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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

If crime being caught by a drive-by patrol is a significant way in which crime is being caught, to me that screams "victimless crimes". I break victimless laws all the time, sometimes with my police officer friends and neighbors present, sometimes on private property miles from any public roads. I never seem to get busted for it. So if 10-block patrols of "troubled areas" really saw an increase in enforcement action, then combined with the fact that America has disproportionately bad imprisonment and recidivism rates, it sounds like you're describing exactly what systemic discrimination is.

You live in a bad neighborhood, so you're more likely to get caught for something, now you're on parole, now anywhere you live is a "bad neighborhood" requiring more patrols, more likely to get caught for something. Meanwhile I can live in my entirely white suburb smoking weed and my life doesn't change.

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If what you describe was the pattern, then the regions with lots of observed "victimless crimes" would be uncorrelated with the regions with lots of serious crimes (e.g. from counting bullet holes down at the morgue, or from ShotSpotter). That's great, this theory makes a testable prediction. It's falsifiable.

That said, I agree that the smart use of such predictions should be sensitive to this. Try to predict where & when the murders will happen, use that to direct patrols (and searches for potential murder weapons). Rather than predicting something simpler like "total number of offences including parking tickets" for the sake of chasing numbers.

(Both of these comments are describing where to put patrols, i.e. where to spend a limited resource to best effect. Prediction applied to human individuals is a very different story, and much scarier.)

I'm not saying it's the pattern, I'm saying it's a significant pattern. And I strongly oppose the idea that our law enforcement should be treating any individual based on "patterns" anyway.

> then the regions with lots of observed "victimless crimes" would be uncorrelated with the regions with lots of serious crimes

That doesn't seem like a strong hypothesis I would've made from the given scenario.

For example, one area that's consistent with the theory is that areas with lots of "serious crime" generate a lot of police activity, which turns up a significant amount of "observed victimless crime". That creates an expectation of a positive correlation between "serious crime" and "observed victimless crime".

Then, sure, according to that theory there might also be some areas where policing starts in an area on suspicion rather than serious crime and then we get a lot of "observed victimless crime" without as much "serious crime". That would be a negative correlation that you mentioned.

I just don't think the falsifiable hypothesis you've drawn up is one that the theory actually strongly predicts, and I don't think refuting that hypothesis necessarily refutes the theory.

Exactly. Vice or maybe Vox did a short with an ex-cop who mentioned this concept. He said they made a lot of arrests of black men carrying illegal switch blades. But said that white people carried those illegal blades just as often. Including many police officers that he worked with. But since they mostly patrolled in black neighborhoods, they of course made many more arrests and citations for carrying an illegal blade.

The fact that you find more crime where you patrol more is such a simple concept, it hardly seems necessary to mention. And yet so many people seem to think all this police data is useful.

There is an argument to be made that carrying a knife should not be a crime for anyone, and that we all have a right to carry a knife to protect ourselves or even use a tool.

But lets accept for a moment that reducing the number of knives on the street reduces violence and protects innocent people. If you accept that premise, then you have to say it's beneficial to society that the police remove as many knives as possible: whenever someone gets arrested for a knife violation it's a good thing, regardless of their skin colour.

And given that we have limited enforcement resources, we should focus most in those areas with the most knife crime victims. So while i accept everything you relayed in your post, the proper conclusion would change quite a bit if there are many more victims of knife crime in the black neighbourhoods... I do not know if that is the case, and i'm not implying the answer is more likely one way or the other.

But if in fact more people are getting stabbed or robbed at knife point in black neighbourhoods and you accept that knife laws are good in general, then it's good that such laws are more strictly enforced in that area, to help protect all the innocent people in that area who might fall victim.

And this principle really is colorblind. For instance many people speed in their cars everywhere, but we should more heavily enforce speed limits near high traffic and pedestrian areas and locations where accidents keep happening.

Now, maybe the rate of knife crime is worse in white neighbourhoods, in which case it really is a miscarriage of justice that more black men are getting charged for illegal blades. But I don't think you can say one way or the other without knowing and considering that statistic.

Are we assuming that police arrests and citations for carrying an illegal knife actually reduce or deter knife crime? Because I don't believe that it does.

--Same as you, just using knives as an example because I agree that they should not be illegal. (And a lot more could be said about certain types of knives being illegal and others not and the idea that certain racial groups or gangs might be more likely to carry that certain type, crack vs cocaine anyone?) But you could replace knives with any type of crime.--

But the reality is that we have a system that will over-prosecute and over-charge people for small crimes which causes a disruption to a lower income person's already precarious situation. Putting through a system full of violence, inhumanity, and other people that are in for much worse and then releasing them back to that same community with a do-not-hire sign permanently around their neck (a felony). After which they are likely to turn to crime to survive.

So while I agree that looking at knife crime data would make more sense than looking at arrests in the scope of the data conversation, the idea that heavy handed policing and a messed up "justice" system will likely create negative pressure on the long term for crime in that community, then the data is sort of moot.

Additionally, the conversation in this mini-documentary pointed to the fact that police were/are incentivized (at least in his Detroit precinct) to "get their statistics". So they would gravitate to these poorer, black neighborhoods because they could stop and hassle low income minorities without repercussion a lot easier than a white middle class neighborhood where people were less likely to even be walking outside and more likely to file complaints for police harassment.

Of course if the law is bad, the solution isn't to dismantle law enforcement, it's to fix the law.

I'm all for that. But systemically we tend to oppose that too. You do that long enough, eventually the ones on the bottom start pulling down statues. But the problem is both. We have victimless laws, and we have law enforcement departments with histories of covering for their own people when they break the law, or exploiting loopholes to railroad people.

How do you deal with police forces ignoring policy and performing as they deem fit all while protecting themselves?

Burn qualified immunity to the ground and salt the earth. This would be the simplest way to keep police accountable for their behavior. It would also imply a massive change in how policing is done (demilitarization), so that's two big wins.

We can lay a lot of the rotten police problem in the USA, and the world, at the fact that the accountability just isn't there.

I always thought only hiring police officers from the area being policed was a good start.

I don't mean that if you hire someone they have to move into the district. I mean that your pool of hires is the people who have already lived in the district for a particular amount of time (years).

The locals know what laws not to enforce and how to gain the trust of the community.

What you're describing is a reform of America's drug laws, not of America's criminal prediction problem and they shouldn't be conflated. Police already use prediction models, they just do it in their heads and inaccurately with much more bias and have a harder time adjusting those bias'. I'm all for changing drug laws and trying to reduce recidivism through counseling and means other than pure imprisonment, but that's beyond the scope of this article and discussion.

Drug laws are one example but by no means the only one. I've been on police ride-alongs where police watch a "suspicious" (i.e. poor) looking car as it passes them heading in the opposite direction. Oh look! They have a tail light out, we can pull them over. Then we can shine a flashlight in their backseat and see a bulge under a blanket. We can ask them certain questions that will either make us suspicious, or give us permission to search the car. Oh look! They have a pistol magazine that holds more than 15 rounds. Now there's a felony that they know the local courts will uphold despite there being a higher burden of proof about when the magazine was purchased than the officers can provide. Nevermind that the local gun stores all sell those magazines, and the police even buy them for personal use at those stores. But now, because of the way law enforcement works and the culture that has become normalized, somebody has a felony because of selective enforcement.

All of that is personal bias enforced by police. None of that can be balanced out for, and I don't understand how that's in the scope of this conversation, to be honest. With predictive police distribution (for lack of a better term), which would be placing patrols in high criminal areas (and for the sake of argument, let's put this at victim crimes, like sexual assault - tend to happen when bars let out around the most bar dense areas), an increased police presence putting patrols there would by there very nature reduce some sexual assault and drunk driving, statistically. People would be more likely to call an Uber, out of shear fear based reaction, and less likely to dump out into the street and beat the crap out of each other or sexually assault a woman in public. This is all done unconsciously anyway, but weights can be adjusted on a machine model int predictive modeling to try and remove the race bias out as much as possible, where as when such predictive modeling is done inside an officer's mind, unconscious bias is an ever present problem where weights cannot be adjusted as easily, if at all. If that makes sense.

A machine model of police deployment just makes for a more transparent model, so long as it isn't kept as a black box, or referred to as strictly "AI". If we arm our society with basic understanding of statistical maths and scientific grounding, they'll stop looking at these things as magic and relying on anecdotal experience. No offense meant.

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