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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

Predatory teachers may use this to get some background details on their targets or to identify potential targets for grooming. Luckily those kinds of teachers are rare, but not unknown.

Also, some police are known to be racist, so if a certain officer gets it in their head to harass a nationality or ethnic group, then their unsubstantiated accusations would be entered into the database and this could then affect the families' chances of getting a decent education or indeed, the teachers may decide to not enter them into certain exams if they've been prejudiced by the data.

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If the safeguarding lead at a school is a predatory teacher looking for grooming targets, the existence of databases is the least of kids' problems. Particularly if the database is mainly flagging up kids that might already be at risk of abuse.

Predatory individuals who are not safeguarding leads benefit much more from people campaigning to silo any records that suggest/confirm they might be a threat.

Unfortunately, child predators are likely to get themselves into as strong a position of trust as possible - coaches, church leaders etc, so I would expect them to attempt to become a safeguarding lead. They could then also use the data to explain why they were taking certain kids into one-on-one sessions.

I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me regardless here!

Senior leaders at schools don't need "data" to justify talking one on one to students or to figure out which students seem vulnerable.

On the other hand, data is useful for people with actual welfare concerns about a child in establishing if there might be some underlying reason behind the child's weird behaviour or expressed fear of going home or visible bruising that's "just an accident". Ensuring nobody can share threats data is a massive net boon to people that harm kids.

> I do feel like I'm conversing with an LLM that has never attended a school but is tuned to contradict me regardless here!

I very much enjoyed my time at an ordinary human child school and attended the mandatory educational lessons very promptly.

There's a balance between using data to identify problems and collecting data which is open to abuse. What concerns me is the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers who are typically not the most privacy focussed people. The predatory teacher example is an outlier, but it demonstrates how there can be unintended consequences. What's more likely is that there will be unconscious bias by the teachers against the disadvantaged children from poorer backgrounds.

To my mind, teachers should only function as a backup social service for those kids that slip through the net (admittedly, not a good net) and should be focussed primarily on education. What set my alarm bells ringing is the lack of openness about the database and whether families can correct false records (assuming they even know that the data exists).

But the "apparent indiscriminate use" is all in your head (I'm glad you have an ordinary human head ;), and if teachers were contacting the safeguarding lead to try to establish who has criminal parents that wouldn't exactly be an unconscious bias anyway! There's plenty of opportunity for actual unconscious bias every time they look at a child or the child opens their mouth...

The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about it found out because it's described in detail on the local authority website, the fact authorities keep records of stuff like absence from school and social worker contacts is universally known (most of the recent child victim scandals in the UK have been that various people noted of various possible signs of problems at various times but nobody had enough of a joined up view to actually act!) and the only bit teachers are going out of their way to not disclose is "I looked up Jonny's info because I'm not convinced that bruising is accidental".... for obvious reasons

> The database isn't "secret", the groups complaining about it found out because it's described in detail on the local authority website

Well for at least some values of "secret":

> School safeguarding leads told Fair Trials that they kept the system secret from children and their families. One said: “They [parents and carers] wouldn’t know about this ... parents will have no kind of sight of it at all ... They just don’t know of its existence.”

The article is short on details about how access is controlled to the database, so I am assuming (possibly making an ass out of u and ming) that it's poorly controlled. The lack of notification to the families is of concern although there's certainly scenarios where you specifically don't want them to be notified.

My biggest worry is further widening the gap between the rich and the poor and between different ethnic groups. Allowing teachers to have access to police data on the families could be very problematic.

> the apparent indiscriminate use of the data by teachers

Where did you get this impression?

If the children and their families are unaware of the database, then there's a lack of accountability. I also saw no mention of controls in the article, though if there's controls that the families know nothing about, then they would be somewhat moot.

There's no evidence that any teachers can see it. It says safeguarding leads, which don't even have to be teachers. What's left of what you're saying if we remove your assumptions?

> Also, some police are known to be racist

Worse yet, most police are at least classist. Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods.

What happens when there's already heavy policing of poorer neighborhoods, and police are trained to "get the bad ones off the streets"? They look for any excuse to arrest and prosecute people in those neighborhoods. Once you have a felony conviction on your record, you're basically unemployable for 10 years (in the US at least). Thus continuing the cycle of poverty. And of course, minorities tend to be disproportionately poor.

This makes that cycle worse. Anyone in the proximity of such a felon due to this data collection and aggregation now becomes a target by the police, raising their chances of getting caught up in the legal system and experiencing life-long consequences because of it.

> Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods.

I see this sentiment often. If this were true it would represent a criminal opportunity to victimize "wealthier neighborhoods." As far as I can tell: that does not seem to be the case very often; and victimization rates are higher in "poor neighborhoods."

I can see the logic of an argument that excessive legal criminalization induces cycles of harmful involvement in law enforcement and legal systems. However, using the language "policed far more heavily" as opposed to "criminalized far more heavily" places the blame on a convenient-to-scapegoat blue-collar occupation rather than directly upon the powerful people who compose the ever-expanding encyclopedia of laws and regulations.

Police already have discretion to enforce the law on whomever, and however they wish. It is inappropriate to try and shift blame entirely to lawmakers, when (obviously) the police have culpability here because of the choices they make regarding the enforcement of those laws. That's why the sentiment is so common. Obviously. Come on.

I still don't get it--not being obtuse, it isn't obvious to me. Is the claim that differences in policing are due to discretion in law enforcement and not because victimization rates are different in neighborhoods of different socio-economic statuses?

Discretion in enforcement is either lawful or not. If discretion is the key problem and lawmakers do not address it, then yes, the responsibility is on lawmakers and ultimately on voters.

Discretion is not the key problem. Discretion is a necessary part of the job.

Let me address victimization rates - because yes, they are higher in poorer communities. That does not justify in any way the behavior of police in those communities, which is to randomly pull over/stop and search/etc. people on the street who "look" like bad guys. If somebody kills someone, sure, arrest them and put them in prison. Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it.

https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/incarceration-a...

The culture of policing is the key problem, which is created by a confluence of training, recruiting practices, general societal attitudes, and the political leadership of elected officials. It's not one problem, as you can see - it's many contributing factors.

A local town near me was praised some years back for drastically reducing violence by shifting towards community-based outreach policing. The local news actually called out Chicago for not following its example, you should definitely read about it:

https://www.aurora-il.org/1637/Community-Oriented-Policing-C...

Critics of community oriented policing typically view it as "being soft on crime" instead of a systems problem. The "put bad guys in prison" model has the effect of continuing the cycle of poverty, and measures such as mostly doing away with pre-trial detention (i.e. bond) for non-violent offenders are intended as a systemic fix for the poverty cycle.

Wait, it sounds like you are shifting the goalposts. In the item "37598636" [0] at issue is Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods. but here at 37605421 [1] the issue is how not how much policing is performed. Maybe the claim is better stated as "poor neighborhoods poorly policed stay poor."

Additionally, the americanactionforum.org link does not support the claim "Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it."

The link is somewhat inconsistent. It claims "The United States currently incarcerates 2.2 million people, nearly half of whom are non-violent drug offenders" and "Of the 2.2 million currently being held in the U.S. criminal justice system, nearly 500,000 people are being held for drug offenses." .5M is about a quarter of 2.2M.

Looking at one of the cited sources [2, Table 13], the latest data is 2019 and states that a slim majority of prisoners are in prison for violent crime. Given that the ojp.gov survey does not include pre-trial jail, maybe % nonviolent drug offenders is different from the below data, but my null hypothesis is that the proportions would remain largely similar.

       Violent:  55.5%
      Property:  16.0%
          Drug:  14.1%
  Public Order:  12.3%

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598636

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37605421

2. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p19.pdf

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