Hacker News Reader

Comment by iwalsh | Hacker News Reader

King County is already using prosecutorial discretion to reduce the number of criminal prosecutions that lead to jail and have been for some time.

Not claiming that we shouldn't do more work here but the Miranda warning changes are in tandem with other improvements here.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/in-king-coun...

View on HN

King County (especially Redmond/Bellevue, home of Amazon and Microsoft) is one of the wealthiest, low-crime areas in the country; I remember someone telling me that Redmond has the highest density of millionaires in the country.

If anything, King County's judicial system doesn't need this kind of help, yet I saw the high budget of the police force when I lived there a block away from the station with its top-of-the-line equipment, education programs, and community involvement. We should be trying to bring this kind of judicial reform and fairness to areas that really need like it like the south-side of Chicago, where there are at least two murders a day.

Couldn't you frame this as, "Kudos, King County, this is a great thing that will help improve the lives of people in King County. Let's try to get it in Chicago, where there are even bigger gains to be made."?

Mine was a more of a blanket statement for the entire country. In most jurisdictions, prosecutors are as vicious as the law allows them to be.

They are vicious because they are incentivized to be so, their success is determined by their prosecution rate. If you incentivize good people to do bad things they will do bad things. The question is, what other metric can you measure them by to determine how "successful" they are?

EDIT: grammars

Is it possible that metrics are a bad way to determine success relative to actually looking into and understanding the situation? The latter is certainly more work. The former is certainly a lower resolution understanding.

Are we certain that any metrics communicate anything meaningful about "successful" performance in the realm of prosecution?

There are obviously better ways to judge a public servant's performance than a handful of decontextualized numbers — but unless you're going to force people to take a test before they can vote (which, umm…), what criteria are best doesn't matter as much as what criteria are most easily communicated.

No one ever got fired for buying IBM, nor for prosecuting someone. They have been fired though, for buying a cheaper solution, or for exercising discretion. Look at what happened to Dukakis...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com