In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers | Hacker News Reader

In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

washingtonpost.com

128 pointsdanso207 comments

It doesn't matter how you "rate" cops if the police union goes to bat for bad cops and gets their jobs reinstated, or they just leave one department and move to another.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/us/police-unions-contracts-sh...

We know who the bad cops are. There's a list of them in Philadelphia who the District Attorney (the current, and previous) will never call to the witness stand because they give unreliable testimony.

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/crime/29-philly-officer...

There's no need for a new rating system. We need accountability for known bad cops.

Yeah. This is what we all want I think. I want to be in a world where when some story of a cop doing something ridiculous surfaces, we're all confident that justice will be done. Unfortunately for me it's usually a sad feeling that nothing will be done about it.

We gotta be more willing to fire, ban, or prosecute cops.

If the DA really knows who the bad cops are, the DA should prosecute them. DAs blaming cops are hoping that the public don't realize the DAs themselves are dropping the ball and letting cops get away with it.

Unreliable testimony isn't a crime (in fact, on these lists, it often originates from officers having committed and been convicted of and served sentences for other crimes). Broadly speaking, protection of police officers from criminal prosecution is broad in such a way that it is difficult to prosecute police for even clear cut violations. For example, the Graham factors used to assess criminal culpability in the use of deadly force are appreciably more generous than most department policies and DoJ recommendations, meaning that there's a broad range of use of force that is in violation of department orders (including severe violations) but not criminal. Use of force on a fleeing individual is a common example. While there is definitely room for prosecutors to be more aggressive on police misconduct, the reality is that there is a huge spectrum of things for which officers ought to be fired but cannot be prosecuted for. Simple incompetence or lack of care is far from the least significant and common.

> While there is definitely room for prosecutors to be more aggressive on police misconduct

That's severely underselling it. Unless somebody dies, a prosecutor is more likely to give up before they even try. Even when somebody dies, that's still a common outcome. Prosecutors even let cops off for crimes committed off duty, wholly unrelated to any conceivable work matter.

DAs who do that get recalled

Indeed. In free and democratic societies, the electorate are the root of these problems.

It’s called market competition. Why can’t neighborhoods vote every year whose contract to renew? Police agencies could compete.

>Why can’t neighborhoods vote every year whose contract to renew?

Because privatization like that is not ideologically compatible with a lot of people.

IMO the "basic patrol work", "standing around to dissuade anyone from trying anything" and "professional witness" duties that cops fulfill could be contracted out to private security the same way we subcontract out EMS. I'm more hesitant to contract out the investigative bits.

Edit: And before any dolts show up to call me the L word I would just like to make it clear I don't advocate for this out of some love for privatization. I think that getting cops off the government "team" is the most tractable path we have to a solving a lot of the problems we have holding them accountable.

Municipalities already vote to put people in charge, who then negotiate the contracts. However, the police unions are very good at negotiating a contract that gives them the maximal amount of latitude that they can negotiate. Which is fine, but when the Democratic party _and_ the Republican party run candidates who do not push back against police unions (primarily because the police unions fundraise for them), how does a "market" make this any better?

There is not an idle set of police officers just waiting around to bid lower and win a new contract. That's not how a union works, and I doubt that any police officer would willingly give up the arbitration clauses that allow them to keep their jobs.

If your response is "just privatize it", I'm sorry but you're not being realistic.

The problem is that the Democratic party is not interested in pushing back against police unions. There are no elected officials that are interested in pushing back against police unions because they are a strong constituency that can make or break a campaign. There are very few politicians who go against the police and still win their elections.

It isn’t about bidding lower. It is about innovating and being more effective. Perhaps they can get to know the locals, do pre-emptive work like Canadians, build goodwill… perhaps they can innovate on their techniques for taking down perps, use pepper spray rather than guns, or perhaps they can use bodycams and document everything. Private competition produces far better products and services than when schools and police face no market competition.

At least the public should make more police work like meter-maids, carry no guns and just issue citations for dog poop or barbecuing without a license. Why come armed to the teeth when Barbecue Becky calls?

Privatizing police forces will not make them more accountable. If they are not accountable now as a public good, how would them being private somehow improve that?

The only comparable example was charter schools and the results were they cost the taxpayers more, and had worse outcomes, and rarely is their charter revoked for poor performance because they hire the sons of politicians, like Chakrah Fattah's son was before both were charged for corruption, in the case of Philly charter schools.

Because if a better police agency with better results comes along, the neighborhood will simply award the police agencies the contract. How is Gilette accountable for making razors worse than other brands? You stop buying them, that's how.

A police force is not like picking your razor blade at the store. How is there enough space in a market to have multiple police companies, when most municipalities are going to award a _single_ contract to cover the police work for that municipality. If there is only one contract to award, that means one police company would win and the others go out of business, or leave the "market" and go somewhere else.

That is a natural monopoly, and all you have done is replicated the same issues as a public police force that the politicians are not willing to challenge, except now you have a private monopoly where you can't force any changes or accountability because there's no other competitors.

The "market" does not make things intrinsically better.

How do companies compete for business from cities and neighborhoods?

You should look up "enterprise sales" on HN, lol

Google "New Jersey Townships" and see how many there are. Companies can sell smart city services to cities, why not this?

You'd be surprised but many religious communities do have their own para-police forces, like Shomrim, and also their own ambulances etc.

Caution: What you DON'T want to happen is overlapping fire brigades or police forces like NYC's metropolitan police vs municipal police, or bowery boys vs black joke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zoXk1vnmcg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_riot

For David Simon fans, there's a new mini-series called "We Own This City" that also covers a similar situation in Baltimore.

Highly recommended, albeit a short spiritual successor to "The Wire."

https://www.hbo.com/we-own-this-city

I think their heart is in the right place (officers should have direct and transparent reputations to people). But in order to implement this "correctly", you need to go one step further into a dangerous territory: the ratings that an officer receives should be weighted by the rating of the person who rated them. Absolute scumbags shouldn't be able to hurt reputations in quite the same way as upstanding people. If you have 5/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1.0. If you have a 1/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1/5.

The "scumbags" most likely know the cops at their best and worst. Rating a cop is relative as they provides a wide ranges of services. It's all relative.

Which is why their rating is still counted, but its biased by what society thinks of the person doing the rating. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of better here. If ratings are something people want to do, you have to bias ratings with additional context, otherwise there is no mechanism to help separate ratings from honest and dishonest people.

But this is also a premature optimization and potentially YAGNI. Yes, you want down-weighting because of one potential complication. But you haven't even built and operated this system yet, so you don't know if this workaround you're applying will even be necessary or will end up causing larger issues.

One example of this is "voter fraud". It is possible to commit voter fraud, and so certain parties want strong identity guarantees to vote. But voter fraud isn't happening in practice, and stringent ID requirements actually suppress minority votes.

It is better to implement the simplest possible system first, observe it, and fix problems later as needed, after careful analysis of the running system.

>YAGNI

But not the ordinary YAGNI. You're Absolutely going to need some way of dealing with low-quality input.

Why? What's the worst thing that could happen from poor quality input? Unreliable scores? These reviews don't mean or do anything in the real world, and it's much less serious than an actual IA complaint. There's also no evidence that there would be enough poor quality inputs to make a meaningful impact on scores.

You really should wait and see before you invest a ton of time and money into solving problems that end up not being problems.

>Why? What's the worst thing that could happen from poor quality input? Unreliable scores? These reviews don't mean or do anything in the real world

If you are actually operating under the assumption that the output doesn't matter at all, then implementing the review system in the first place is a waste of effort, let alone any features thereof. But assuming that we do care about the output, its quality does matter.

>There's also no evidence that there would be enough poor quality inputs to make a meaningful impact on scores.

In pretty much the same way that there's no evidence that any given new website needs to worry about sql injection.

This encourages an undesirable outcome: Police now know that Group A's ratings will be more heavily weighted and Group B's ratings will not be heavily weighted. They will then be incentivized to treat Group A with kid gloves and mistreat Group B, regardless of what caused the police interaction.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider what the police might use as a proxy/heuristic to figure out what group a suspect is in.

I think you meant they would mistreat Group A more, if they are more heavily weighted, but I do see your point.

I agree that this is a danger. Fortunately, with additional data available, data scientists will be able to show any biases more clearly. If it happens with a rating system, it was happening before the rating system, except now there is the benefit of more data.

Similarly, you could also show if people from Group A (the more weighted group) also rate the police lower, despite similar treatment as those of Group B. The data will cut both ways.

EDIT>> Nvm, you were using "weighted" to mean "the weight of their vote", not "the weight applied to their vote."

Other way around imo. How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people."

I don't think the system described in the article is good either, but this isn't why. A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. "Upstanding" is as good a euphemism for it as any I guess but we should eliminate that not formalize it.

My suggestion has nothing to do with how the officer views the person they're interacting with for a given interaction. Whether the officer thinks they're a "scumbag" or an "upstanding" person is completely independent of that person's rating for a given interaction. If you are a scumbag, it's likely reflected by your rating.

> How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people."

Why?

> A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others.

And what are those groups?

Why?

It’s kind like human rights - the majority of people who are at risk of having them infringed are unpleasant or unsympathetic characters.

I’d argue a cliché “upstanding law-abiding citizen” type doesn’t generally have that much to fear from a police interaction. They are generally being dealt with on a presumption of good faith, and have at least some access to leverage and ability to push back against unfair treatment. Someone who’s already been identified as a “scumbag” doesn’t, and that is why their treatment is more illuminating.

And what are those groups?

There are many of them and they vary by region. Police very observably interact differently with richer versus poorer groups, for example, or with groups from different ethnic backgrounds.

> It’s kind like human rights - the majority of people who are at risk of having them infringed are unpleasant or unsympathetic characters.

I think some people have a view of "human rights" that fixates on and elevates "unpleasant or unsympathetic characters" but I don't think it's intrinsic to the concept of human rights.

> I’d argue a cliché “upstanding law-abiding citizen” type doesn’t generally have that much to fear from a police interaction. They are generally being dealt with on a presumption of good faith, and have at least some access to leverage and ability to push back against unfair treatment. Someone who’s already been identified as a “scumbag” doesn’t, and that is why their treatment is more illuminating.

Illuminating of what exactly that would make their view more "important" (as stated above) than the views of law abiding citizens?

> There are many of them and they vary by region. Police very observably interact differently with richer versus poorer groups, for example, or with groups from different ethnic backgrounds.

I think if you break it down more granularly, you'll see that what police interactions vary more within, for example, ethnic groups, than between ethnic groups, based on characteristics such as past criminal history, etc.

I don't think it's intrinsic to the concept of human rights

Nobody said it was. But it is almost definitionally true that the people most at risk of having their individual or human rights infringed are those people who are subject to the most forceful remedies of the state. And these are, by and large, not people for whom it is easy to have sympathy.

Illuminating of what exactly that would make their view more "important" (as stated above) than the views of law abiding citizens?

It is easy to treat a good and compliant person well; observing someone do this tells us little. It is harder to treat someone “bad” well, so seeing this happen can give us greater confidence that people in positions of power are treating others equally, free from prejudice. It’s tells us more, and thus is more important.

You might; I can’t say. It doesn’t ameliorate unequal treatment on the basis of other characteristics, regardless.

It seems like treating good people well is the axiomatic virtue, while treating bad people well is a virtue derived from the first.

The determination of who's bad or good is fraught with error and subjectivity; therefore to protect good people, we must protect all people.

> How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people."

I absolutely agree, but the point was not that it doesn’t matter how cops treat “scumbags”, but that you can’t trust some people’s word on what they experienced. I think it is certain that there exist both cops who lie and non-cops who lie, so we need some way to filter out the signal from the noise.

Lucky us. Now that the PageRank patent has expired, we can apply it to policing and to social credit scores.

Who is a scumbag? Some police officers decide that some people are reputable citizens and others are scumbags based on prejudice, and arguments like yours are a great way to dismiss any criticism of them.

The very same argument could be made about rating police officers. Also, we shouldn't pretend that scumbags don't exist, they do, as both citizens and police. If you're going to cast doubt on the existence of scumbags in citizens, but not police, you're showing your own prejudice.

The actual problem is that police are above the law. What I mean by that is, unlike citizens they are in a position where they might break a law without any repercussions or abuse their position of power.

The only real way to deal with this would be to police the police in a realistic manner. Bodycam and location data of their every move would need to be available for that. Currently, police can simply turn these off.

Yes, there are scumbags in both ordinary citizens and in police but one of these groups of scumbags already gets "policed". (Disclaimer: I do think that this idea is not the right way to deal with this problem.)

You make a good point. I believe the idea with a rating system of police is that you tie the departments funding to the average rating of your officers. So while officers can abuse their power, if there is a reliable signal of this (reflected by their rating), they get canned to raise the overall rating of the department.

no, police are not above the law. they're only "special" in that they enforce the law, which requires exceptional privileges and responsibilities ordinary citizens don't have. but they're otherwise fully under the same legal jurisdiction as the rest of us.

some police may act as if they're above the law, but that's projection, not foundational.

edit: interesting, seems to have hit a tribal trigger of some sort, but can't tell if it's the "police bad" or "police good" contingents getting their feathers ruffled.

de facto vs de jure

Hey, i just want to mention that I did not down vote you. Of course you are technically correct, it seems like you took 'above the law' in my comment in the 'literal sense' but it was more of a way to express how common it is for police to abuse their situation and privileges.

no worries, and i understood the intent, but wanted to explicitly counteract the nodding-along effect of platitudes like that.

we all have the propensity to abuse situations and privileges, so police aren't special in that regard. the problem is that we narrowly attribute this universal human quality to just police, blinded by context, because that fits a preconceived narrative and surreptitiously makes each of us feel a little better about ourselves. this happens subconsciously and is a form of the fundamental attribution error we make so often.

that's not to absolve the police of grievances, since they do have extraordinary powers and as a result their misbehaviors have greater impact. certainly we should hold them to a higher standard. but police aren't more corrupt than average (they aren't lesser human beings, as implied).

> Who is a scumbag?

And that's why these systems will never work very well.

I'm heavily critical of the police, and they deserve a lot of criticism. But there are lot's of people (half my family) that are just scum. Algorithmically it may be hard to fairly weight, but on a personal level it's not hard to put people on a pretty consistent scum spectrum. If the people lower on the spectrum are critical of a certain cop, I can't weight it highly for reputation evaluation of that cop. The same for any information said scumbag provides about others.

I could argue that police come from the same population as anyone else, therefore a significant portion of police will also be scum

I certainly agree with that, no argument here.

I agree that most people are inherently good. But I add a few points of skepticism toward anybody who chooses a role that comes with inherent authority by default: clergy, legislature, law, etc.

Not saying they're bad, most aren't, however, you wanted to be the guy with the power- There is possibly a reason for that.

> you wanted to be the guy with the power- There is possibly a reason for that.

Sure, but there's nothing that suggests the underlying motivation would be negative. For example, a lot of people cite a desire to protect and serve their communities. Just because there is a motive for something doesn't imply that it's ulterior or nefarious.

I didnt say it was nefarious. When you open new lines of credit, or make an inquiry, your credit score drops. Atomically these aren't bad things, in a vacuum, yet when you step back and look at things holistically they can be part of a pattern. Feel me?

People may cite that. There’s no evidence of it being true. The issue of being class traitors is absolutely a negative issue.

That doesn't contradict the parent's claim. Moreover, they're not drawn from the same population, there is a filtering mechanism that reasonably skews for police to be above-average even if we might want it to be better.

Moreover, I'm also skeptical of the simplistic idea that our policing problem derives from "too many immoral officers". It seems more likely that it's an emergent property of the incentives and constraints we put on police brass (including the police union system).

Further, if we're going to reform police, it would be nice if we focused on policies which weren't predictably counter-effective. Rather than the de-policing policies which have increased homicides by 9k/year (relative to the time period before the de-policing movement kicked off in earnest with the largest increases in the "communities of color" in whose name the de-policing initiative campaigned) for no appreciable difference in unjustified police killings, it would be nice if we instead pursued one or more of: more police training, weakened/abolished police unions, restructured internal-affairs departments, tightened background checks, mandated periodic psyche evals, etc.

> filtering mechanism that reasonably skews for police to be above-average

Are you saying cops are on average less scummy? Why is that a conclusion that you find to be inherently true?

> a filtering mechanism that reasonably skews for police to be above-average

Cite your sources please. I have a very significant doubt that this is empirically true.

In fact I'd be willing to wager that the nature of the job provids an improvised filter that achieves the exact opposite effect.

> Who is a scumbag?

There are marginal cases for sure, but let's not pretend that true scumbags don't exist just because the demarcation line is subjective; that's like pretending there's no such thing as a ripe banana because the green fades gradually into yellow with no clear line between them. Look beyond the marginal cases and it becomes clear that the difference really does exist. There are people in this country with numerous DUIs and domestic violence convictions, obviously such people are scumbags.

Speaking of domestic violence, want to post some statistics on the amount of cops that are domestic abusers? Or the ones caught drunk behind the wheel and get let off.

Why not post the amount of cats that are orange or scarecrows in overalls? What does the rate of cops being DV cases have to do with this comment?

What a derail! And one that in no way remedies the stated problem.

I think people with numerous DUIs are just as likely to have a serious disease as have some moral failing resulting in them being a 'scumbag.' To me, choice is a major differentiator rather than 'obviously this person has a history of x actions' in the abstract.

Are you making the case that a person with numerous DUIs doesn't have a choice in the decision to drive drunk, and therefore isn't a scumbag?

Pretty much, yeah. I'm acknowledging that it is possible the person with numerous DUIs is an alcoholic and that, once drunk, the intent necessary for a knowing crime is no longer really there. The logic of 'chose to get drunk so chose the consequences' doesn't work if the person has a disease causing them to continuously drink.

Do you think being an alcoholic is a valid defense if you murder someone while drunk?

Unlikely - it's definitely something you can raise in an argument about intent to get drunk and that lack of intent impacting the nature of mens rea, so it might be a mitigating factor, but either way it isn't a complete defense so you're kinda starting at negligent homicide.

The difference, of course, is I'm not actually talking about what you did, I'm talking about what makes you a scumbag. I don't think people can really be unintentional scumbags - intent is required.

Recognizing the root cause doesn't remove choice or blame. If we follow your logic consistently, then none of us are ultimately responsible for anything we do because of determinism.

Things like that should only really be a factor in choosing sentencing and rehabilitation.

>Recognizing the root cause doesn't remove choice or blame.

That's not my logic.

If you have a disease that causes an involuntary action, that removes choice.

I could extend that - the more something slides towards coercion, the less choice there is. Rather than a complete removal, a person's punishment should be evaluated in light of the circumstances in which they act.

>Things like that should only really be a factor in choosing sentencing and rehabilitation.

That's kinda what I'm talking about - a sentence of being known as a scumbag.

And maybe the wife beater is fucked in the head because he got brain damage as a kid from his dad beating him. I don't really care though, I don't have a problem classifying him as a scumbag. Cycles of abuse can be broken, and addictions can be kicked (and usually, avoided in the first place. Unlike getting beaten by your dad.)

Yeah, if the person is intellectually disabled and that disability causes them to act in a certain way then I don't really consider them a scumbag either. Their parents, maybe, or whoever is supposed to be supervising them.

Look, if you're a person who enjoys harming others, is incredibly lazy and chooses theft or destruction over actively working in your community when you have the opportunity to do so then you're more of a scumbag in my book.

> Yeah, if the person is intellectually disabled and that disability causes them to act in a certain way then I don't really consider them a scumbag either.

That's easy to claim online talking about abstract scenarios, but if you saw a man beat his wife in public I think you'd be more than willing to make a snap judgement about that man's moral character, and wouldn't stop to think "well maybe he's not a scumbag because..."

Sure, I don't disagree. I snap to judgment more often than I'd like to.

This criticism itself is a distraction, who is a scumbag is a different problem than whether or not scumbag feedback being weighted equally to less problematic peers is detrimental to the purpose of the system.

> Who is a scumbag?

Easy question. 99% of those arrested are scumbags.

This is speaking as someone who has been to jail and met the population that gets arrested. They are the worst, and their opinion in regard to rating cops should be largely ignored.

Obviously excluding yourself, I guess that means you spoke with 99 people all of which were scum, which strikes me as being fairly socially active for a fish out of water!

Sounds like you're casting some sort of sarcastic doubt.

I've mixed with a population of about 500. Spoken to many, intentionally and otherwise. Very familiar with their culture. Trust me, 99% of the arrest population is scum.

Speaking as someone who has met the population that gets arrested, they are no more or less scumbags than the population that doesn't.

If you were really speaking from a place of actually knowing the arrest population, you wouldn't say that.

If you spent some time in jail or prison, you would know there is a huge difference between the normal population and the arrest population. Violence, drugs, theft, robbery, rape, (things people get arrested for) ... they're scumbags if anyone is.

I have spent time in jail. I've also spent time out of jail. There's just as many scumbags outside. Lots of violent and aggressive people are not in jail, and lots of good people who didn't hurt anyone are in jail. There are a whole lot of other things besides what you list that could land you in jail.

To be honest ... based on what you're saying I don't think you've really been.

> There are a whole lot of other things besides what you list that could land you in jail.

Incorrect. The jail population is 99% in those categories.

> and lots of good people who didn't hurt anyone are in jail

Also incorrect. Although, there are a lot of mentally unstable folks there, who could be considered to be a bit more innocent than the others.

Okay buddy. I’m sure all the people In prison, not even jail, for weed related non violent issues are somehow hurting people. Your toxic world view is a neoliberals elitist status quo wet dream. Nothing more.

Only 92 people were sentenced for marijuana possession in the federal system in 2017, out of a total of nearly 20,000 drug convictions. That's about 0.5%

0. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

Should be much higher for the states. I can't find numbers for that, though, only drugs in general.

Okay? That’s federal. Why is that relevant? When you get arrested for marijuana randomly on the street in a normal state, what are the chances it’s going federal?

Incarceration is mostly for violence and theft. Lots of stolen cars, lots of assaults. Quite a lot of murders.

I didn't know anyone who was there for just drugs, except a few who were dealing hard drugs. (And who were coincidentally also violent thieves)

If you want to understand the jail population, watch the show "lockup raw". It would give you a better picture of who is being discussed.

Though it defies logic, there are a lot of people like yourself who seem to think that prisons are filled with a bunch of victims, who are just there for drug offenses. It's not true by a long shot.

https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/whos_in_prison_for_mar...

Linking to a conservative think tanks report is pretty funny. It isn’t even trying to hide its bias from the get go. It knows it audience. People who have already been instilled to vote against their self interest and who want to oppress others.

I would not only link to a leftist think tank. Besides that being rarer than the propoganda of the right. It’s insulting to myself most of all (the fact I would let myself get duped by propaganda this easily) and to the people i am talking to, to do that.

Also, watching a tv show? That’s the worst way to understand politics. While being the best way for basic propaganda to work on a person. Life isn’t a joke where tv shows are what should be referenced.

> Linking to a conservative think tanks report is pretty funny. It isn’t even trying to hide its bias from the get go. It knows it audience.

The statistics were well-framed and accurate. It also has a nice discussion about how the statistics can be spun in different political directions, which is uncommonly honest for any side.

> People who have already been instilled to vote against their self interest and who want to oppress others

This narrative of law enforcement oppressing others is probably something we would hopefully agree to disagree on regarding the particulars of who, and how wide-spread that is. It definitely happens. I would say that my first-hand experience mixing with something like a thousand inmates (the number is true) is that they were very ethnically diverse. About 1/3 White, 1/3 Black, 1/3 Hispanic. Roughly. More Black and Hispanic and less White I guess, but there were plenty of Whites. Virtually 0 Asian. However nearly everyone was very lower class.

More important is that everyone who I knew of ... deserved to be there. They were mostly burglars, robbers, car thieves (way more high-speed chases than you would expect). Many were there for some type of Assault. Many multi-charge cases. Plenty of murderers, and a lot more rapists than you would expect.

Very very few were there for only drugs, and honestly, they were released quickly into treatment programs. Other than that there were hard-drug dealers facing more major cases. They also tended to have a long case history involving the crimes above.

Mixed with their more serious crimes, drug abuse was rampant, both in their outside lives and inside the jail. The law in the jurisdiction (I won't name it for privacy) doesn't care about marijuana. It was mainly heroine and meth. Those were even inside the jail in small quantities, leading to fights and even an in-jail murder over its control.

However, nearly all of the drug addicts were eligible for reduced sentencing and "programs". In this jurisdiction they really bend over backwards for addicts. People would be in and out for serious violent cases and receive "programs" (outside treatment) and reduced sentences because they were mentally impaired from addiction. One guy in particular I knew, was a meth + heroine addict who had been in and out on "programs" for many years for all sorts of serious crimes, had lately killed a cop with his vehicle while fleeing.

The drug defense was such a great way for people to get off that many would help each other concoct their defenses about how they were under the influence for their crimes. Another guy in particular came up with "bath salts" defense for a violent crime while I was there, and he was in fact released for it, instead of facing pretty serious time. They were going to even let him even go to a different state to care-take his for his son. However, he was back in for another case within a month.

As for oppression, I understand that BLM has some valid complaints, for instance. And I certainly met a lot of cops who were nasty, violent, cruel people who didn't live up to the profession. It attracts some really bad people. I look at cops totally differently now. I would also say that parole and probation is very harsh and that people who have to endure it are "oppressed" in many ways, and often even financially exploited by law enforcement. These people have very little chance of crawling up out of the lower class after being in the system. Many end up on the streets. But their own addictions and criminal culture are a major factor.

My point was not so much about oppression, which certainly occurs, but that from my first-hand observation, the vast majority of the arrest population is genuinely guilty of what they were arrested for (and often also of a lot additional crime they weren't arrested for), and is quite a lot more criminal and dangerous to society than 90% of liberals assume (and I am a liberal). People who don't know any better often think of jails and prisons as teeming with "victims of the system". But trust me, the vast majority are real low-lifes. They are a serious danger to you, yours, and your stuff. They should absolutely be separated from the rest of society, for both punishment and public safety.

> Also, watching a tv show? That’s the worst way to understand politics.

I see you assumed that it's a drama or staged reality TV. No, it's closer to a serialized documentary. I am telling you as someone who has both spent 2 years in jail and seen this show ... that it is an accurate, gonzo-type view into what jail is.

It's not political. One could definitely use it to understand the politics of jail however, internal and external. It's a little sensationalized for TV consumption, but, it's also pretty close to what I could see being "source material"; It wouldn't surprise me if pieces of it are a supplemental part of any Criminology curricula.

I'm not trying to be rude here, but this is a situation where you don't know something (what jail is like inside, or anything about this "show"), and you are talking to someone with that knowledge. In other words, you would stand to learn something.

Now I doubt you're really interested, but since I'm typing, I'll say that the "show" is candid footage of the daily lives of real inmates. It also features several "plant" inmates who are not criminals, but who are fully immersed with real criminals. The real inmates are only partially aware of being recorded, and are usually not conscientious of it. It's a documentary of what jail is like, and shows the live population in a real jail; Who they are, how they talk, think, and act.

I'm surprised it was even legal, frankly. It is pretty exploitative, since in jail you are technically still innocent (not yet convicted). However, I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that again, the vast majority of the inmates are in fact guilty of the crime they are accused of, and something like 95% of them have been committing serious crimes their entire life. I sense you may possibly have a "political" disagreement with this statement (apologies if not), but I assure you it is true.

The show is actually amazing because jail is a very dangerous place where you can absolutely find yourself in violent, possibly even deadly situations. While the "plants" were monitored closely on CCTV, they are very certainly in physically danger. (It's worth mentioning that CCTV is common in most jails/prisons; it wasn't just for the show).

While personally in jail, I was involved in numerous fights, and witnessed countless others, two of which were particularly brutal and involved fractured skulls, also a few stabbings, several large group melees, and a suicide. A murder also happened in a pod I was in, though I wasn't anywhere near it. Jailers are also sometimes very violent and provocative. There were at least a few shivs around in any given pod. It sounds a bit extreme in retrospect, but I'm not exaggerating anything.

> While being the best way for basic propaganda to work on a person.

Who said anything about propaganda? There isn't really any active political angle to it (except perhaps the Sheriff's funding / election). It definitely shows the Draconian threat of "crime doesn't pay" by showing the inside of the admittedly quite ugly industry, but I don't personally think that's more propagandizing than simply educational in a net-positive sense for our particular society. It is a little sickening that a show like that is a form of entertainment for some people to watch. I can understand the fascination with it, but I personally didn't even watch a whole lot of it because it hits too close to home.

Also, please don't insult my intelligence by suggesting that I am propagandized in some way, or lack the critical thinking to discern television propaganda. We're both in a high functioning career. Presumably we're both smart people, no?

> Life isn’t a joke where tv shows are what should be referenced.

Well, think about it ... I'm obviously speaking from a position of real life experience. There aren't many good "jokes" here. I'll try to sidestep the offense I could take at the term "joke" in response to someone mentioning a serious topic and "life" experience, but that's difficult.

Basically, you heard someone with some rare domain knowledge say "hey - check this thing out, it's actually pretty realistic". Even without actually looking at that thing, if you can't figure out that that person is probably correct about what they say ... I'd point out what that makes you, but this is HN and I don't intend to flame. You should figure it out though.

I don't think you'll even read any of this, typing it is just therapeutic I guess. But, since you bothered me, I'll tell you that I don't like your demeanor or arrogance.

Arguably it's petty, but for the sake of keeping HN a nice place I think I'll check your comments every now and then ... and if I see you calling folks names like "boot licker" again, or posting non-substantive stuff (which seems likely?) I'll happily flag it! Maybe the thought of dang would force you to become a better, or perhaps less frequent poster.

Your profile indicates a bright person, and I assume you are. Heads up - what you're saying isn't matching.

I haven’t used boot licker directly before. You can be superficially technically polite as you are doing without actually being kind. As can be seen with all the back handed compliments you keep using. I find that more arrogant than me being irked at the casting of an entire disenfranchised population in a negative light and breaking the name calling rule in a comment. You’re right I should not have done that.

Your usage of race is not cool to me either. You believe people have a lot more free will and power than I do. We both think we are right. You said you’re a liberal. I am not. I get that your political world view means believing the average person has a lot more agency than they do.

It is weird to follow someone’s profile to tattle on them and imply they should hopefully get unnerved by that.

I did read your whole comment.

> Your usage of race is not cool to me either.

There's really no indication where that's coming from. I definitely said nothing inappropriate about race.

Two things are relevant there:

1) It's not an unwise assumption that your raising of the specter of "oppression" was along the lines of race, as that is so often the main context for that sort of discussion. See the BLM movement, and basically any other conversation about police oppression. I thought I was making it clear that I did not perceive much racial oppression in the proportion of races present; that the proportion instead suggested that socio-economic class and uncomplicated inherent criminality were the most important hallmarks of the arrest population. I really have no idea which direction or for what reason you could possibly be offended by anything relevant to race that I said. Trust me, I hate talking about race, but it seemed relevant, and everything I said was a just a real figure.

2) Race is extremely relevant on the inside. It's HUGE culture shock. I was lucky to be mainly housed in the "Non-Active" population, which means "not actively gang members". This is opposed to "General Population", where falling into a race-based gang is culturally mandatory (for all races). Basically everyone must participate in some level of gang activity and take orders from racial leadership. Resources (food, jobs, phones, televisions, chairs, area, etc.) are divvied up by racial "politics" (which is an oft-used word on the inside which has a slightly different, more ominous meaning than when you or I say it). There is some mixing, but you know where your race's areas are and you get into trouble fast if you infringe on other races' stuff; No watching their TV, sitting on their chairs, using their stuff unless you are invited. In my group we mixed a lot more, and overt gangs were actually taboo, but almost everyone was a former gang member from general population and/or outside. There were still very solid racial cliques and they still fought over racial ownership of certain resources. The gangs were beneath the surface and occasionally became active.

It's a fascinating topic really. Not all of the racial gangs are strictly exclusive, and there are more denominations than you would expect. I knew a white guy who ran with an Islamic black gang when he was in prison. (Coincidentally, he was an utterly vile person who will either rot behind bars or die young, which I can honestly say is for the best). Some hispanics run with white gangs and vice versa. Then there are those who claim "other". Any race can claim "other", meaning they largely stay out of racial politics as best they can but they still basically have to form a cohesive group and minimal leadership in order to maintain resources and not be taken advantage of.

Anyway, even though I largely avoided the problems of "general population", race and racism is a very serious thing among inmates. It flows in all directions and is super uncomfortable. Also, for the record I totally avoided any gang affiliation. I cliqued mainly with the hispanics and whites (the blacks mostly stuck to themselves) but I had some close black friends too. Plus you know ... "I voted for Obama" so there's that often-denigrated but still good-faith line. Dislike Biden though.

> the casting of an entire disenfranchised population in a negative light

Yeah I mean, we do disagree .... "casting in a negative light" is trivial and pretty essential to the whole idea that it is in fact justified to condemn someone to time behind bars for the very serious crimes they commit of their own free will, which I assert they definitely have. I really think if you spent meaningful time among the arrest population it would become really clear that the majority of them disenfranchise themselves with willful major crimes. Remember -- you rarely ever even see these people let alone mingle with them; I think you don't understand them because you haven't met them.

There are a lot of homeless + insane folks in the system though, and I feel differently about them.

Anyway. For some reason I needed to blab about jail stuff that I NEVER talk about with a rando who vehemently disagrees ... Thanks for reading. That's probably enough HN for me for a while.

It’s common knowledge how important race is in prison. That has nothing to do with you bringing it up as you did. Nor does me bringing it up mean I don’t know how important it is in circumstances like prison and jail.

I believe in not having an oppressive society that then cruelly punishes people unnecessarily. Recidivism is quite high in the US. I want to focus on Lowering that. not punishing people. I don’t have contempt for people.

You don’t know the things I’ve gone thru. I’ve lived a privileged life, but not a perfect one. You remarked before how I’m probably well paid in the tech industry. I’m not. Never have been. Haven’t always had food or roof over my head. My skin color didn’t do me favors in run ins with authority when I had not done anything wrong enough to warrant time and attention.

> whole idea that it is in fact justified to condemn someone to time behind bars for the very serious crimes they commit of their own free will, which I assert they definitely have.

Nothing will change me to believe this. I view humans as equals. I want to help people. Not throw them into the barbarism you have talked about and when a lot of them end up not being able to improve their lives enough, blame them. I find it cruel and unusual. I don’t have any bloodlust, as it were.

Most people are incarcerated for the reasons you list. [0] That doesn't necessarily make them a scumbag or a bad person in my mind, without knowing more about the situation. There are plenty of examples where it's not so clear cut, here are a few:

Supposedly over 90% of convictions are from plea bargains. We'll never know how many of those people were actually innocent. CeCe McDonald may or may not be one example. [1]

Anthony Gammons, Jr. may have acted in self defense for him and his child, but he wasn't legally allowed to own a firearm so he was convicted of murder. [2]

Teenager gets 10 years for consensual sex. [3]

Kalief Browder in jail for three years without a trial. [4]

Alexander Torres wrongfully convicted for murder for 20 years. [5]

When I was in jail, the few people I talked to, were in there for cannabis possession (as was I), driving without a license, and missing a jury summons. None of that necessarily makes them bad people in my mind. Maybe they are, but it would be for other reasons I'm not aware of.

[0] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p19.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeCe_McDonald

[2] https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2020/sep/15/indiana-s...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_v._State

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder

[5] https://www.aol.com/news/20-years-prison-man-found-204259158...

At this point you (two) are just going to accuse the other of not associating with criminals under the most harsh (or harsh enough) circumstances. Maybe maximum security prison?

No, my whole point is that I'm talking about the general arrest population.

The inverse is also true--some people decide whether or not police are reputable or scumbags based on prejudice. Thankfully in either case, reputation systems (whether a formal ratings system or an informal social reputation) can tolerate outlier reviews and consequently "argument's like the parent's" are not a particularly good way to dismiss criticism of someone (if someone is designated "a scumbag", it's on the preponderance of their reviews, not just those of one or two prejudice people).

clearly we need a social credit system where citizens are scored based on their financial history, trustworthiness, charitable efforts, and praising the government on social media.

I think that is definitely something that we could look to address in the future but I think that the priority right now should be to crack down on police malfeasance.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I agree, in larger populations there will be trolls that just hate all cops.

This is the premise of Nosedive, Black Mirror S3E1.

Spoiler: it does... not end well.

And the "meowmeowbeenz" episode of Community. Also does not end well, but is very funny.

Given the very low number of negative reviews in the pilot programs (only one negative review at Virginia Commonwealth Univ.), I think these can be reviewed on a case by case basis. As the supervisor mentioned, he went over the body cam footage with the officer. Seems like a great learning tool on how to be a better public servant.

So who rates the raters?

We don't have some infinite-regress rating system to qualify people to vote. Or to voice their opinions verbally. Or, really, for nearly anything. And for good reason - there is no objective point from which to judge.

You accept that humans are flawed, and that rating systems created by them reflect human judgement.

Because it's related to your comment, this is a good a place to ask something I've been wondering for a long time:

Is there a word or concept (in English, or in any language) for an ostensibly straightforward and common sense solution to a real problem, whose implementation entails creating a solution which is far larger in scale than the original problem ever was?

I mean something distinct from concepts like perverse incentives (the cobra effect, for example). I mean something like what you're talking about above. But a more illustrative, completely made-up example might be a law that was meant to make people pay their traffic tickets. Imagine that, through a series of steps which each seemed reasonable at the time, implementing this law ended up creating a global, keyhole satellite surveillance network over the entire surface of the country, with massive bunkers of computers monitoring for traffic micro-violations (".02 kmh over the speed limit, that'll be 2 cents") in real time, then notifying people with a tracking bracelet that everyone was legally required to wear, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to enforce the law we all agreed made sense at the time. And, to ensure the tickets could be delivered in a timely manner, the banks and communications companies had to support a bunch of government technology and oversight, and car companies had to build some tech into their automobiles to shut the off if you didn't pay.

It becomes dystopian really quickly, but I don't think it has to.

This silly example is just meant to illustrate what I mean: is there a name for decisions whose implementation seems straightforward, but which, step by step, create a much bigger apparatus than you originally intended?

I don't think this is entirely theoretical: there are plenty of real world examples, but I won't name them because they would probably distract from the question. Even in software development, you probably run into a situation where some product person says "can't we show this property over here?" and you say "sure, but we'd have to spend a year rewriting our entire architecture first".

>Is there a word or concept (in English, or in any language) for an ostensibly straightforward and common sense solution to a real problem, whose implementation entails creating a solution which is far larger in scale than the original problem ever was?

You're thinking of the phrase "nuking a housefly", or some similar metaphors that fit the pattern "[large weapon] a [small animal]"

The word is Vernuftendlösunggrosseproblemenmacht.

Hah. So, China's social rating approach on all citizens as the starting point

There's also a lot of bias here, since most people don't have a lot of contact with police, unless they did some bad stuff.

That itself is a problem that should be fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing

Surely this is some Black Mirror joke or a rhetorical question which is meant to (by inference) dismiss the original idea of rating cops as too intrusive.

Out here moralizing about policing while reinforcing class-tinged generalizations like “scumbags”

I feel that there are a lot of concerns in these comments that come mostly out of misconceptions about the broader complexity of police oversight and professional standards and the way this kind of system integrates into it. I serve as part of the police oversight system in a major city and would love to consider a program like this, which I think would tend to actually mitigate many of the problems people are raising here, rather than make them worse.

1. Virtually all police departments already solicit direct feedback, both positive and negative, from citizens. This is just an effort to significantly increase the amount of feedback received through lower friction (phone based experience encouraged by officers rather than a paper form you ask the officer for or a website you go to later). For departments under supervision, DOJ generally requires that police departments or their oversight agencies accept positive and negative feedback, including anonymously, from the public. Part of the motivation of this kind of program is explicitly to increase the amount of positive feedback, because as a rule of thumb higher friction feedback processes result in more negative average feedback in this kind of situation (only people who are really pissed off go to the effort), but less friction to feedback also results in a better cross section of the population responding (traditional methods like paper forms tend to bias towards proficient English speakers, individuals with more free time, etc). Currently, even very busy police officers typically receive only a small handful of citizen comments and they are virtually always negative and resulting from a complex or extreme situation. This makes all sorts of biases and edge cases a major part of the data - in fact the majority of it. Significantly increasing the number of "reviews" will make them far more positive on average, and more related to actual officer conduct and not unusual interactions.

2. The fact that certain people give more consistently negative feedback and that certain officers, due to their assignments, interact with these people more frequently is well understood and already significantly influences police department metrics. For example, officers with advanced training in crisis intervention can be expected to receive more complaints, rather than less, because they are dispatched to interact with a community that is more likely to complain. The increase in overall volume of feedback from this type of program should make it easier to characterize this effect.

3. Police departments with well-functioning professional standards programs integrate many methods of overseeing officer performance, of which direct public feedback is only one element. For example, random audits of OBRD footage are typical (supervisor watches at least one randomly selected hour of body camera footage per supervised officer per month is an example policy). Negative public feedback, if handled as a complaint proper, will lead to a supervisor or full-time PS investigator reviewing body camera footage and potentially interviewing witnesses etc. in order to substantiate or dismiss the complaint.

4. Police officers in large departments receive a substantial amount of procedural criticism ranging from chain of command reprimands to being a subject of lawsuits. Police unions generally favor more direct feedback mechanisms because they allow for intervention in problems before they reach the stage of a lawsuit. From my experience working with direct feedback programs officer support for this concept is probably surprisingly high for that reason - better to have a contemporary, written negative review than a months after the fact IA investigation.

5. Officers in most departments are probably not going to be significantly more lenient due to this program, because their decisions to cite/not cite or arrest/not arrest is regularly reviewed by chain of command and in more serious cases outside professional standards as well. Officers are generally more likely to get in trouble for not citing than for citing, although there are a number of factors that can influence this (the situation can get complicated, e.g. blanket requirement to arrest on felony warrants is typical but may be waived in the case of e.g. DV victims). Like it or not, discretion is a well-established part of policing and departments are increasingly developing methods of monitoring and standardization in order to quantify and reduce e.g. racial bias.

6. Oversight, performance evaluation, and policy enforcement is a large function that typically involves multiple distinct commands in a police department (training, field training, performance, professional standards, etc). Most large departments are implementing some form of computer-based data system to surface trends and anomalies in officer performance measures, but particularly due to the significant power of police unions very few decisions are made based on actual data (zero in a lot of departments). Ultimately all of the collected feedback will be one of many inputs into the decision making process on advancement, discipline, etc. In practice, the subjective judgment of the chain of command virtually always wins, even in cases where it is difficult to square with objective data. Police union CBAs usually enshrine this concept in contract language (e.g. no discipline can be imposed without the subjective approval of a board of command staff based on a hearing, even in cases of clear and provable violation of policy that has a specified penalty, is a typical CBA term).

7. I like that this program seems intended to surface more subjective feedback on demeanor and professionalism, because these are huge problems in a lot of police departments that are extremely difficult to address because of the difficulty of establishing any evidence of a professionalism problem. Particularly, the lack of data on the issue makes it a bottom priority and something that the chain of command is encouraged to ignore rather than address, yet it is one of the biggest factors in public perception of police.

8. None of this program is actually new, just an effort to increase the response volume on existing complaint/commendation programs that have typically existed since WWII.

very helpful, thank you. hopefully there are resources available to analyze and action upon this feedback in the productive way described.

Perhaps this is all true in your country, but not mine.

I used to regularly take photos of cops abusing the system. I even once followed a cop going well above the speed limit when their lights weren't flashing. 20km down the road I eventually caught up with them because they'd pulled over... to set up a speed trap! Naturally, my first words were, "'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, do you know what speed you were doing?" (I'm not in UK).

I've caught them blocking traffic to book people getting around traffic jams in the other direction, after watching them speeding and going through a red light, & doing an illegal u-turn.

Double parking. Forcing cars to cross double lines, to book minor infringements. Going almost double the speed limit through a retirement village (90km/hr in 50 zone). Blocking traffic to buy food... my list is pretty long!

Police need to uphold one rule: serve the community by obeying the rules they enforce.

In my country they give themselves almost free reign, to the point where they're almost terrorists.

No amount of social and media propaganda, nor closed door review processes, will rectify the situation, unless atrocious behavior is stopped

I'm in no way claiming that any of these measures are especially effective. Rather, I'm sharing the caution that this program is unlikely to result in any significant changes other than the availability of better data... including all of the negative outcomes people here predict. There is a long track record of police chain of command ignoring data, policy, and disciplinary recommendations, and that's an entirely separate problem to solve.

> Police need to uphold one rule: serve the community.

It's functionally impossible to enforce this rule without fairly significant community feedback obtained through a formalized mechanism like this. People have been trying for decades and you yourself have described the result. accountability of police officers is routinely defeated based mostly on the lack of objective evidence of significant wrongdoing (which is a requirement to take any action, often explicitly under CBAs but always in practice as a result of employment law, culture, etc). Improved mechanisms of collecting data on officer performance is an enabling step towards broader reform of departmental culture, not in the least by showing that a problem does exist. Right now, many departments evade action simply by denying that there is a problem and not collecting the information that would reveal it.

"Police unions generally favor more direct feedback mechanisms because they allow for intervention in problems before they reach the stage of a lawsuit. From my experience working with direct feedback programs officer support for this concept is probably surprisingly high for that reason - better to have a contemporary, written negative review than a months after the fact IA investigation."

You're in oversight, so a union could track down your comment and use it to impugn any act you take as biased. Excuse me if I take with a grain of salt your conclusory remark that all the other comments on here are "mostly" misconceptions.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. Do you see stuff like this as one-off or inherent to the current way police unions work in America? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8536863/Head-NYPD-u...

That kind of thing is absolutely routine and police unions are almost certainly the single greatest obstacle to improved policing in the US. But the way things are right now the police unions are tremendously powerful, and so reform efforts have to cooperate with them and find common interests. Shortening the cycle time from an alleged violation happening to discipline being imposed or not is one of those common interests. Whatever my feelings might be, complaining about the unions isn't really conducive to the type of work I'm trying to do. I'm a political appointee (so I have and express my own opinions), but I serve as just one part of a broader system that requires cooperation between parties. I can only speak to that system (one of many different efforts towards more just policing), but it happens to be the one that is producing programs like the one the article covers.

Police reform is inherently political, and so you ought to take everything with a grain of salt. But it's important to understand the context: direct feedback is nothing new and basically everyone (including the unions) agree that we need more of it. At the same time, the impact that direct feedback will have is limited because performance and discipline is not generally "data-based" in any meaningful sense and the unions (to some extent reasonably given the valid concerns around automation and employment issues) will generally be opposed to efforts to change that. So the bad news is that this program is not some silver bullet that will fix policing, just one of many small steps.

On the flip side, the reason that I commented on much of this discussion being based on misconceptions is because of the huge number of comments pointing out edge case issues or potential perverse incentives. It's vanishingly unlikely in my mind that any of these will materialize because of the critical context that I'm trying to share: first that police behavior is very resistant to any change at all and there are powerful institutional forces against things like increased leniency as a result of this program (although it's not at all clear that this is really a good thing), and second that the downsides of this type of program in terms of bias and unreliable information are already fairly well understood because the program is not really new but an expansion of a decades old effort.

The irony is that I am not intending to say that this program is good because police departments are effective, although maybe that's how I came across. I intend to say that this program is good because police departments are extremely resistant to change and have no problem throwing out data that runs counter to their interests, so this type of data collection can only really help to validate concerns from oversight and professional standards personnel.

> That kind of thing is absolutely routine and police unions are almost certainly the single greatest obstacle to improved policing in the US.

I always find it interesting that police unions are generally portrayed as bad while non-police unions are generally portrayed as good. Or, vice versa.

(I realize that you didn't make statements about unions in general, only a strong statement that the presence of a large and largely independent collection of unions is a hindrance to improving one part of public life).

You have to acknowledge that there is a slight difference between a union of armed mercenaries and a union of, say, grocery store staff. You can see how some might view one of those as "bad".

Very true. But there are also unions with access to young minds, that control the skies, that intermediate our interaction with the government, etc. All of the public-sector unions have some superpower.

Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?

Exactly my thought and this is what happens at the end of the article.

If the townsfolk (who pressure the politicians who pressure the chief who pressure the officers) would prefer that to you hassling them over those kinds of transgressions then yes.

Weed, fireworks on the 4th of July, teenagers fishing without licenses, there's all manner of things that are illegal at the state level yet locally accepted when done tastefully that the cops should not be ticketing people for because they people they serve generally do not support that.

It's not "the townsfolk" who would give the officer a rating in that situation, it's the person getting pulled over for a dangerous vehicle. "The townsfolk" very likely want dangerous cars stopped, but that likely won't be reflected in any ratings by the people pulled over for dangerous vehicles, so it's biased. It's naive to assume the thought process is "well, I was breaking the law, but the officer was professional, so 5/5"

Why do you think people driving shitboxes (or any other crime) will give unfavorable ratings at a higher rate than people who get cited for other crimes?

If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's constantly enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable resulting in "man, that's bullshit" reactions from the people being ticketed then it will show in the aggregate stats and the chief will hopefully say tell him to knock it off and do something that has a higher ratio of public safety to pissing people off.

Literally every trade where customers rate performance has had to grapple with this. It's a solved problem. The real value add is using the ratings to compare members of the team, different types of interactions, etc, etc. Anyone who's ever managed or worked from a ticketing system should be familiar with this.

It's not a "solved problem" because your proposed solution wouldn't even work. Officers have discretion over who to engage/pull over which makes it totally different from most customer facing roles.

If the rest of the police force is doing the right thing and not modifying their behavior to get a better score then a single officer can always perform better than average by avoiding potentially negative encounters. This doesn't even get into differences in job duties/ patrol area that can totally skew the data even if every officer plays by the rules.

>It's not a "solved problem" because your proposed solution wouldn't even work. Officers have discretion over who to engage/pull over which makes it totally different from most customer facing roles.

I and my coworkers can choose what tickets to grab out of the queue. Sure I could game it and only take easy ones but my boss would figure it out sooner or later. Salesmen can try and avoid customers that look like they might be a PITA, they mostly don't. It's really not a problem in practice.

>If the rest of the police force is doing the right thing and not modifying their behavior to get a better score then a single officer can always perform better than average by avoiding potentially negative encounters.

Why is that the "right thing"? The cops should be serving and protecting the people of the jurisdiction that employs them. And they should be enforcing the law as a means to this end.

The "potentially negative" encounters here are enforcement of laws that are considered unreasonable by the public. You're damn right I don't want the cops enforcing a state law on weed, or anything, when they know that a greater fraction of the locals consider said law unreasonable and would just give them a 0/5 for it.

>This doesn't even get into differences in job duties/ patrol area that can totally skew the data even if every officer plays by the rules.

They already deal with this stuff. Adding numbers and records doesn't make the problem different or worse.

> I and my coworkers can choose what tickets to grab out of the queue. Sure I could game it and only take easy ones but my boss would figure it out sooner or later. Salesmen can try and avoid customers that look like they might be a PITA, they mostly don't. It's really not a problem in practice when someone

Your boss has a list of all tickets. There is no list of all possible police interventions so it's going to be way less obvious when a policeman does it. Also salesmen avoiding undesirable customers absolutely is a problem. You just don't happen to be the type they ignore (e.g. obviously poor people)

> You're damn right I don't want the cops enforcing a state law on weed, or anything, when they know that a greater fraction of the locals consider said law unreasonable and would just give them a 0/5 for it.

It's not about what a greater fraction of the locals want though. It's about what the particular person they are contemplating enforcing a law against wants.

> If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable

For most laws, the person breaking it will be the one that deem enforcement unreasonable. Someone speeding say the speed limit is unreasonably low. Someone driving a shitbox will think car regulations are unnecessary. Someone smoking weed will think drug laws are terrible. The problem is that these peoples are the ones that will give the rating and they won't go after the community consensus.

> Literally every trade where customers rate performance has had to grapple with this. It's a solved problem.

The problem is that police interactions are in nearly every case due to a bad situation. The "best case" is that you need to report a crime, but the police will need to enforce a law and the subject will usually not like this.

>""The townsfolk" very likely want dangerous cars stopped, but that likely won't be reflected in any ratings by the people pulled over for dangerous vehicles, so it's biased"

Exactly, if I get pulled over and issued a ticket for having a burnt out brake light, I'm not likely to actively thank and highly approve of the officer who just issued me a $100+ dollar ticket. The officer was well within the law to do so, and other citizens are safer after I get the light fixed, but emotionally I'm sure as heck going to be upset and want a little bit of passive-aggressive revenge. "Why did you pull me over and give me a ticket when I see much more dangerous cars on the road. Shouldn't you be focusing on bigger crimes?"

Maybe I'd leave a good review if the officer let me off with a warning, but officers would realize this and that would incentivize leniency. Not necessarily bad, but that could have unintended consequences.

Do you want to eat vegetables and exercise right now vs. do you want to snack and chill right now?

Do you want to be healthy and strong in 15 years, or obese in 15 years?

Are your answers to the first compatible with your answers to the second? Even if they are, do you recognise that most people demonstrably don’t? That’s just an analogy, of course — most people want cops to be tough on criminals and recon at least one law (that their community chooses to keep) is dumb and they should be free to ignore it.

Unless you are the person pulled over, you aren’t going to know that a particular cop pulled over a dangerous driver. How would a citizen who wants bad drivers to be pulled over be able to rate the cop highly? Which cop would they rate? How would they know how many dangerous drivers there would be on the road without the cops?

Imagine the town has absolute perfect police, who only every pull over dangerous people, only arrest criminals, and never harass or bother innocent people.

What would these perfect cops score as their ratings? Probably really low, because the only people who they interact with are going to be criminals and dangerous people, who will obviously hate the cops.

Of course, cops aren’t perfect, but my point is that you can’t use a system like this to determine that.

Good observation. This sort of rating system would incentivize cops to go out of their way to have benign but unnecessary interactions with people. Maybe this wouldn't be all bad; optimistically such interactions might help bridge the divide between the public and police. But mostly, I think it would waste people's time and inflict a lot of unnecessary discomfort and stress.

What the individual wants is not always good for society. Tragedy of the commons is a well understood failure mode for groups of people of all sizes.

As one of the townsfolk, I'd like to note that fireworks on the 4th of July are never done tastefully.

The police chief doesn't have to exclusively use the ratings to decide promotions, they can take other factors (like what kinds of duty the ratings were acquired on) into account.

In principle, yes. In practice, bosses get lazy and defer to the easiest metrics.

That is often true, but local police departments are not known for being excessively data-driven.

Yeah, but giving them metrics won't fix that. Even forcing them to cite the metrics in their decisions won't force a culture change. And even if you could somehow convince/force them to earnestly intend to be data-driven, they'd probably still fail.

In ostensibly data-driven workplaces, the decision makers pick and choose which metrics to consider, influence how those metrics are measured, determine which exceptions and extenuating circumstances to consider, etc. The end result is often just as subjective as what you started with, except now the decision makers can conveniently pretend that the result comes from an objective process rather than their personal whims. It becomes a method for disclaiming responsibility.

Right, but you can't simultaneously say that pursuit of the metrics will lead the organization away from its holistic goals while also saying that managers will ignore what the metrics are telling them by interpreting them to confirm whatever they wanted to begin with. Something can't be both inert and poisonous.

I didn't say anything about metrics leading police away from the holistic goals of police. I said police are already disconnected from those goals, and introducing them to the art of justifying anything you want with data isn't going to change this. If anything, it will only lend an air of scientific authority to their wholly unscientific decision making processes.

These rating systems are a generally poor representation of reality and don't solve the problem they're trying to address.

With Uber/Lyft/DoorDash ratings, people one might consider "woke" will almost always give a 5 star rating unless something goes horribly wrong (i.e. an actual crime is committed) because they understand that the worker's livelihood depends on their rating. Other people will use the rating as leverage to extract special treatment (similar as what happens with tipping). Finally, there's some number of people who will give "genuine" ratings, but even these are often bimodal (5-star or 1-star).

Applying the same system to police will probably change which group does what, but won't change the outcome: the ratings will be gamed and largely useless. Arguably it's even worse because of how politicized the subject of law enforcement has become.

I don't understand why this broken model of crowdsourcing ratings is being applied over and over again to different aspects of society. It's as if the managers and MBAs of the world have given up even trying to manage people and want to outsource the task to a howling mob of strangers.

> I don't understand why this broken model of crowdsourcing ratings is being applied over and over again to different aspects of society. It's as if the managers and MBAs of the world have given up even trying to manage people and want to outsource the task to a howling mob of strangers.

I think it's a manifestation of McNamara's Fallacy. Soliciting ratings is just one method of quantifying things, putting problems in terms of numbers so we can do math with those numbers and generally feel like we're being objective and scientific about the matter. It liberates people from having to get into the weeds of making subjective qualitative judgements.

There are obvious problems with it; McNamara's fallacy was being willfully blind to qualitative considerations which turned out to be very important to the war. Furthermore, by picking and choosing what you want to measure, and which metrics to value or ignore, you often end up with a process that although ostensibly objective, is effectively subjective.

And yet, the fact that there are ratings appears to result in higher-quality ride services than taxis.

Anecdata, but in my experience rideshares (which have ratings) are cleaner, more punctual, have fewer no-shows, and let's zero incidences of refusal to carry than taxis. Obviously there are likely a number of confounders involved, but I would be surprised if ratings were not an important factor.

I had an incident involving someone forcibly entering my home that required police assistance. The two responding officers would have absolutely received a 5/5 rating from me. The next day the same asshat decided in his short time in my home that I was woefully short of canned vegetables, and graciously delivered a can of peas through my front window. This required a second visit from the police, and the two responding officers that morning would have received 1/5 rating from their rudeness and absolute lack of caring accusing me of "maybe smoking a little something and being just a bit paranoid". Then accused my house of being a grow house because I had a couple of Kino lamps from doing product photography. Absolute joke of a uniform and prime examples of why police have such low appreciation with the citizens.

Ratings systems suffer from an 'outlier syndrome', where most ratings are from folks at the ends of the bell-curve. Even averaging such data doesn't come close to any kind of true measure.

One can imagine Police work would be subject to such effects even more strongly, as they deal often with people at their worst. It's the job after all.

This is clever and I agree with the comments regarding their heart being in the right place but this is a flawed approach. The customer service experience of criminals isn't the right thing to optimize and probably has nothing to do with outcomes if not inversely correlated with crime reduction. The very idea that we can view and treat police officers like we do customer service people at say the mall I would argue is causing issues between community and police. If you're ever talking to a police officer you're obligated to follow their lawful commands, and if you have any issue with them the forum to litigate that is court not with the police or through something like a net promoter score. If anything the experience of the people not interacting with the police aka the broader community IS the thing to optimize for. Maybe mail out surveys and ask people where the police are doing well and where they could be more helpful.

the customer service experience of citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries - to whom the police serve!

> citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries

I was always curious about how true this statement actually is. I understand that the state runs primarily on money from taxes, but what part of that is actually coming from local citizens pockets? I imagine there are places where most money comes from tourism or goods exports.

You don't typically pay your money on a tour to the state. You pay it to a hotel, an amusement park, etc who then pays it to the state instead of employees.

Yes, but my point still stands. The money that ends up with the state didn't originate from a local.

He's talking about the perverse incentive LEOs will have to get good ratings, which will be hard when you spend much of your day bringing in guys for beating their spouse, who by the time you arrive has decided she just wanted you to make him stop hitting her, not take him away to spend the night in jail.

Small town cops generally know all the regulars by name, I could see a QR code program working better in a larger city where there's more anonymity to the reports.

I think their jobs are to serve AND protect, not just serve. If police officers optimize on not making anyone unhappy, it seems like the protection part won't be done as effectively (e.g. someone who drives dangerously but never gets a ticket won't have much incentive to drive more carefully so other drivers on the road are then put at risk).

Like almost everything, there needs to be some balance. I'm not sure bad ratings due to "I was breaking the law and he gave me a ticket instead of a warning" would be best for society. But if the officer was cordial and courteous in that same interaction and they received good feedback, that would probably be a good reinforcement loop. A complete totalitarian police state wouldn't be good for society but going to the other end of the spectrum and having lax policing would also be bad for society, I think we need to try to strive for the least bad balance, which seems like it is incredibly hard to do and then of course no one will be completely happy and lots of people will complain. They have a very tough usually thankless job.

I mean, yeah this approach probably is flawed for various reasons, but oh boy:

> The customer service experience of criminals isn't the right thing to optimize

Not sure where to even begin with that statement. Police interact with tons of citizens, and many of them may end up with civil penalties or misdemeanors, but would you consider someone getting issued a speeding ticket for going 15mph over the posted limit to be a criminal? Also, are you worried that someone being arrested for armed robbery is going to use their phone in the back seat of a police vehicle to give a fake bad review?

I think if this program helps encourage officers to interact with citizens more cordially it is a win. And of course this data could be gamed or misused, it's more about what we decide to do with the data. Imperfect data can still be useful though.

I've always wanted something like license points for law enforcement officers. Every time they have a valid complaint/incident, the LEO looses a point of their national LEO "licence". Pair that with their dept. liability insurance bond, and once they drop below some threshold their insurance cost goes up or has to be self-funded. If it drops below another threshold they're uninsurable by any department and/or loose their national level credentials.

If this licensing entity is external to the force it would hopefully be more likely to remain unbiased, and this kind of national level of oversight would prevent bad apples from just moving to some other area to dodge a bad reputation/incident.

> The customer service experience of criminals isn't the right thing to optimize and probably has nothing to do with outcomes if not inversely correlated with crime reduction.

The vast majority of contemporary approaches to policing, but dating back to e.g. Peel in the mid 19th century, run quite contrary to your ideas. The people that police interact with and "the broader community" should not be any different (this basic idea is called community policing), otherwise policing will inevitably fail to meet community needs, for several different reasons. It is fairly well established that a lack of contact between police and members of the community results in an increase in crime, for a few reasons but in particular because the community will stop reporting crimes to the police if they do not have positive interactions with them. This has been a widespread problem in most if not all US cities.

In practice, the portion of people that police interact with who receive any sort of legal action (from citation to arrest) is very small. Around 2% in one field services division. The vast majority of police interactions are either addressed by policework (collecting information, brokering agreements, just telling people to knock it off) or were not even potentially criminal in nature to begin with (traffic accidents, medical emergencies, etc). These are all cases of officers acting as individuals to address a problem, with no criminal process involved.

> If you're ever talking to a police officer you're obligated to follow their lawful commands, and if you have any issue with them the forum to litigate that is court not with the police or through something like a net promoter score.

It sounds more like you're talking about a prosecutor. Police officers exercise a great deal of discretion and individual responsibility outside of the legal system, and are accountable to the police department for their work. Police departments have an entire command or division, usually more than one in practice, responsible for reviewing officer actions and conduct. Police departments are organized under city and state governments (and occasionally some other less common kinds of governments like improvement districts), and are accountable as a whole to the government they derive their authority from. That is, while courts do serve as an ultimate forum for complaints about police, courts generally only address specific violations of the law. Broader policing issues are heard out in the chambers of city councils and legislatures.

> If anything the experience of the people not interacting with the police aka the broader community IS the thing to optimize for. Maybe mail out surveys and ask people where the police are doing well and where they could be more helpful.

This is a standard practice in large police departments and is usually more formalized through e.g. commissions and councils of community members. Surveys themselves often originate from the city government in its role overseeing the police, e.g. conducted by the mayor or council members.

Based on some recent experiences I've been thinking that police forces need something that is almost like a JIRA taskboard. Incidence type, officer name, data, upload picture/videos etc.

It wouldn't just be for police positive/negative interaction. Any crime could be entered, any criminal behavior.

We have an incident in our school district with an individual who has shouted at children and parents and on a few occasions has tried to enter the school. Obviously bad stuff, obviously particularly concerning given recent events.

During a school board meeting it came out that the police only knew of 3 incidents out of probably dozens. There's not a clear path from seeing the behavior, reporting it to the school, reporting it to the police, and being able to put all this information in one place.

It's probably a pipe dream to think that someday we could have a dashboard where everyone could monitor these issues, but it might address a lot of problems.

Gave me a ticket 1/5

This^.

The rating system puts the public in danger as a result if the right punishment (proper fine) is not given.

Fines are stupid to begin with. If they are too low nobody will care and the sheer number of people breaking the law makes enforcement pointless. If they are too high, they can send the average person into financial ruin, and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble. Even a ticket of a couple hundred dollars insane to the average American.

In either case, without any proper oversight, this money just ends up going towards the funding of police departments, who are then incentivized to give out more tickets. Ultimately they act as tax collectors rather than protection for those living in their jurisdiction. Our people used to run bad cops out of town, now we can't even be bothered to fire them.

> "...and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble."

this is why tickets should be income-contingent, if not wealth-contingent (much trickier and more invasive, so unlikely).

In Finland, it's apparently the case, and Switzerland as well.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-t...

However, improving traffic infrastructure (separating bicycles and pedestrians from cars and trucks with physical barriers, reducing the flow of traffic through city centers, etc.) is a much more effective way of reducing traffic-related injuries and fatalies, which is what the fines are supposed to encourage.

well, fines are (indirectly) meant to prevent collisions and conflict, not just injuries and fatalities, premised on the notion that traffic laws represent the best way to do so (not always true).

that's mostly unrelated to multi-modal infrastructure, which i'm an ardent proponent of. if i had a magic wand, i'd turn all the street parking in LA into protected bike/scooter lanes, narrow all non-bus lanes to 8 feet, plant street trees everywhere possible, and increase public transportation tenfold.

but to reduce injuries/fatalities measurably, we mostly need to target distracted driving, which is beyond obeying traffic laws, and gets into the design of cities, cars, and devices.

Even small fines come with a large serving of shame, at least for a lot of people. Receiving an inconsequentially small fine can be the kick some people need to sort themselves out, if they perceive the social denunciation implicit in the fine.

Of course, some people are shameless.

Where I am from, if you get enough strikes on your record you can lose your license.

This seems trivial to control for.

Classify each interaction with cops, e.g. traffic stop, wellness check, house call, etc.

Then compare ratings for each classification to see who's performing above/below average.

If this system is anonymous, why can't the officers simply not give cards to people who already hate them and maybe file some fake reviews as needed to boost their metrics?

I've always found it interesting that when I'm pulled over for a traffic violation, a police officer can use their discretion on whether to punish me.

I've been pulled over a few times for speeding, and a couple times I simply got a warning, and other times I got a ticket and had to pay a fine.

If I committed a crime, why should an officer have that leeway? They caught me, I should have to pay the consequences... right?

I've wondered if part of the reason for that discretion is a tacit admission that the fines / consequences for these tickets are simply too high.

The purpose of a traffic stop is seldom due to traffic infractions. Traffic stops are an access vector, or as police call it, a point of contact.

Are there any numbers to back that up? I'm sure there are some bad apples out there that make up excuses because they think someone looks suspicious tho. But it also seems like there are a huge number of bad drivers out there that do dangerous things and having traffic laws that are sometimes enforced seems like it has to curtail some of that behavior.

Just talk to any cop. If they are honest, they'll tell you this very thing. In fewer degrees than it takes to get to Kevin Bacon, I was witness to an investigation where one individual was thrown the book to convince them to work off the charges being filed by rolling up. A traffic stop is precisely how they made first contact with people up the chain. It's like criminal investigation 101. So much so, it is part of every cop drama

That seems a little disingenuous to just throw all cops under the bus and say they all do that bad behavior. One anecdotal case and law and order episodes probably shouldn't be enough to come to that conclusion.

If you think that all I have is one anecdotal story because that's all I've shared in a single post on an interweb forum, then you're making gross assumptions on your part.

If a patrol officer is tasked to pull over someone by an investigating detective, their sergeant, or anyone else out ranking them, that's what they are going to do. They all have ranks and respond to higher authority. It's part of their job.

Mandating that cops enforce unpopular laws was critical to Teddy Roosevelt's reform of the NYPD to help reduce corruption. That leeway was used to solicit bribes, particularly to let bars open on Sundays.

I think that if we removed a lot of the leeway about enforcement we would find ourselves forces to ask, "What laws do we really care about enforcing in the first place?"

Something to consider.

I once decided to see if a type of document existed—this being the internet, it was once amazing to me the things I thought might exist actually existing, maybe I should still be amazed—and the document I wanted to find was a “list of crimes” in my State. California does not (or did not) have such a list. I basically just wanted a number, and to see if there were any interesting ones I never thought of.

Massachusetts actually does have such a document, and while it isn’t my State and at this point I forgot the number, there were some interesting ones at the top that basically had to do with archaeology.

The US Department of Justice also doesn’t have such a list, just an FBI estimate at the time of >4,000 which means they don’t know either.

I wouldn’t call it a political position because that would require further research and more time than I’m willing to commit, but I would say I have a disposition towards reducing the total number of crimes on the books, which would mean compiling a list of what they are and consolidating and repealing many of them. If we can’t be bothered to know what they are in their totality, then we probably don’t need most of them.

Here you go, the master crime list of Massachusetts: https://www.mass.gov/doc/master-crime-list/download

Here's one that seems similar for North Dakota: https://attorneygeneral.nd.gov/sites/ag/files/documents/Offe...

And I think that is a good conversation to have. If the law is not worth enforcing, it is not worth having. Laws are meant to remove one's freedoms. Sometimes that loss is meant to protect others, but it is still the government telling its citizens they are not allowed to do something. People should have as few goverment imposed restrictions as necessary to have a functioning society.

Thanks for sharing this, I hadn't heard of this.

Here's Teddy Roosevelt in his own words [1] describing it:

> To break up the system of blackmail and corruption was less easy. ... the criminal who is blackmailed has a direct interest in paying the blackmailer, and it is not easy to get information about it. Nevertheless, we put a complete stop to most of the blackmail by the simple process of rigorously enforcing the laws, not only against crime, but against vice.

...

> The multiplication of laws by the legislature and their partial enforcement by the executive authorities go hand in hand, and offer one of the many serious problems with which we are confronted in striving to better civic conditions. New York State felt that liquor should not be sold on Sunday. The larger part of New York city wished to drink liquor on Sunday.

> ...

> The law was not in the least a dead-letter; it was enforced, but it was corruptly and partially enforced.

> ...

> The paper again and again called upon the police commissioners to either uniformly enforce the law or uniformly disregard it.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/09/municip...

Because the purpose of the fine isn’t the money, it’s getting you to be more safe. If they can achieve that with a friendly chat then isn’t that better for everyone?

Do we achieve that in the status quo, though? Where I live, driving 10 miles over the speed limit at all times is the price of entry and if you do less than that, you'll sooner or later run into a motorist who gets aggressive with you.

Speeding is a constant issue and people are constantly crashing cars into buildings and people.

I have never seen police enforcement make a meaningful difference in safe driving. I've never seen police proactively enforce pedestrian/cyclist safety or remove cars from the bike lanes. Safety is a matter of correctly engineering streets and roads so that dangerous driving feels viscerally unnatural and uncomfortable.

The only thing that it seems to accomplish is A) giving police a way to arbitrarily bring down the hammer on people they don't like while shielding their friends and relatives, and B) fleecing motorists by setting up speed traps at places engineered to encourage speeding rather than re-engineering the roads for calming.

No. If he always chats with a Chris, but always tickets a Rene, that isn't better for everyone.

We have discretion build into our society for a reason. Judges, juries, police, all exercise discretion.

I think perhaps we're finding that the efficiencies we build into a system are vulnerabilities abused by unfriendly actors.

If I'm going to be treated as second class, you had better be, too.

It's not about efficiency - it's about justice. If you're against discretion then you're against basics of our society like trial by jury.

And if you can't trust these people to use discretion sensibly and fairly then you shouldn't be trusting them to do anything.

I think I can be against a single person's discretion and judgment and still be in favor of things like trial by jury.

A trial by jury is multiple people collectively judging on something after taking some time to consider the whole story.

A single officer in the field deciding, within a few minutes, whether you should pay a $200 fine seems very different to me. Although a speeding ticket, and what typically goes in front of a jury, is also usually magnitudes different.

Here in Oregon it's the policy of the DMV, Department of Transportation, and police departments to educate drivers. After enough warnings or you're acting like you don't care you will get a ticket.

Interestingly enough, I've been pulled over several times but always by a different department it seems like. They obviously don't talk to each other or I would have gotten more tickets by now.

If I committed a crime

The difference is that citeable infractions like plain speeding are not crimes.

It's too late for me to edit it, but my intent was to say I broke the law.

There are times where a law may have technically been broken, but it was done so to prevent something worse from happening.

For a silly example... If I were to run across an empty street (not in a crosswalk) to help steady a ladder someone was about to fall from, then I technically jaywalked. However, it was done with very little risk or downside to prevent someone from getting seriously hurt.

The officer could see that and write a ticket, then let the judge/courts sort it out. But that would clog up the courts with a bunch of trivial cases, while also having citizens upset with unjust laws. It can also lead to people refusing to help others in the name of obeying laws that are well intentioned, but can't be applied universally for society to continue to function.

I'd argue it's time to redefine what jaywalking is then :)

Empty street? Cross it all you want, help that person from falling, it's not a criminal offense. And then the officer wouldn't have to forgive you or look away, but instead there was no law being broken.

It's a worthwhile experiment but the first thing that came to my mind was: oh, everybody exchange cards in the locker room and give each other good reviews--it's anonymous, after all.

It's Black Mirror already.

I'm not sure I agree. If they are rating these public servants on their service to the public that would be within the scope of a job review. Or think of it as one of those "how was your service today" questionnaires you get sometimes.

This isn't about policing someone's personal life.

But on the other hand, Yelp reviews are already problematic and extending them to civil servants probably doesn't help the situation.

someone above commented: "Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?"

I think the down-board view is that Uber’s rating works because the drivers also review the riders. Are police able to rate the people (I hate saying citizens because police are “just” citizens too.)? Will this still work “like Uber” with only one side of the transaction doing the rating? What happens when police rate people? Who views this score? Is it a precursor to dating someone? Hiring someone? This is where it starts to resemble black mirror.

An interaction with police is usually an inherently negative experience.

There are plenty of people that would rate an officer 0/5 for giving them a speeding ticket regardless of how pleasant and polite they were. In fact, a police officer giving a speeding ticket with a smile on their face would come off as extremely condescending and feel like they're doing it as a power move asserting their authority.

There are others were you will appreciate the job the police officer is doing. Like if you get your bike stolen and they track it down and return it to you. Or you get mugged and they catch the mugger.

Of course if your police are not doing this then you may not be inclined to rate them as highly.

no, a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia. and we already live in it. giving citizens a way to speak up about potential abuses is in no way harmful

> a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia

“State“ or “government“ is just whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular (usually geographically bounded) context.

So, apparently, dystopia is universal.

> "Whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular context"

Are you sure that's the definition of "state" or "government?" I don't think it is.

I agree that the definition is problematic, though commonly accepted. The argument for goes back to Hobbes, and thus is in one sense foundational to western democracies.

But it runs into problems when you look at the other aspect of western democracies, which is that power resides in the people and is only conditional granted to authority figures (i.e the "king" rules by consent of the governed, not by divine right). Thus the people have the ultimate right to legitimate violence.

Also remembering that Hobbes was arguing for a king, not an elected representative...

That argument might come from Hobbes but it wasn't his definition of a government either. Absolute authority as he saw it was simply a requirement for effective government.

Boxers have something of a monopoly on legitimate violence in the context of a boxing ring, but that doesn't make them a government.

> The argument for goes back to Hobbes

While it resembles Hobbes description of the Leviathan, and is in some sense a product of it, the definition is more directly product of fairly modern political science seeking to systematically define it's scope of analysis and the things it is addressing in ways that don't apply only to a narrow cultural and historical context than it does to Hobbes’ normative arguments.

> Thus the people have the ultimate right to legitimate violence.

That it makes a genuinely democratic state also one in which the state or government is the people is more a feature than a bug of the definition. (Though whether actual modern Western regimes are genuinely democratic is a question for which analysis of particular states has frequently suggested a negative answer.)

Complaints are definitely useful but I'm not sure aggregate star rating data would add anything.

What I do not understand is why police do not have a certification like Lawyers or Doctors do. If they really mess up they should lose that certification (just like a lawyer or doctor can) and then they can no longer work as a police officer. No moving a town or state over and continuing onward - license revoked.

I used to live in Warrenton, the police there and in all of Virginia are absolute bottom of the barrel trash. I have never come across a more hostile, self-involved, power tripping force anywhere in the world with the exception of China. Virginia's police departments make California look good.

I’ll take an officer that actually enforces laws who is less cordial over one who allows crime/violations to go u punished with a smile just to get a good rating

I can think of so many issues with this it could fill a book. How about just holding police accountable if they commit a crime?

Easier said than done. Aside from some headline incidents, cops do things regularly that would be considered a crime if done by anyone else. It's part of the job. It's also the fundamental premise for qualified immunity. It's largely why we have so much trouble holding obvious bad cops accountable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com