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How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

economist.com

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Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#101

Post by jberryman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35
rrmm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There still needs to be visibility. Only the recent ubiquity of cell phone cameras has allowed the public at large to see interactions between citizens and police. Before this it was easy to dismiss or just be ignorant of how often police abuse occurred to certain groups of people. It was the officer's word against these "thugs". Getting everyone to admit a problem exists and getting our heads around how frequently i…

I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us. Say…

I think the meta-discussion about how accurate or relevant media portrayal of police brutality is, and how it influences peoples' perceptions is an important one. However I think your comment betrays a lot of privilege (or I should say: the way in which your comment resonates with white upper-middle class americans here betrays privilege). If you're black, regardless of your background, you've likely been sat down by your parent and "given the talk" about how to behave around police; about how not to get killed. There's a real culture of fear (which is grounded in reality, in real deaths and real experiences, in real numbers) which is I think more significant than whether police brutality is more or less prevalent than stroke or getting struck by lightning. It's not something I've ever had to deal with.

My other concern is that you haven't bothered to research statistics on police brutality and harassment, yet you seem to express doubt that the numbers are significant. In your hypothetical "most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly", yet almost no Black American will tell you this.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#102

Post by wyldfire »

Retric wrote: post #55
TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us. Say…

the problem is minor and mostly random in nature 1 defect in 10,000 is not arbitrarily 'good'. Picture a bridge that randomly drops 1 in every 50,000 cars. Further, cops are not a single entity if state and local cops have different issues and different training then that might be a way to improve the system. But, we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?

> 1 defect in 10,000 is not arbitrarily 'good'

Phew, agreed -- my jaw dropped at grandparent's 'minor'.

> we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?

I think there's plenty of open-loop approaches that could be considered (training on de-escalation, refresher on citizen's rights, praise/laud the interactions that result in no arrest or arrest without aggression). Waiting for national consensus is unnecessary: cities, counties and towns can recognize the crisis and establish best practices that are effective.

National consensus is likely useful to allocate funds that may be necessary to make these improvements, though.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#103

Post by Pinatubo »

nkoren wrote: post #80
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice statistics. Just because an officer kills, doesn't mean it was a crime and it doesn't mean the officer overstepped his bounds.

If the US crime rate were 79 times higher than the British crime rate, then you'd be absolutely correct. However as far as homicides are concerned, it's only 3.8 times higher[1]. A 4-fold discrepancy would be completely understandable, and one could probably make a valid argument for a 10-fold discrepancy, based on a theory of necessary force multipliers or something like that, but a 79-fold discrepancy is utterly in…

I think to get a complete picture we'd also need to consider the relative prevalence of firearms in the US versus the UK. There are fewer non-lethal options for dealing with someone armed with a guns as opposed to other weapons.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#104

Post by vacri »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #63
Retric wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is minor and mostly random in nature 1 defect in 10,000 is not arbitrarily 'good'. Picture a bridge that randomly drops 1 in every 50,000 cars. Further, cops are not a single entity if state and local cops have different issues and different training then that might be a way to improve the system. But, we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?

> 1 defect in 10,000 is not arbitrarily 'good' No, I'd argue it's pretty awful. The average person probably interacts with the police ~10 times during their life. If 1 in 10 000 cop interactions ended up with you getting killed, police brutality would be in the top 10 causes of death in the US (on par with suicide).

Temporal said 'criminal', not 'fatal', and gave the example of 'maimed or fatal'. There are also non-fatal, non-injurious ways to be criminal in policing.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#105

Post by vacri »

ck2 wrote: post #16

Put aside the whole idea of the app for a moment. Think about how this reflects on society when this becomes therapy for teenagers at the formative years in their life to deal with something very bad that happened to them by people who were supposed to protect them.

Teenagers and young adults are ripe for causes. It's part of their psychological makeup; find a cause and be passionate about it. It's why protest groups are mostly young adults, and why armies are full of teenage signups.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#106

Post by sokoloff »

mindslight wrote: post #98
TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us. Say…

> This all makes me believe that the biggest danger to our civilization are we ourselves - and our massive overreactions to media-manufactured non-problems. Completely agree with this point, but it's irrelevant to the subject of unaccountable police (although it's quite relevant to the media's derailing the issue into racist tripe) Any single case where police and prosecutors harm someone who is neither subsequently…

Those cases will always exist, IMO.

Suppose a bank was robbed by one person described as 5'10", medium build, wearing a dark blue hoodie, running north on Main St. and two people were seen minutes later running north on Main from the bank matching that description.

It's perfectly reasonable and there's a societal interest for both to be stopped and contacted, even though it's CERTAIN that at least one of them is uninvolved.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#107

Post by sokoloff »

jberryman wrote: post #101
TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us. Say…

I think the meta-discussion about how accurate or relevant media portrayal of police brutality is, and how it influences peoples' perceptions is an important one. However I think your comment betrays a lot of privilege (or I should say: the way in which your comment resonates with white upper-middle class americans here betrays privilege). If you're black, regardless of your background, you've likely been sat down by…

I'm white upper-middle class, and I got multiple "talks" of how to interact with police, from my family, from cop friends of mine or cop dads of my friends, and from a book I bought on the topic. My kids will get the same from me and my brother (who's LEO).

It's not (and shouldn't be) just a black youth thing.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#108

Post by mindslight »

sokoloff wrote: post #106
mindslight wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This all makes me believe that the biggest danger to our civilization are we ourselves - and our massive overreactions to media-manufactured non-problems. Completely agree with this point, but it's irrelevant to the subject of unaccountable police (although it's quite relevant to the media's derailing the issue into racist tripe) Any single case where police and prosecutors harm someone who is neither subsequently…

Those cases will always exist , IMO. Suppose a bank was robbed by one person described as 5'10", medium build, wearing a dark blue hoodie, running north on Main St. and two people were seen minutes later running north on Main from the bank matching that description. It's perfectly reasonable and there's a societal interest for both to be stopped and contacted, even though it's CERTAIN that at least one of them is uni…

The scenarios will always exist, but the uncompensated damage to innocents does not need to. The "reasonableness" of the stop is effectively internal to the police, and is not a substitute for actually making the innocent person whole again.

Doing otherwise is making it so the true cost of policing is funded by a reverse lottery.

(You've constructed the scenario to be quite benign, but even so the victim has been assaulted and is likely pumped full of adrenaline with nerves shot for a few hours. And that's basically the simplest thing that can occur)

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#109

Post by cryoshon »

jberryman wrote: post #101
TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us. Say…

I think the meta-discussion about how accurate or relevant media portrayal of police brutality is, and how it influences peoples' perceptions is an important one. However I think your comment betrays a lot of privilege (or I should say: the way in which your comment resonates with white upper-middle class americans here betrays privilege). If you're black, regardless of your background, you've likely been sat down by…

I am white and got this talk. It was in the early 2000s, well before the current awareness of widespread police abuse of citizens.

The moral of the story: people have known the police are rotten for a very long time, but haven't discussed it until now.

Re: How three teenagers invented an app to police the cops

#110

Post by cryoshon »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #83

I'm with Temporal that this will be negatively biased against the police. There will be some good ratings of good cops at least while this is a fad. There might be a percentage that do it consistently. Yet, most people are going to make this the goto app for ranting against the police. These rants will vary in accuracy. Overall, I mainly see it being an app for collecting negative claims about police rather than trul…

Derp, maybe if the police stop behaving badly, we will have more positive things to say about them.
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