LAPD ended predictive policing but a new effort shares many of their flaws
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There are many places (nations) where there are few shooting without police enforcement. Some of those places even have pretty liberal gun-ownership laws.
I think the answer is that those same places have a better feel to them: the people interact as if society is co-operative, united; rather than competitive and lead by virtuous independents.
Too much of the American philosophy is a harsh, cut-throat idea of competition at a individual level (I think at a group level it's not so bad, if individuals are still supported). Lack of basic, affordable healthcare options and an insurance mechanism/collusion that unnecessarily penalises anyone without (but few/no low-level plans available); "at-will" employment (with little oversight) as a norm that benefits employers way more than employees, legal norms highly biased towards the wealthy/connected.
Add in a history of slavery that created a large, black underclass; a "melting-pot" immigration philosophy that favours cultural/racial diversity over social cohesion, not to mention the historical in-fighting over resources, and you have little/none of that social comrade-ship at a national level.
Incidentally, I think something that could sooth the social problems a little is a common standard of "politeness" - which has little to do with respect, or approval. It's about your own behaviour, and a social contract that has to be followed, without regard to whether others do also. It's entirely possible to be polite and aggressive (passive-aggressive?) or show clear disapproval/distain without being impolite. It's rather a guideline for what is permitted (maybe wrt third-parties) in showing distain. I think this maintains the social-regulation impact of behaviour without the aspect of humiliation that becomes resentment and/or violence.
There are mentions of very bad policing practices (to call it politely), but there is no call for action in that direction. Why? The only 2 possible actions in regards to police are the extremes, "abolish the police" and "leave them do anything they want, no matter how bad it is"? Why there is no call to put policing back in the service of citizens, not as city paid thugs as they are in some cases?
2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/13/guardian-and-o...
I think ending qualified immunity would go a long way in keeping police power in check; they seem to have gone rogue in many municipalities today over the last 30 years or so. They seem more like an occupying army than a police force; something you should steer clear of because you can't predict what they will do, and they suffer few repercussions for their bad actions.
This is sort of naively how I'd expect policing to work. I live in a small town between Chicago and Gary, IN, and I know where is safe and where is less so. I'm genuinely curious if "best practices" for the police are not to focus where crimes usually occur?
For example, in my town on Halloween, a 13 year old out trick or treating with his grandma was shot and killed. When I read where I sadly wasn't surprised. Like, should or shouldn't the police have been generally patrolling that area that night?
That said, this is a position that requires a willingness to expose oneself to the pain and suffering of condemnation, in which the average person’s conviction would very quickly waver and capitulate to whichever wind the “public” opinion (read: corporate media mogul’s opinion) might blow. Haaarrddd stuff to expect.
But they don't get "flak". They get a community of people misrepresenting the facts making it look like they're racist. And that turns into a national news story. And that turns into them being told to resign because the people above them don't want the political heat.
I get that there are police officers that are, indeed, racially biased. But calling what the ones doing the right thing "flak" and dismissing it does a disservice to the good ones. It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
Just look at any major police scandal in the past decade. There's almost always an attempt at a cover up, and always a ton of officers that knew about it and did nothing. No matter what the crime or infraction is, police protect their own and circle up in the face of even the most benign criticism. There's a great book called I Got a Monster [1] that details Baltimore's infamous gun task force, and it's shocking how many people knew what they were up to for years. People who look the other way aren't good apples. For a bit of history, Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop [2] does a great job detailing the growth of us vs. them thinking among police nationally.
> It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
Police are almost NEVER fired. The number one goal of police unions is to prevent any firing for any reason ever, and they are very successful at that.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Got-Monster-Americas-Corrupt-Police/d...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...
But police chiefs and above are forced to "resign" much more commonly. And it happens when the optics are bad on something that was the right thing to do (like policing higher crime areas more, when those areas have a higher rate of minorities).
I would also note that the kind of policing like stop and frisk that people hate, is not the kind of policing that actually prevents crime. THere's a giant body of research on this. Across America police departments, regardless of how "focused" they are on high crime areas seem to have abysmal closure rates for murders, assaults, rapes, and property crimes. Police in the US are far too focused on dumb shit like clearing corners, and policing nuisance crime.
Moreover, who cares if a police chief, a political appointee, resigns? It means almost nothing for day to day policing which is governed by lower level union members and informed by trainings selected by the police unions.
It doesn't. It relates to the post I was replying to, which said that
> I’d hope police chiefs have thicker skin enough to make the right choice despite the (agenda pushing) flak they might receive.
Having thick skin doesn't help when you're out of a job and can't pay your bills; because you did the right thing.
I didn't say anything about thick skin. The truth is that police are virtually never fired, and when they are they usually get rehired by other departments. I'd be surprised if you could find a police officer being fired for "doing the right thing" anywhere in America, unless it was whistle blowing.
As for police chiefs, who cares? They are political appointees, who are probably fired or forced to resign at similar rates to heads of other departments. I still doubt you can find a single police chief who was fired for "doing the right thing." Where in America has there ever been a police chief who was trying to put resources into solving violent crimes and was subsequently let go for it? Sure, some have been let go for cargo culting CompStat and failing, but that's a shitty idea anyway.
So it makes sense to me that there is a perception that in poor areas police patrolling is done to catch the inhabitants whereas in rich areas it's done to protect the inhabitants.
No matter how you frame it, where the cops put their boots will necessarily increase crime reporting much like increasing a good's price necessitates a drop in demand.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/criminal-justice/cr...
They hate crime as much as anyone else. There is a love hate relationship when some of your relations engage in low level crime and get caught in the fight against crime for the 20th time. “Why did they have to come for Gary again, he never hurt anybody”. But Gary didn’t want to go back in for robbery, so he ran and got shot. But when mrs Jensen has her house broken into she’s upset this happened to her, not realizing her son Gary while not “dangerous” is part of the atmosphere of crime that allows her house to get broken into.
One of the ways to combat that is to do what Giuliani did in New York and attack all crime including quality of life and other low level in addition to organized crime and gangs.
The other way is to do it the Soviet way and have neighbor rat on neighbor and ship the baddies off to the gulags (often they did worse than that).
What doesn’t seem to work is being nice to crime and suggest crime to go away. It needs persistent pushback whether in the US, Albania, China, Belize, etc.
One thing which would help is to have better funnels away from crime to divert people at high risk of joining crime into regular sustainable jobs. But this takes culture. If all your friends are making "good" money stealing catalytic converters and they constantly nag you to join them, it's hard to not get involved.
There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid.
During Giuliani's tenure, unemployment in Manhattan dropped from almost 10% to 5%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN The median income rose from $54K to $93K, which even adjusting for inflation is a >40% increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 The number of people below the poverty line dropped from 340K to 270K even as population grew slightly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061
(None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)
The cops where I live are very reasonable. They don't have the spare resources to waste their time handing out tickets for drinking on your porch or investigating other the victimless stuff. That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city.
Getting there is a matter of slow transformation. Even in Beijing or Tokyo, life wasn't always quiet and peaceful. It happened gradually as society evolved to a point where minor crime was more or less eliminated.
I'm sure there is always a small group of people who wish for wild-west frontier like chaos, it has some appeal, but after a while the majority of people just want peace and quiet and to be left alone.
Even there, it's not consistent. The cops just know better than to try to enforce the stupidest laws against people who might actually have political power.
This sounds like a silly question, because it's so ingrained in how we think about policing and crime, but I think it's a question we have to reassess when crime is low. If an area is entirely lawless - in such a state of societal collapse that everyone is allying with a local gang for their protection - then having police patrol the area is likely useful in the same way as sending UN peacekeepers to areas controlled by warring armies or sending knights to clear out dangerous medieval roads. But most places in the world these days have functioning governments.
A news report about the shooting (https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2021-11-03/indiana-m...) says:
> One of the trick-or-treaters told police that he exchanged words with a man about 30 to 45 minutes before the shooting, which happened around 7:30 p.m. The man threatened to get a gun and shoot them, according to court documents.
> The group later saw a car with five or six people inside who appeared to be staring at them. The man who had exchanged words with one of the youths got out of the car with some of the other occupants. Another man took a “shooting stance” and shots were fired at the trick-or-treaters, court records said.
> A police officer captured Crews after the father of one of the youths chased him in the neighborhood, according to court records.
It's pretty clear that, even if this is a more dangerous area than some posh suburb of Chicago, it's still relatively safe, since not only were there kids out trick-or-treating by themselves, they felt comfortable getting in a verbal argument with someone who threatened to shoot them and they stuck around the area for 30-45 minutes. You don't do that in an area where shootings are particularly commonplace.
So, suppose that the police were patrolling the area. What would have been different? The man was caught - did he genuinely expect not to be caught, and would increasing police presence have dissuaded him? He also, apparently, got out of the car and started shooting - would there have been enough time for a police officer to react and save the child's life?
Meanwhile, the article talks about how "predictive policing" focuses on crimes that are not murder:
> Searching for a robbery suspect described only as a Black man between the ages of 16 and 18, officers stopped 161 people and arrested 10 at the intersection where the store was located in a span of two weeks. [...]
> Some encounters turned deadly. In 2016, LAPD shot and killed 31-year-old Keith Bursey Jr at the intersection, after the car Bursey was a passenger in was stopped by gang enforcement police investigating “an odor of marijuana”.
If a police patrol in Indiana had stopped and searched every car on Halloween with "an odor of marijuana," would they have found the car with the armed man and saved this teenager's life? If they had done a dragnet search for a teenager who stole some clothing, would they have made the area safer?
The problem (and I'm not saying I have an easy solution!) is that overpolicing doesn't particularly contribute to lowering crime rates, past a certain point. If you're trying to prevent a genocide in occupied Srebrenica, by all means, send in armed patrols and authorize them to use their arms. If you're trying to prevent some ten murders a year, all of which have unrelated causes, though? It's very much the "Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done" sort of reasoning.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that overpolicing can make the area even more dangerous by fostering a distrust of police - if you were a teenager in a bad part of town and the news liked to call you and your friends "youths," and you got in an argument with someone who threatened to shoot you, would you feel comfortable telling the local police patrol?
I think you might be underestimating how common this is in areas like where the shooting took place. Kids talking shit, kids being out by themselves, people shooting, threatening to shoot each other...
There’s no reasonable discussion of this issue that doesn’t start with assessing the goals, outcomes, and tactics, of America’s multi-generational War on (some) Drugs (when used by certain people).
The vast majority of policing and deciding which neighborhoods to patrol has literally nothing to do with stopping property crime and assaults. If it did this conversation would look totally different.