Low amount of solved crimes? Make it illegal to be offensive on Twitter and suddenly lots of crimes gets solved.
If you use the wrong metric then people will game it. Now watch governments do the same.
They've already been doing that for ages: crime rate, gdp, employment, inflation. Here is a clip from my favourite show that highlights this:
Decision making which relies on trust and reputation works well if an organization is small (50-100) and there is no big stuff turnover. Metrics are scalable - you can increase organization size from 1000 to 100000 and they'll continue to work (as bad as before but not much worse).
So true.
In a world with information overload, the real trick is not having lots of information, it's knowing which variables really matter. Bad bureaucracies and journalists often fixate on the wrong stats, which is usually what's easiest to measure or benefits them personally the most.
In the case of Quora, they seemed to prioritize signups and decided to become a gatekeeper to loads of actually useful information for humanity. Twitter appears to be sliding down this same path. The managers responsible for these decisions probably have loads of metrics "proving" that they're geniuses for these decisions, but I'd say that they're not measuring the right variables which are a lot harder to figure out.
This may be a controversial statement to some, but in the case of Covid, the governments of the world have been fixating on what benefits them most ("permanent" emergency powers, the beginnings of a digital social credit score system through the backdoor of vaccine passports, shoveling trillions of dollars around that will inevitably lead to gross corruption, a permanent in-built excuses for every failure they preside over, an opportunity to reset the economic system (you will own nothing and like it), etc) and what's easy to measure (the omnipresent "cases") while harming a load of other important variables that also really matter to peoples lives and health: the survival of the small businesses their family built, social cohesion and mental health, early cancer screening, physical fitness and low BMI, the right to absolute bodily integrity, and numerous other important things that are harmed by the fixation on only one aspect of health.
I think that part of their job is resolving violent or potentially violent conflict.
It’s true that perhaps my situation as described to the dispatcher might not have met a certain threshold, however, it would’ve made sense for them to ask more questions and give guidance as in general people have a bit of adrenaline when calling and might not be in the best shape to give a clear description. Immediately dismissing such scenarios could lead to some harmful results.
That's an interesting interpretation. They also said that "they were damaging cars" and "they became aggressive".
You should reread the comment, this wasn't actually said.
There are just too many cases where a quality of life type call like this (you haven't yet been actually beaten) or a white person feeling "threatened" turns into a major issue -> police respond, end up needing to use force, the thing escalates.
Perhaps you could try to be a police officer and help out.
Its not like the job is very appealing in current environment. The risk of either dying on job or getting imprisoned due to domestic disturbance calls gone wrong is very high. Not to mention, a lot of cops not showing up situation seem to be in line with the demands of general public who instead want to mental health workers to show up for handling a variety of scenarios.
Are those stats wrong? or maybe misleading by focusing on the wrong slice of the population? Or something like that?
Or is the compensation for those jobs more than it is for police officers?
No need: they are just quitting and getting other/better jobs. Civil servants (teachers and police, among others) aren't slaves after all, they have plenty of options.
The USA lost in Vietnam, went on to have a very mixed record in the 1980s, got their confidence back in the early 90s, lost some of it in the mid to late 90s...and...well, the 00s taught the USA military again to be humble. Not a good template for municipal police departments.
There have been plenty of scandals in the USA military that have sullied its reputation. "Poll after poll" is just anecdotal, and not born out in practice.
> So it is an excellent model when we consider how to reform the police.
Militarizing the police is not the answer. Imagine if the police acted like those MPs at Abu Ghraib.
The US military has had its share of scandals but I have yet to see that degrade the normative US opinion of our "soldiers," namely that they do a hard job on our behalf and deserve respect and gratitude for that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/29/the-in...
Soldiers have a special reputation.
Careful what you wish for there...
You should look up the ROE for a roadblock.
Not even the military is safe anymore:
>Trust in the military is dropping significantly, new survey suggests
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/03...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/29/the-in...
Also, the cops get blamed for things that are outside their control, like car break-ins, "They [the thieves] know that the most they'll get is a citation, so they'll be out on the street in a couple of hours," said Pete McLaughlin, retired.
Also we have a District Attorney (Chesa Boudin) who doesn't like to prosecute non-violent crimes, so rampant shoplifting has caused at least one CVS (at the corner of Eddy & Van Ness) to close.
When every major BLM-esque protest in the last several years was triggered by the death of a black person at the hands of the police, that characterization is "grossly offensive"
Not saying you should be put on trial for it (like in the article's case). Just stating a fact.
We could debate their tactics or the value of property damage to a social cause in terms of convincing moderates. But your presentation is pretty gross.
> won't even send a cop out for less than a homicide any longer
You might have cause-and-effect backwards here.
Talk to an actual cop and you'll quickly learn how wrong your theory is.
what you describe is basically a blackmail by the cops. Blackmailing the public that way kind of suggests that it isn't just few bad apples - it is the whole police system which is morally corrupt.
I'm not saying they weren't, but especially for quality of life type calls where a cop used to come out, no way is that worth responding too. And if you paid attention to what BLM etc have been demanding, it's to reduce disparate impact on certain groups of police calls (FAR more calls for black males for example then middle aged asian females)
An example is that the guy who solved this "mean tweet" problem is the same guy who could go and solve the burglaries problem. Assume you have a team that analyzes cyber crime that is underemployed but the team is required for rare cases. In their free time they enforce "mean tweets" (I'm not arguing that is okay, I'm arguing about resources). The assumption that they could use their free time better to solve burglaries is probably not true. Unless they Aram Mojtabai from the Blacklist. All of his resources are 1:1 as he can do anything.
You are the one making assumptions that firing people doesn't exist as a concept.
You missed the point which was not normative - that resources are not always interchangeable at a 1:1 ratio. You can clearly fire and hire wherever you want. It's the efficiency of that transaction to be discussed. Does the value gained by adding an enforcer outweighs the value lost by removing a "mean-tweet-enforcer"?
If the force's problems are caused by a shortage of enforcers and adding one more enforcer provides a huge value... while at the same time this "mean-tweet-enforcer" provides little value, then absolutely, make the trade.
But if this "mean-tweet-enforcer" does a lot of other valuable things, and this one article that made the news is just a one-off, while at the same time the police are not at a shortage of people but have process issues leading to the reported evidence failures, and adding another enforcer does not help much - the trade may not value society.
I just see a lot of arguments that we should reallocate resources without analyzing the tradeoff where one side may gain little from a lot of expenses. The OPs article states that the burglary issues, from what I can see before the paywall, were caused by evidence failures. If the argument were able to show that the resources lost by looking into this tweet could be reallocated to solve the evidence failures in the article by securing more CCTV feeds or something, then that's a strong argument. Either way, the comparison is theoretical. There are no mean tweet enforcers. The discussion is not normative, but positive. Simply not all resources are a 1:1 trade.
You seem focused on the economics of the situation and I’m hard pressed to come up with a number for police who are a joke vs. police whom the public have faith in. But a cheap way to get that benefit is stop having law enforcement act like asses.