Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

I don't trust the stats. Things that would have been reported as crimes 15 years ago aren't being called in now.

* Leaders inside the police force have incentives to make it look like their departments are effective and nudge the numbers.

* Elected officials, such as the mayor, have incentives to make it look like the police department is effective and reinforce the number nudgers.

* This has a reinforcing cycle where number nudgers are promoted and in turn promote other number nudgers until leadership is saturated. More creative accounting practices are encouraged as the environment becomes more competitive.

* Many District Attorney's are happy to prosecute lesser charges that are easier to convict on instead of more serious charges that more accurately reflect the reality of what happened.

What’s new about these incentives? Why would this be happening now, uniquely?

It describes a process in which crime reporting progressively gets further from the ground truth over time. This isn't new.

All of those incentives were in play 50 years ago. You may as well say you just don't like statistics that you disagree with.

As discussed in the bullet points, those incentives create a sort of natural selection which changes how the statistics are reported over time.

It's not like we are measuring length or temperature. The data has a degree of human subjectivity when being recorded. It seems normal for that subjectivity to shift over time, especially when we are taking about different humans over timespans of decades.

Things like theft under $950 being classified as a misdemeanor in California (happened in 2021 IIRC), which makes it far less likely the cops will do anything about it, de-facto legalizing theft.

This isn't the only place it's happened, it's just the one that got the most visibility.

That happened in 2014. So recent-ish, but people started being really loud about it in 2021 as part of the same non-data-backed outrage.

It is a knock on effect. As decency decays and criminals figure out what the new rules are it gets amplified.

The perverse incentives you're describing were just the same 15 years ago.

And these are national stats so a few DAs in very blue cities not prosecuting minor offenses aren't big enough to have that much of an impact.

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