Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
nature.com
nature.com
For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks.
On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
> To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more positively residents evaluated the police services they got.
> "Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.”
> But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area & more trust from people.
San Jose has issue with single family units over dominating the area; the need for denser housing options hasn't abated, nor for the surrounding county and the greater bay area. That has to be planned with local Transpo options, and now you enter the quagmire of 4 transportation agencies systems in the South Bay at least across several modes.
Do you have a source for this claim? I mean we can all claim it is intuitive but just how many police, how "well funded", what equipment, and what jurisdiction?
Hence the brilliant onion headline, "‘So, It Means Making The Police Lose Their Homes And Forcing Them To Get A Divorce?’ Says Nation Still Struggling To Understand How Defunding The Police Works"
https://www.theonion.com/so-it-means-making-the-police-lose-...
https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli...?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc
Cambridge NJ is often cited as a model of reform. But I am not sure they reduced spending. Instead they disbanded and reformed their police.
Police unions, poor training and qualified immunity are really serious issues - but ones that are intractable to fight for on the national stage due to political gridlock. Just breaking up the unions as they stand right now and enforcing transparent employment history for law enforcement would make worlds of difference, but the action can't be taken unilaterally by a particular district - that district can ensure that incident reports are preserved but officers moving into the district may have had their employment history purged.
Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment.
Can you give an example of a country that does what you recommend? If you can’t, what evidence do you have that it is the solution?
I’m not American. My criticism above is that the movement appears to have developed a policy idea that is not used in any country with a successful policing track record.
As for your claim that individual districts can’t take action....why? Cambden did. They’re hardly perfect, but it’s an improvement. They’re a local area.
And this story shows that when they did try cutting funding, before the reforms and it didn’t solve the problem. Only a concerted reform effort did.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
Comment above was heavily downvoted, but no one has provided a meaningful reply to the stats. The numbers are clear. Compared to places with better policing, the US has a smaller number of officers per capita, and spends less.
The US does spend much more on prisons however, which is surely a mistake. To your point on shifting focus away from punishment this is one of the first places I would look to cut money: prisons.
In the UK, police killed only 3 people in 2019. There has been surprisingly little inquiry as to how they do it. I get that US police are bad, and so spending less money to get less of them might be an improvement. But to actually solve the problem it seems that changing the police is the better answer. And this will necessarily be local because most of the important stuff in the US is local.
Well then.
- US police are above the law, and have free union-provided legal counsel.
If a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back, and the union will threaten the careers of city councilpersons, DAs and judges at the next election. A perfect circle of corruption.
- DA's and judges are elected, so political from Day One of their careers. Public unions hold 20% or more of the votes and vote in a bloc. Either play with the unions, or finish second.
- the US is the most successful multicultural large country in history, but that makes things more complicated.
- everybody who wants a handgun has one, or two. A lot of people driving around illegally have a loaded gun under their seat.
No, they don't. Public employees don’t, outside of a few localities with extremely high concentrations (which are usually military, which isn't unionized) make up 20% of the electorate, much less public sector unions holding 20% of votes.
> and vote in a bloc
No, they don't. Law enforcement and corrections unions often don't even lean toward the same major party as most other public sector unions.
So get your facts straight.
If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.
That doesn't contradict anything I said. There are signs saying that not because public sector unions as a whole either make up the 20% of the electorate you've claimed or vote in a unified block across different public sector unions as you've claimed, but because the general public, and especially voters that consider “law and order” an important concern, are particularly likely to be swayed by law enforcement union endorsements.
> If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.
...often, quite badly. I've got a Political Science degrees from a subprogram specialized in the pragmatics of US electoral politics at all levels; “Law & Order” is, I know, entertaining to a lot of people, but it's not really a guide to reality on, well, anything.
Governments employ 20 percent or more of workers in nine states
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/on-numbers/scott-tho...
The claim was public sector unions, not government employees. And the claim was 20% of votes, not 20% of workers. A substantial share of government employees are not unionized; this is particularly true of federal government employees; and a substantial share of voters are not employed (some unemployed, but more out of the workforce, looked students, homemakers, and retirees.)
And nine states leave 41, or 82% of the total, where even that far-from-what-you-originally-claimed situation still doesn't apply.
How does that relate to my argument? My point was that attempting to tackle those factors is the actual solution.
(Would need a source on your 20% claim though. Endorsed by the police union is an appeal to voters outside the union, not an appeal to union share of electorate)
a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back
Yes, we should rebuild the infrastructure. If more money is required we should find it. But we should find a way that holds the bureaucrats accountable on both the costs and the schedule; otherwise we will be throwing good money after the bad. My 2c.
Every city/county had their own "Bauhof" with a couple of construction workers and machines for all kinds of maintenance that a city had: snow plowing in the winter, pothole fillings and greenkeeping in the summer, pipe laying/maintenance, traffic lights and general lights maintenance, other infrastructure upkeep.
Today much of this is mandatory outsourced to the lowest bidder, with no way of accounting for regionality or quality.
To make it worse, cities and counties used to have capable public servants in architecture and supervision, which meant that for those projects where external help was needed (think construction of new projects) that work could be properly supervised and issues either prevented in the planning stage or caught during construction and remedied before that became too expensive. Nowadays, thanks to more and more budget cuts, pay in public service is a third to a half of the private sector which means that even if there were a budget no one would apply. In IT the situation is even more dire, which is why almost all major government IT projects fail, with the additional complexity that most IT projects have way too many stakeholders and no leadership.
We as Western societies need to roll back that privatization mandate, at least for areas where it has obviously failed.
And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location...
State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor of 3.5, even after adjusted for inflation.
With respect to public infrastructure specifically, there has been no austerity. For example, here is a graph of NYC subway ridership from 1970 to 2014: https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%.... Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic failure in the last few years.
The London transit system, by contrast, spends about $3.2 billion in capital expenditures to run a system that is very similar in terms of age, size, etc: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf. Despite spending half as much money, London has been able to significantly grow the network while keeping maintenance current and maintaining on-time performance.
Honestly, invocations of "starve the beast" and "austerity" are nothing more than gaslighting. It's a cop-out for why our public services are so shitty, even though we spend vastly more on them than we used to spend.
Obviously the capital spending boost that is happening right will only be reflected in future ridership.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13...
(The local share of property tax was not defined in Prop 13; this is strictly how the Democrats in power chose to implement Prop 13.)
Inefficiencies or corruption when building new things?
Pension benefits for an aging workforce?
Pure incompetence at the top or pure incompetence at the bottom of the org chart?
Transit capital projects in the USA, for instance, are typically delayed for many years by lawsuits over environment laws, etc. For instance, near the nation’s capital: https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/transportation/pu...
> “PLTC and its member companies should not be required to finance the hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs for issues that are out of its control, not of its making …,” Risley wrote.
> More than 970 days of project work were affected by delays caused by the MTA, he wrote, which included third-party lawsuits, delayed right-of-way acquisition, and changes to regulations and third-party agreements after the project started.
And on the other hand, there’s straight up corruption and fraud. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/nyregion/cuomo-andy-byfor...
> “They are working here?” Mr. Cuomo asked. Not a soul was in sight. “Yes, sir,” the man replied, nodding vigorously. “They must be very short people,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Or invisible.” About 130 people were being paid to work until 11 p.m., though their day had clearly ended well before that.
Just because the spend per rider increased over that time doesn't mean the system is getting what it needs though. A newer system will usually function better than a starved system years later naturally because of deferred maintenance and other aging infrastructure ailments even if the per rider numbers have increased. Comparing it just on the per rider spend assumes that the earlier number is enough.
Though I suppose you would have to look at the state of thr system in the 1980s. NYC may have had more deferred maintenance.
[0] More or less, they've stopped during COVID but it's not a great time to do maintenance.
After defunding the police, they'll have private security as well.
Wikipedia[0] says that "[austerity] is a set of political-economic policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both." That strikes me as a correct definition of 'austerity'. But we've not had any spending cuts in real terms or in terms of GDP. Nor have we had tax increases for the past "40 years" -- sure, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama raised taxes, but Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Trump cut taxes.
Yes, reducing budget deficits has been a stated goal of most Presidents since 1980, but that's mostly been lip service. None bothered to actually try. President Clinton did manage to reduce the deficit, but not because he wanted or tried to, but because of the unexpected revenue growth caused by the unexpected economic growth caused by the unexpected IT revolution.
> For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD.
What was that in 1980? Was there a step in this, say, around 1996? Did it go up in 1996 when Federal funding for 100,000 new police officers dried up? I.e., did President Bill Clinton's well-meaning 100,000 police officer initiative have unintended consequences?
> On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
I don't doubt this! We saw in Ferguson, MO, that the police was giving out an inordinate number of traffic fines every year! It's almost... exactly as if... they were paying themselves with that -- a terrible corruption. As I recall the number of citizens in NYC who have fines in arrears is staggering. Police department funding via fines is a form of corruption, and strongly indicative of police departments being too large.
And the invention of civil asset forfeiture (in the 80s, IIRC), and the rise in its use (in the mid-90s, IIRC), also seems like police (and prosecutors) paying themselves with poor people's assets. And it is invariably the poor who have been hardest hit by civil asset forfeiture.
The police have to be sized appropriately to:
- investigate and close most cases
- support investigations appropriately
- provide a minimum of neighborhood police
presence to deter crime and build a rapport
with the community
The police departments of most large U.S. cities are almost certainly oversized at present. One of the first steps in remediating some of iniquities of our system should be to end police department funding via fines and civil asset forfeiture (by simply ending civil asset forfeiture -- as clearly unconstitutional a practice as any). In some States fine revenue is shared with the State, but perhaps the amounts of the fines should go down and the percentage that goes to the issuing jurisdiction should go down significantly. At the very least the parameters of traffic violation fining need fine-tuning. Once the police can only be funded by general revenue of the local town/city, and the towns/cities cannot fund themselves with fines / civil asset forfeitures, we'll see a proper reconsideration of police funding.
I.e., the police need to be not so much defunded as right-funded, and today that would generally mean spending less on police. I'm not sure that in 1993 it was the case that the police needed to be funded more, though I'd be happy to see evidence to the contrary. Crime rates did go down significantly in the 90s, but those extra ~80,000 new police officers are not the only cause of that, and probably not even a major cause at all. The main cause of the fall in crime rates in the 90s seems to have been demography.
> For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc.
Education isn't part of LA City government, education comes from school districts which are not funded or controlled by cities in California (if any Mayoral candidate in California other than SF tells you they're going to fix the schools, they're either lieing or unaware of the job of their office; SF is an exception because they are a combined city and county and school districts are supervised by the counties in which they reside)
Same with healthcare and transit --- those agencies are separate from cities too, so city funds don't go there.
Likely a large portion of what they saw was a product of racial and political demographics. Whites are a larger percent of rural populations than cities. [0] White people on average rate police much better than non-whites. [1] Of course whites may rate police better because they live in rural areas, but the gap in satisfaction between whites and blacks is too great to be accounted for by more whites living in rural areas. Also rural people are more likely to be conservative and conservative people rate police much higher. Rural officers are in less danger in rural areas, so they may not need to be as alert and forceful because they know their lives are not in danger as much.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-... [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...
Also I think the US has a real problem with valuing personal well being over societal well being somehow being warped into being a virtue. If you cheat on your taxes and manage to save 5$ while depriving the US Government of 20$ then you're a hero - this slippery slope has led acting in a morally grey manner for your own benefit being seen as a strength which makes it much more societally acceptable for people who contribute to systems of oppression (facial recognition and people tracking, supporting the spread of disinformation, helping to erase painful truths from public consciousness) to be viewed as "winners" so long as they walk away with a fat check.
It's hard for me to tell if this has always been a valued virtue, but having grown up in the US it certainly was an apparent virtue that I was imbued with - somehow we need to work at changing that.
50% of the rules for our socialisation are encoded in the 'ether' which is to say the rituals, norms, policies, procedures of what is considered 'normative' in any region, organisation, community. In most 'old world' countries you see these rules as thick as sauce everywhere, and of course they can be suffocating and often a roadblock to progress. But usually they provide the foundations for good social behaviour as well.
The Scandinavian countries are like this - visiting those places it feels a little bit like a nation-sized cult, where everyone is obeying an invisible set of rules. But it would appear differently to them obviously, if their instinct is to closely match their peers behaviour and adhere to whatever norms are there. The Swedish press, in particular, doesn't feel like a 'free press' as we would have it, but rather a loose set of groups acting in an ordained fashion for the 'good of society'. They act like a collective version of the BBC or CBC - the official mandate is not there ... but the cultural mandate is just the same. From the outside, it looks like a lack of 'freedom of the press' and maybe paternalistic, but they would see it differently of course.
In the 'new world', absent those implied rules, and possibly with the support of neoliberal ideals, and also the notion that 'everyone is doing it' - it's just easy to think in more narrow, self-oriented terms, and so you get these kinds of attitudes.
I do however believe that most researchers are a fairly pro-social, moral bunch, and I also believe that most police are as well and their intentions are mostly good and so I'm doubtful of existential concern here, other than to say ... we need to 'keep an eye on it' and think about issues thoughtfully. I'm more concerned about unecessary surveillance, lack of judicial oversight and process, than any kind of algorithm.
That being said, I am tired of people vilifying the police and taking indiscriminate actions against them. The reality is that law enforcement performs a valuable role in society, yet it is also an institution that has serious issues to resolve. Those issues will be difficult to address with an antagonistic relationship. It creates barriers to questioning when the police are needed, what roles are better fulfilled by other institutions, and how we ensure that officers are accountable to the communities that they serve.
I suspect that it would be far more effective to place pressure on the government rather than the police simply because the scope of the problem is outside of the domain of the police. It is legislation that dictates what roles are taken by the police and which are taken up by other agencies (as well as how funding is allocated between those agencies). Legislation also determines the what and how of police accountability, which limits the consequences that officers face due to acts of negligence or malice.
What if every single one of those additional arrests is a Black person? Well that might require an additional look. It's possible that it's all Black people doing those crimes. It's also possible that the mathematician built an algorithm anchored on years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial profiling.
Will the mathematician be able to say, "hey cops can we take a second look?". No. Can the police be trusted to dig into the nuance themselves? Also no. Is racism active and documented in police departments across the country? Yes.
Should everyone who has any ability to do so stand up and say, we won't support this shit, which is what these mathematicians are doing? I think yes, but that's obviously my opinion.
That possibility is explicitly excluded since the data comes from crimes reported by victims, not investigations initiated by police officers.
Here's some real data: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpa11.pdf
Across all races and Hispanic origin, American Indians and Alaska Natives (15%) and persons of two or more races (15%) had the highest rates of reporting crime or neighborhood disturbances to the police. No statistical difference was observed between the percentage of white (9%) and black (7%) persons reporting a crime or neighborhood disturbance to police in 2011.
Also, perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but Appendix Table 4 suggests that minorities are much more satisfied with police response than the average.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-...
And then there is the fact that illegal immigrants do not call the police for their fears.
3 people "screened and analyzed" 1.1 million calls and found out that there was a (presumably temporary) effect on minorities after one much-discussed incident involving minorities? The rest is cherry-picked examples and wild conjecture and not thorough analysis of the data.
> illegal immigrants do not call the police for their fears.
Um, that's because they're illegal and has nothing to do with racism.
(1) Statisticians predict where crimes are likely to happen for the police using data.
(2) Police predict where the crimes are likely to happen using highly biased guesswork.
The statisticians are being irresponsible pushing the police towards (2). Option (1) can be de-biased, can be debated, its effects can be assessed and its parameters can be tweaked over time.
This is a choice between two options and the people signing on to this letter are arguing for the worse one. They link a bunch of news articles, but the academic complaint seems to be that the model says "assume crimes happen in high crime areas". That isn't a very scary model, and if anyone has an alternative they should be pushing it towards the police, not holding it back.
Just because they choose to "opt out", it doesn't mean everyone else will. It leaves the task to a smaller pool of competent people (best case), or unscrupulous people out to make a quick buck or push an agenda (worst case).
It seems, law enforcement was using data to create their own reality.
Perhaps it's just too easy to call something "racism" just because we don't like it?
>This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics.
They disagree that crime statistics are reflective of where crime occurs. They are more reflective of where police officers are and where crimes are most easily spotted. For example, the racial disparities in policing crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.
Predictive systems that read in biased data will produce biased data.
The article says: MacDonald argues that PredPol uses only crimes reported by victims, such as burglaries and robberies, to inform its software. “We never do predictions for crime types that have the possibility of officer-initiated bias, such as drug crimes or prostitution,” he says.
By lesser crimes I don't mean trivial things that provide an excuse to harass non-criminals and give "broken window" policing a bad name, but actual crimes which aren't major violent crimes.
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/chicago-police-arrested-more...
Garbage in crunched by garbage is still garbage out.
source: work with data and am not terrible at my job
Here is just one data source from NYC: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan...
Subjects firing on Police: 79% Black
Subjects killed by Police gunfire: 69% Black
If you want to tackle Black crime, start with decriminalising drugs, and then getting Black fathers back into marriage and raising their children.
Destroy the idea that being law-abiding, studying hard, and being regularly employed is 'acting white'. Scale back welfare to make all these things more attractive, and restrict immigration to direct more job opportunities to African Americans instead of Latin American and Indian migrants.
Almost 65% of black children are raised without a father (white: 24%). Together these numbers imho give a much better explanation towards black crime and disadvantages than inherent bias.
Using math to improve the effectiveness of the police is a good thing. This effort - however well intended maybe - would throw out the baby with the bathwater.
People who live in areas that experience high incidence of criminal activity also want to have crime reduced. They want someone to establish order—when you have a vacuum, someone will fill it, usually someone with even less oversight, though occasionally you can luck out with a benevolent dictator of sorts.
So yes people in those areas want policing —though they may also want some reform as well. Few people want no police. They know that’s a recipe for a power vacuum and the domino effect that has.
The biases are deep and insidious. They exist in each and every one of us. "Addressing" them is a complicated issue.
These instances are not the result of some nebulous ingrained tendency to view others as less than themselves, they're the result of a coordinated and deliberate attempt to assert power.
Your assertion that removing police would create a "vacuum" assumes incorrectly that there is currently a sense of "order" established. This is not the case, as there is no set of behaviors black men in particular can adopt which will not result in their extrajudicial execution. Police are more accurately viewed as an occupying militia and I see no reason to believe it would just as soon be replaced by something similar.
(Anti-Riot)Police see themselves as the entity that establishes order at the cusp of disorder.
When you have these kinds of confrontations (it could be internecine for all I care) you’re going to see that kind of human interaction. Neither person is a robot and thus the results are less than ideal.
What is worse is a power vacuum and the resulting gangs and warlordism (unless the community stands up its own local police force) but we’re back to policing.
In this setting, it's less clear which "side of the force" is most impacted by the scientific input, but I think it might be reckless to simply cut them off without finding a better model for providing some of their more critical social services. In particular drug, mental health and domestic abuse interventions which sadly seems to be a very large portion of their workload.
> Using math to improve the effectiveness of the police is a good thing.
There isn't a mathematical definition for "police effectiveness" and any attempt at a quantitative metric for that sort of thing should be viewed with intense skepticism. If your "police effectiveness measure" is skewed towards making more arrests, then that metric clearly has problems and, if used by an actual US police force, would just result in excessive violence and lawless arrests against innocent black people. This is just an example but the risk is real. The fact that such a metric might be theoretically possible is not a good enough reason for engaging in research which will affect the lives of real people.
The only scientists who should be collaborating with police departments are sociologists and psychologists - and, as the hoary history of psychology demonstrates, even they should be treated suspiciously.
- electricity (cellphone towers, refrigerators)
- food technology (producing food efficiently)
- medicine (vaccines, hospitals)
- hygiene (sewer system, clean water)
Many times throughout history gangs form for self protection in absense of a functioning authority. Regardless they inevitably get involved in a racket of some sort or assert their claim to some sort of territory and become just another band of violent thugs out for themselves and a scourge on their host community.
The remotely closest thing to a gang that hasn't progressed to that probably isn't like that are the Guardian Angels safety patrols.
Being brutalized is neither neccessary nor sufficent, although it may make them more likely. If the "configuration" arises essentially they will go down that path.
As to the larger question, I'm having a very hard time seeing adding knowledge and science as a bad thing. Without those, any proposed improvement to policing (including abuse) is simply flailing guesswork.
In your view, these are people that don't wish to integrate themselves, and in my view, these are people that never had much of a chance to begin with. The public schools I went to were so underfunded, and I am lucky that I took a different path than the one of least resistance. A lot of the people I grew up with that joined gangs were abused as kids, had learning disabilities, grew up with violence, didn't have a proper learning environment, didn't have after-school programs to go to when they wanted to avoid violence and abuse at home, etc. I'd rather take money from police departments and funnel it to actually giving those kids a chance.
I had an early life typical of some of these places. My area was not as bad as the one you describe FYI. I made so many mistakes in my own early life that really set me back, some of which could potentially be attributed to the nihilistic attitude of my surroundings. As a result I'm perhaps more sympathetic to the downtrodden people of these areas than you might believe. That being said, my own success in life has made me slightly less sympathetic to these people than I used to be. I underwent a massive attitude change in my early 20s that changed my entire life. I stopped blaming other people for my problems and took responsibility for my life, it was like flicking a switch. All of a sudden everything in my life slowly began to function, I started to receive positive results from my actions. I understand that not everyone can become rich. You'll have greatly different results if instead of becoming a software engineer like I did you're just bagging groceries. That's always going to be the case though.
I truly understand that getting through to kids from broken homes can be difficult when their parents, like mine, have created such a hostile environment for their kids that they base their entire conceptual model of society on their broken home life. Having said that, there's no one out there telling people that getting hooked on hard drugs is a good idea, yet it still happens. These kids know what living a good life looks like. They make their own bad decisions. I really do believe in offering all the support we can to help at-risk children avert ruining their lives. They're not all going to be saved, no matter what you do. I feel like those who are capable, and interested, will always seek out better things for themselves eventually.
And as for making the right decisions--I have a few issues that have worked hand-in-hand to keep me from having a long and stable relationship. I know which bad decisions I've made in the past, I know as I making them that they're bad, yet here I am, single and at 31! It's something I'm still trying to work through. So having said that, I am not going to judge someone for their bad decisions if I can't always pick the right path myself. And I'm sure you're not always sticking to the right path, either. I mean, I'm sure there's a billionaire out that there could go through your life decisions and judge you for not having a fleet of yachts yet. It's easy to be like "don't do meth!" and then not do meth, but I don't know what those people are going through that they thought that meth was a good idea. I don't want them in jail for it, either. I think there are far better options.
> ...the issue is that society gives up on them before they even have a choice...
I was able to learn useful skills on my own without the education system supporting me. No doubt, high school helped build a useful foundation for learning other useful things. I was teaching myself skills using freely ( or the next best thing ) available tools and resources online. American poverty in 2020 includes access to the internet. This is evident by the interaction of impoverished and low socio-economic status Americans on social media. They're not here debating the systemic causes of poverty on HN, they're consuming mind numbing media on worldstarhiphop. Before I was able to get internet access at home I used the local library, or at my high school. I won't dox myself by talking about my specific professional interests, save to say they were important enough to me that I devoted my own time to researching it. I refuse to believe that there are people in first-world countries who have no access to useful resources like this. YMMV, obviously. I didn't have anyone in my life who encouraged me to do X, I just felt X was cool and I really wanted to understand more. Most of the people I've met in my field are the same. I don't mean to project my own thoughts and experiences on to everyone. I feel that my natural inclinations were to learn, and all of the people I grew up with who were similarly gifted and inclined ended up escaping poverty in one form or another. You could probably count yourself among this cohort.
Throwing police at the problem is only putting a band-aid on the symptoms, but ignoring the root cause. Violence will only beget more violence in the long run.
From her twitter page ( https://twitter.com/mathbabedotorg/status/127394137538240512... ) : Cathy O'Neil @mathbabedotorg I'm interested in algorithmic accountability, civil disagreement, and the social mechanism of shame. Algorithmic auditor at ORCAA.
That's a very big "if"
Predicting where you will need to send patrols is proactive policing.
This is fiction.
It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen.
Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly reports since they don't definitively tell you how the company will be doing - they just tell you how it has been doing. Prediction and imagination are not flawless tools, but they are helpful to plan for the future. (Which is amusing to say in the light of the book being discussed)
If I similarly just made up a book where police surveillance was the best thing in the world would you cite that as an argument in favour?
How can you use a made up story to argue something when someone else could make up another story that disproves your point and proves theirs?
Using the logic you've already employed, one could conclude that the entire anthology of philosophical texts also have zero bearing on reality because "they're all made up".
Societal and philosophical questions don't work like that, ethics are driven by society and the view of society changes over time with actions like, as an example, eating beef on Fridays being incredibly taboo among christian societies a few hundred years ago (and to this day in some areas) to the point where taking an action like that in public would likely call into question your ability to act ethically.
Ethics is a highly subjective field - if you try and revive geocentric solar system models with a paper that essentially amounts to "I said so" you'll be dismissed since there are theories with more evidence out there. The process of allegorization though is a more subjective and iterative process where two people can honestly state very different theories and have wide support from large groups - including potentially having mutual supporters.
The allegory that comes from Sci-fi isn't a statement of fact, it's an opinion on danger and while objective evidence is always preferred it doesn't mean that subjective evidence is meaningless. The process of going back and forth forever is quite valuable, if it isn't being done with "No, you're stupids" then each participant will be further developing their theory to account for weaknesses or vagaries exposed by the other participant and that process produces a better understanding in both parties and more refined theories to be presented to spectators.
The question of whether it's morally correct to commit murder is still open - there are some really compelling arguments in favor of not murdering people and some of those even arise purely out of self-interest[1] but if I say "Bob murdered Jim" there are all sorts of qualifiers and conditions that can take that from being pretty ethically repugnant (say infanticide) to being generally seen as justified (maybe, ongoing debate yo) at least in the US (say a genuinely necessary and unavoidable act of self-defense).
The problems fantasy is really good at digging into are ethical ones and, physics based fantasy books are super boring. If your sci-fi book was about how the earth would be different if G was actually 1.367×10−10 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2 you would essentially have a book about how some mechanics of movement are affects and why planes are so expensive to fly - you could build an interesting plot, but the allegorical value would be essentially nil... well that's what I think, lesse is some sci-fi writer comes along and writes a super impactful and interesting novel about an earth that is essentially the same as ours but with slightly less than two times as much gravity.
1. Which tends to be the strongest moral guidance IMO, but I'm jaded :shrug:
Just by chance, you can go back and find stories from the past that seem prophetic now, but not going forward.
The details are total BS, but sci-fi is absolutely a good vector for allegories and societal insights.
PredPol is a precrime system written by a mathematician (an assistant professor of math and CS) which recommends where police officers ought to patrol. [2] PredPol was deployed in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, CA.
This is not fiction.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100603031047/http://www.dhs.go...
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110527/full/news.2011.323.h...
No the book and movie are fiction, I mean. You can't learn anything from them. They're made up. Inside someone's head. There's zero data points in them.
I'm sure you can learn something from studying the history of the two projects you mentioned!
But not from a story someone made up and that some people acted out on a film set. That's not data. Don't base you philosophy on something that didn't actually happen.
You have made the erroneous assumption that I cannot articulate the insights, and further the erroneous conflation between "cannot" and "will not".
If you're actually trying to contribute to the discussion, it follows that you would try to convey the insights you've learned from Minority Report in a way that can help others to appreciate what you think is important.
You're right -- it could very well be that you have some deep insight you gained from Minority Report, but simply refuse to say it, even as you post on this forum, and even as you demand others take the time to watch it based on nothing but that demand. I was aware of this possibility, but ignored it, because that would speak very poorly of you, to take the time to post and yet share nothing of what you learned.
What's more likely is that you have nothing to share, because you simply had the feeling of insight, but without any of the substance that would allow you to share what you've learned. The fact that you so steadfastly refuse to share means you probably never gained the insight to begin with. That's why I made the comment: to distinguish between false and real insight, you need to do a check about whether you can actually share with others what you learned without them having to set aside the three hours that you did.
That's not snark, it's good epistemic hygiene and respect for others' time in a discussion. I do hope you take the advice seriously next time.
Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on.
Meanwhile, wage theft, over twice the size of all other kinds of theft put together, keeps growing year after year.
Police patrols should be entirely reactive, and not proactive. Proactive policing does not work.
The vast majority of crime where police should be involved are crimes where the victim can call the police later. For those that don't fit this criteria, either police patrols are already ineffective (targeted assassinations, for example), or the police isn't being called because the victim thinks it will make the situation worse. Which in many cases is true, and I think fixing that problem would be a good step to take.
That is not what occurred in practice and there is no data to suggest this would ever be a probable outcome. At any rate people don’t have a choice on who responds if the call is to 911.
The data behind 911 Good Samaritan laws[1] that protect people from being arrested when they call in overdoses would like to have a word with you.
[1] https://www.shatterproof.org/advocacy/state-by-state-informa...
In any case, if you are giving anyone defibrillators and locating them to minimize response time to cardiac incidents, it would be absurd to give it to the police.
Policing is not causing crime. People committing crime is causing crime.
You have to ask yourself why there is more crime in poor areas. The answer is that we don't go looking for or don't care about the crime that happens in other areas as much, and that the socio-economic conditions lead to more crime. You can't fix these issues by sending police there to act like an occupying army. You can only fix the root cause.
As a personal anecdote, having grown up in such places, people have so many bad experiences with police that they genuinely don't want to call them when their presence might maybe help. So is sending police patrols to maximize the number of arrests and create ever more negative experiences the solution? No. You have to fix the root cause.
Removing criminal elements from communities creates safer communities, which is a prerequisite for people thriving.
Do you have a source?
I assure you mathematicians aren't optimizing the "visbile presence in the community". That's not something you need a mathematician for. Mathematicians are optimizing the ability of police to maximize the number of arrests by deciding which areas they should patrol in order to maximize crime.
How, is this your line of work?
I'm not sure it's a good idea to assume certain truths based upon intuition.
I challenge your assumption. To me it seems intuitive that crimes are committed at higher rates by the socioeconomically advantaged, because they can get away with it.
See for example that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the general population.
https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing...
Completely agree on proactive policing. End the drug war and it would cease to be necessary.
This has been known in those communities for decades. It's only the most obvious, well-documented brutality that has begun to make other people aware of it. It's the broad reaction to that brutality, where other police and their strongest supporters reflexively excuse the inexcusable, that have made people like these mathematicians realize that sending the police doesn't solve the problems that their models are pinpointing.
If the mathematicians want to help people, they'll model the broader causes of poverty, injustice, and inequality. Then we can try to solve the real problems, rather than "I heard there was a problem, let's send in people with guns until it gets better."
Respecting the victim's wishes is basically giving tacic approval of spousal abuse and honor killings.
This sort of prediction depends on the data being good. That's not a given. Even the crime statistics are problematic. There is an issue with certain groups getting treated differently in arrests and convictions.
So you could have an area that doesn't have much crime reported because when crime happens it's not reported as crime. Whereas you can have other areas that have a lot more crime reported because there is less leniency given to the population.
I think what the article says is likely to be true. It's a scientific cover-your-ass label for the high-ups to be able to do whatever they want and justify it. Similar to how CEOs bring in external consultants and pay them fat money so the CEOs can now do whatever they wanted originally, but now with Big Consulting Firm's stamp of approval. You can make these "AI" models skew to the direction you want. Just as it is with statistics and p-hacking, only that the machine learning community is even less versed in confidence values and is just generally less mature in terms of best practices as it's a newer field.
And absolutely researchers should pay attention to who they work for and where the money comes from. Fundamental research is one thing, working on general AI is useful for all human endeavors just like working on energy efficiency or better cars. It's a necessary part of life that bad actors have benefits from a tide raising all ships.
But it's not the same when directly working on a project for a bad actor. Similar to how Google engineers stood up against military projects or serving the Chinese censoring machine, it is important for mathematicians and computer scientists to consider whether they are building something unethical. These are professionals, intellectuals who have more responsibility than lower paid workers. We cannot blame the cleaning personnel or the cooks at the police canteen in the same way.
It is part of one's civic duty as an intellectual to reflect upon one's societal role and impact.
Again, this is not about fundamental research, that might be used for evil purposes. It's about directly working for corrupt organizations. Whether the police in general (or which specific levels or branches) is corrupt enough to refuse working for them and how much worse they are compared to big corporations is hard for me to judge from Europe. But it's certainly something that people working for them should reflect on and make a moral choice because they are the ones who see what they actually work on. There are many places for mathematicians and computer scientists to work at and so they have the luxury to follow their conscience. And all this also applies to intelligence agencies, like the NSA and others as well.
Not that predicting where crimes will occur is really a thing - more likely you are just predicting where a population is getting policed.
Deterrence and deescalation are where predictive policing could theoretically be useful but in practice it is often just bias laundering or reinforcing their tautologies. Looking at the "wrong side of the tracks" more and the arrest rates will climb there even if crime is actually lower there - let alone confounding variables. Like say the police being called in domestic disputes by witnesses in thin walled apartments and trailer parks but not in large fenced estates even if they are just as loud and violent because they weren't literally heard.
Citation needed, particularly for Nature. As far as I can tell the supposed disparities are explained by the amount of violent crime the race and ethnicity commits (leading to more police interactions), but it's impolite to bring that up.
If you're basing your opinion off of highly publicized gruesome videos, I can show you less publicized videos of other races being killed by police too.
If the rare skeptic persists at this point you can now label them a "white supremacist," having conveniently shifted the goalposts on that term so that they are now an irredeemable racist, and proceed to burn their existence to the ground and salt the earth.
Again I have yet to see any convincing data that supports this. There's a marketed list of names of victims, some with video footage, but I can also show you names and video footage of non-violent victims of other races being killed by police.
I certainly support police reform (within the bounds of common sense), and continuing to try to lift black folks up, who I agree have been systematically discriminated against for hundreds of years. But doing it under false pretenses has already opened up a Pandora's Box of racist moral panic when it's simply not there.
What pretense are you saying is false, exactly? That there is a pattern of police abuse towards non-violent black people? It's patently silly. Black people have "the talk". White people don't have "the talk". We have videos of obvious injustice and racism popping up all the time, and the one-two punch of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd being killed by people who are obviously, deeply, racist and nothing being done about it (indicating a severely dysfunctional police organization) catalyzed the "moral panic", but there's no such epidemic of videos showing white people being abused. Why? Because there is no such epidemic, and it is racist.
I do support ethical decision making, academics should be conscious of first and second order consequences.
What is the alternative? To give up and stay out? Ethical considerations are great. Define fairness and set a valid goal for the algorithm that takes fairness into account.
Do the signatories presume a non-quant approach would be less biased towards this supposed “systemic racism”?
I mean not only artificial heuristics like machine learning, but the ones people have always used, e.g.: "acting really weird means the person is probably on drugs/commiting a crime".
All prejudices we use are heuristic techniques. Some are badly calibrated and give bad results (e.g. racism) but some may give accurate results (e.g. "poor neighborhoods have a higher crime rate"). Should these techniques be used when they're accurate?
To use a less charged example say I have three populations of fish, and all swallow coins in the same proportion as each other. In this universe sharks make up 10% of the fish population, sea-bass 30% and rockfish 60%. Exactly 5% of each fish type has a coin in their belly at any given time.
So if we have a world of 1000 fish, then we're talking 100 sharks, 300 sea-bass, and 600 rockfish. Of those 5 sharks, 15 sea-bass, and 30 rockfish have coins in their belly. To measure anything other than those counts of 5% per subpopulation, is there a way to measure how improbable that would be with random selection and subsampling and what not? Does this question even make sense and is well defined enough? My stats strengths aren't the keenest.
Don't you want to solve crimes and put murderers in jail? And scare others away from delinquency?
Police brutality and systemic racism caused a group to rise up and demand justice. The populace took notice, a movement was formed (BLM) and overall trust in law enforcement was lowered. Crime rose as a result.
It's not "so called" Black Lives Matter, it's "so called" equal and just law enforcement that caused the The "Ferguson Effect"
>for every investigation over a white cop shooting a black person allegedly
This is false. Fryer saw the effect when investigations were in response to social media outrage. In fact, he called out that the effect is not seen when investigation are started in response to complaints through the regular channels.
Is noplace safe from politics?
Yes, having more liberals working in policing is probably more inline with the goals of those liberals than not, but that's not the point of a boycott.
If the police can't get the help they need from mathematicians because of a large enough boycott then it gets them to the table and forces them to reform.
I'm not arguing whether or not this will work, or making a value judgement, I just see a lot of comments which don't seem to understand this point.
If not, this will make someone unhappy. And this is the whole point of boycott.
The police is making mathematicians unhappy. Bad cop, no donut in any dimension.
They will just hire someone else. Google was making AIs for the chinese government that almost certainly have deep ethical issues and it was barely a thing. Now helping the police is a boycott issue?
The question is not "do the police want a seat at the table", its if you want the people working with police to be only people who disagree with you and reject your position?