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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

If it was good at predicting crime I highly doubt only 2/38 departments would have cooperated. The know it doesn't work.

And it looks like they had some data:

>We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.

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>If it was good at predicting crime I highly doubt only 2/38 departments would have cooperated.

That's certainly low, but I suspect (absent some legal framework like FOIA) the default position of police departments is to share less information, not more. So it's still what I would expect even if it was reasonably good.

I wish the article would have provided more details about why the PDs chose not to use it. Was it because it was bad at predictions? Cumbersome to use? Glitchy?

It reminds me of a project I was involved with that used a "real-time" computational fluid dynamics model to optimize datacenter air-conditioning. Management was big on the hype, but if you paid attention, the system was routinely unplugged from the actual control system because the facility engineers just found it too difficult to work with.

> That's certainly low, but I suspect (absent some legal framework like FOIA) the default position of police departments is to share less information, not more.

Why on Earth would we want people who have a poor grasp of the law, paired with the means and the license to arrest and kill be transparent about their work..?

We can both agree that transparency is the ideal and still recognize that’s not how incentives are aligned. In general, there are far more downsides and risks to PDs regarding open sharing of information so they generally should be expected to act accordingly.

E.g., I’d like to live in a works where lawyers are concerned with justice rather than “winning” but I’m not shocked when they act like winning is the goal.

To be fair, the way legal system works means if a lawyer isn’t trying to ‘win’ your case, they’re not being a good lawyer - the assumption your client is innocent and you need to defend them is kinda fundamental.

How morality informs the law and the ways lawyers should behave (i.e, should they phone it in/decline the case in if they disagree ethically) is interesting but more difficult as a topic

I think this is mostly correct. Not only are lawyers who aren't trying to "win" not good lawyers, they are possibly breaching their oath. The lawyer has an obligation to try and win, but only after they have done a preliminary investigation before filing the case. There are also some guardrails; your lawyer can't lie about facts they've found out during that investigation, for example. If they do, they can be sanctioned for it. So they can't just try and win at all costs.

With all that said, I think the original point still stands: in most people's minds, an 'ideal' system is one where all the lawyers are trying to seek justice. We just create a less-than-ideal adversarial system as a weak proxy for that given that human nature tends to make the ideal an unreliable expectation. I don't think that's fundamentally different from the PD transparency issue.

"Winning" as the goal is the only way lawyers can be truly objective. Otherwise the justice system turns into a popularity contest. The problem is that any single person/lawyer might ~think~ they know who is guilty or innocent, but they may very well be wrong.

If a defense lawyer knows that his client is guilty, and successfully defends him anyways, that means there was not sufficient evidence to convict. Don't blame the defense lawyer for doing his job rigorously. Blame the prosecution for failing at theirs.

>If a defense lawyer knows that his client is guilty, and successfully defends him anyways, that means there was not sufficient evidence to convict.

This assumes the jury is rational and objective. There's plenty of behavioral psychology that goes against this, but a more glaring observation is that lawyers do not seek to maximize the objectivity of the jury during selection. It's usually very much the opposite.

The goal of the district/trial court system is finding of fact. That's objective. Winning is about swaying the jury, which pulls on the levers of subjectivity. The system is, in part, designed to protect the rights of the innocent. Take the Blackstone ratio, which assumes it is better to let 10 guilty people go than convict 1 innocent. Verdicts cannot be purely objective in a system designed to be asymmetrical.

It seems to me that the incentives of police departments should be irrelevant, and that an organization with that much responsibility should not be able to simply refuse to give out at least certain types of information.

Ignoring incentives takes us into a fairy-tale. Human behavior is largely governed by incentives.

That’s partially my point. Ideally, yes, humans should act impartially and irrespective of incentive. That’s not the world we live in, though.

I think you're missing my point. I'm saying they shouldn't be allowed to give their incentives higher priority. They should be more tightly scrutinized so that their incentives don't matter.

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