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Comment by elchin | Hacker News Reader

This. We need to keep in mind crimes rates in Switzerland are extremely low.

Exactly. If the thing you are trying to predict is very rare (compared to business as usual), the error rates of your system have to be unfathomably low if you don't want to either drown in false positives or detect nothing at all ( =expensive money wasting project).

In some cases the error rates need to be so low, that even claims like "we are 99.9% accurate" should be taken with a big crystalline block of salt.

Remember this whenever terrorism is used as a reason why we desparetely need these surveillance mechanisms. If burglars are rare, terrorists are even rarer. The proposed systems are good for bigger things like demonstrations, social movements etc. but they suck at detecting terrorism, unless you have a metric ton of personal which will look at false positives all day long.

And yet this reasoning is exactly why the police keeps reiterating that they need more and more power, both surveillance, and the power to interfere without a criminal cause.

Ironically this is actually true. The question is to what level you want crime to fall, and if the answer is zero, then you best let the police shoot every last person without requiring them to have committed a crime.

Ironically that would be a crime in itself. If you want zero crime your options are to either nuke the earth vor to make all crime legal.

But fear of crime is not, especially with the older generation in .ch.

I remember when I lived in London there was a time when it seemed like there were more and more police sirens everywhere, this made me feel like there had been a big increase in bad people doing bad stuff.

But, it turns out, what had actually happened was they had changed the standard for sirens on emergency vehicles. As vehicles were modernised they all started to sound like police cars. At the same time a new system for medical emergencies was introduced that involved a first response by motorbike paramedic followed by backup a bit later from an ambulance if necessary, again all with sirens blaring. Suddenly it sounded like the police where rushing everywhere all the time. Whereas before you could tell the difference between a fire engine, an ambulance and a police car from the sound so you could tell what kind of incident was going on.

I'm sure that contributed to a sense that there was a big crime problem in the 90's when in actual fact it was starting to tail off.

It seems like you are trying to make a point here, but I cannot figure out what the point is.

Which maybe means the Swiss cops know what they're doing, and we shouldn't be quick to mock this scheme.

There was no statistically significant difference between Swiss regions that did use the predictive software and those that didn't. All regions saw a broadly equivalent drop in crime.

Crime rate have very little to do with how society is policed. If you want to find explanations look at wealth distribution, poverty rates, the school system, job market and so on.

Bad/non existent policing definitely skyrockets the crime rate.

But once you have decent policing, I can believe other factors dominate.

No, that count maybe for cities but not for villages.

Did NYC see a decrease in wealth inequality, poverty rates, improved school system and job market between the 70’s and 00’s?

Because crime dropped almost 90%.

Didn't national levels also fall sharply?

They did. But the question remains. Did any of those things listed get better in the US? I’d say no, except maybe employment?

Even global levels fell!

A major global factor is likely the introduction of lead free gasoline.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

"Crime rate have very little to do with how society is policed. "

This is totally false.

Here's a far-left VOX article even brandishing the idea [1]

Policing practices, particularly the number of police and their tactics have an enormous effect on crime.

Obviously, social systems do as well, but there are plenty of very poor places with very little crime.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/h...

Come on. This disingenuous argument is exactly why Yoho flipped out at AOC earlier this week.

Bending reality to fit one’s political worldview.

Or that there are social measures in place that prevent crime, rather than better policing of the crime that occurs.

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