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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

I can see it happening when checking takes a long time - but they're probably man-days into an arrest at the point they're sitting in an interview room post-arrest. Against, the LEO looking at their tablet screen prior to arresting the guy, seeing he looks different and not arresting him?

Are the LEOs getting bonuses for raw number-of-arrests?

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It depends on the department, but raw arrest counts are absolutely part of individual officer performance metrics, with low arrest count officers being "pressured to find something" at the end of the month.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nypd-officers-arrest-q...

Which is absolutely a big issue with our policing system. Most of the time they just arrest easy targets like sex workers or people who could be charged with 'public misconduct' or something like that.

> Are the LEOs getting bonuses for raw number-of-arrests?

There may be a subconscious bias here... if you spend your entire year looking at murder suspects, you probably see the guy on the other side as just another scumbag... and probably want to make sure the victim gets justice (even if it's wrong)

When LEOs manage to get a conviction, they now have irrefutable proof (a conviction in a court of law) that they were right in the first place to make sure that scumbag was convicted. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of increasing prejudice.

It's real interesting going through forensics courses and working with computer forensics professionals and seeing the opposite.

Since you're not briefed on the crime and only given a list of tasks to perform (ie, locate pictures of a vehicle), there might be less of a bias here.

Are the LEOs getting bonuses for raw number-of-arrests?

A good number are nazis, so if the software enables them to enjoy life better by harassing a few more black youth, that's enough of a reward.

No, that’s way too easy an answer. It’s also othering the problem away; essentially saying “non-nazis would never behave this way”. But they would, have, and do.

Since this is a programmer-rich forum, let’s talk about bug fixing for a moment. When you are looking for a bug, it’s easy to convince yourself a number of things, like: “It’s a random glitch, just restart it and it won’t happen again.”, or “It’s this library which is buggy, it’ll be fixed when we upgrade it to the latest patch.”. Now, of course, we programmers are then punished mightily for our arrogance when the bug keeps happening. But what would happen to bug fixing if this never happened? If we could just declare that the bug was this or that, and move on?

Obviously the police deal with crime and disorder every day, this would attract people who are more on the right of the political spectrum.

This is exacerbated by deep-seated structural factors in the US, policing by consent is unknown, there is high income inequality and segregation, the level of training is pitiful, it's no surprise that Amber Guyger's instagram feed looked the way it did. Of course those types would use any tool they are handed to have fun at the people's expense. The system selects for them.

This is still just othering police, and thereby avoiding solving any problem. I.e. if the problem is caused by some inherent factor in the people who choose to become police officers, then we can simply blame them and move on; easy hate clicks galore!

But I think police are molded by their experiences, and made by various vicious cycles to become the stereotypical bad police. I described one such cycle above; here is another: http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=545 If this is correct, then anybody, even the most well-meaning angelic people, would, over time, become bad police, but anyone could still merely claim that all police are bad because they are “right-wing” (as if that automatically is a bad thing) or racist, and nothing could ever be solved.

Police are also moulded by politics, they answer to someone, which usually isn't the locals. Consider Louisville, KY, where there have been demonstrations for 3 months now against the Breonna Taylor shooting, with no visible results. Such an environment attracts a certain kind of person, with a predictable outcome.

I would assume that the cycle of police recruitment and retirement is too slow to have this big of an effect. To affect police behavior, the iteration cycle must be fast (which I assume it isn’t), or the pressure must be huge (which we should have seen evidence of, I would think, since the large disparity between boss and subordinate would create some leaks).

Happens all the time. I want a status of "Developer in denial" in JIRA.

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