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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats

So by monitoring an area with high crime rate, you catch more crime, which results in more policing for the area with a confirmed high crime rate?

And that's a bad thing?

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By monitoring any area more, you find more crime, which results in that area being considered as "high crime" and in turn increasing monitoring--that's the cycle OP is talking about.

That’s an oversimplification.

First of all, unless you’re completely overwhelmed and not even bothering to enforce certain laws, you’re going to find out about most of the serious crime that takes place. Law enforcement is made aware of homicides either through missing persons reports or the discovery of dead bodies. Armed robberies and grand theft are usually reported if, for no other reason, than to create a paper trail for insurance claims. People who get shot or stabbed badly enough to end up in a hospital, end up in a hospital so there’s a reporting mechanism there. It’s not normal for most major crimes to happen completely outside of the attention of law enforcement unless things have gone very very wrong (which admittedly they have in many American cities). And much of the time, you can infer where these crimes happened.

The benefit of increasing patrols and surveillance in a specific area is more about gathering evidence to solve crimes, and less about discovering those crimes to begin with. In some cases you might end up discovering more crime (especially when gangs are involved and people are intimidated into not reporting crimes) but if you monitor areas where any serious crime would already get reported in the first place, you won’t actually find more serious crime there.

The devices monitor specifically for gunshots. I find it hard to believe that gunshots in wealthy area's often go undetected, with or without those devices.

It's biasing the sample. For example, drug usage among teens are roughly the same between white, hispanic and african americans but african americans are more likely to be arrested and charged for drug possession or usage. Here the difference is probably because african americans are stopped and searched more even though their usage is about the same as whites.

Are the rates of drug dealing the same through?

Let me put it this way. The biggest drug epidemic of this century was the opioid crisis. Half a million Americans died. The primary people responsible are white billionaires, and we know exactly who they are — yet they were never even arrested.

The difference being that they convinced doctors to hand this stuff out like candy. It was all legal. Which is why it got that bad in the first place.

Right, which is why it’s asinine to talk about “crime rate” as though it weren’t wholly dependent on whom we as a society want to call criminals.

"Asinine" is a bit much. There can be huge problems that aren't illegal, but that doesn't mean the crime rate is totally useless. You just have to treat it carefully, like any measurement.

This is whataboutism.

Some sort of system which detects prescription abuse should not be deployed over utility poles in low income neighborhoods. It should be deployed where abuse is happening, for instance in pharmacy computers etc.

Also "white billionaire" part is low key racist against blacks. They are "incidentally" whites billionaire criminals, they can as well be black billionaire criminals, unless there's a fundamental difference in criminal tendencies among races.

Or a fundamental difference in billionaire tendencies, don't forget that possibility.

Read the thread again; the comment I responded to literally asked if there was a difference in rates of drug dealing between white people and Black people.

And the rates of drug-related violence and property crimes.

It’s probably a cultural factor. Most criminal enterprises want to be discreet in order to avoid detection by law enforcement and rival enterprises. Whereas the black criminal community has made an entire industry of advertising their criminality through music and fashion.

Yes, in a country filled with badly trained police that open deadly fire upon hearing a firework[0] or an acorn dropping on a car hood, more police presence is a bad thing.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403

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