idea after all, since they give the Government too much arbitrary power to be enforced on whoever they don't like this week, so we should repeal them and tell people to mind their own business when they come up with this stuff.
The problem isn't the law. The problem is the selective enforcement. It's the selective suspicion. It's the selective police state.
Do you honestly believe that some cop in white suburbia is going to care about loose cigarettes? No way.
But that doesn't really matter anyways. I thought we were talking about not throwing people in jail and giving them criminal records for petty crimes. If a black guy gets in trouble for, say, selling loose cigarettes, is he supposed to feel better knowing that if a white guy in a different neighborhood did the same thing, that guy would be getting in trouble too? Is that really the best we can do here? I'd rather try and find a way to not throw him in jail in the first place.
You're just upset you got called on a false dichotomy.
Isn't enforcement of a law (through an arrest for example) the first indication that a crime might have occurred?
If so, how to figure out if the 75% attribution is fair or just a result of selection/confirmation bias?
I suspect there is no way for the public to know.
Given the greater prevalence of things like stop and frisk in neighborhoods with large minority populations, is it any surprise more people are caught for things like drug possession? That's going to further skew the stats, leading to more enforcement in those neighborhoods (since they are "high crime").
Drug use is actually higher in young white populations than it is among young black populations, but because of where law enforcement spends their time the incarceration rates differ wildly.
What other metrics should we use? If you simply assign patrol routes based on population you are going to under-serve areas with higher crime and over-police areas that don't need it.
Of course it's complicated, and of course crime stats are a simplification. Most stats are. The point is, stats are much better than going by biased "gut feelings".
Yes there are underlying issues with stats such as underreporting, but the solution isn't to get rid of the stats. It's to improve the underlying cause of the bias in the data, such as improving police/public relations.
My solution, implied in my comment, was not to use naive statistical models or ideas (i.e. 75% of "crime").
And your now stated solution is easier said than done, and certainly not immune to the same kind of biases a naive solution may be subject to.
Here is the NYC crime map: https://maps.nyc.gov/crime. Look at the maps for felony assault or rape. Stop-and-frisk isn't going to change the incidence rate of those crimes.
The general point holds - there are corrective measures that need to be taken to avoid skewing crime data as a result of increased enforcement, and in the case of some jurisdictions those measures are being taken.
What's not obvious to me is whether police are increasing the severity of the charges based on where they are, even if the charges wouldn't necessarily hold up in court. There's a case to be made that that would be an efficient tactic - public defenders will encourage plea bargains and it gives the DA more leverage to settle the case quickly and efficiently. The opposite may be true when booking a drunk banker who gets in a fistfight, or a privileged college kid who rapes his date behind a dumpster.
Also, the discussion generally is not about CompuStat, it's about "quality of life" improvements prosecuted with the use of secret databases that are not publicly available. So, you know, there's that.
https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2016/9/beware-biases...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/us/backlash-in-wisconsin-a...
Source: http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-contrarian-strate...
“Basically,” Thiel explains, “I thought that some of the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud”—which at one point posed an existential threat to PayPal—“could be extended into other contexts, like fighting terrorism.”
For contrast: Mongo Inc's Eliot Horowitz: https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/mongodb-co-creator-explains-why...
tinfoil hat
A LOT of hand-cranking integrations and massaging data, presumably that's where they make most of their money - billing hours to agencies with deep pockets.
Even the most bass-ackwards database designs can be reverse engineered by bright people in a day or two (we know Palantir can attract these people) especially if they have some scars dealing with dumb database design. And it's probably not likely that the person who built that database and the program that uses it went to great lengths to obfuscate anything. I'll even go a step further and say that most data sources are probably really simple programs. Throw in any kind of documentation as a bonus and the learning curve just goes down.
What the hell could they be charging that much for?
There's a rooftop patio, as many buildings in the area have, and gym subsidies as most tech companies have. I've been told they have emergency readiness kits (which are advocated by every level of government in every jurisdiction), but they're definitely not at the desks (or they are, but invisible).
How are any of these criticisms distinct from Google, which owns an entire street block (no joke street to street, Ave to Ave)? I've had more than a few meals there as well and it's pretty much the same situation as far as I can tell.