Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

Not if the patrols they are sending have been taught to see all of the people in those places as targets. Police can literally make things worse. Even the victims of crime often don't want police there.

This has been known in those communities for decades. It's only the most obvious, well-documented brutality that has begun to make other people aware of it. It's the broad reaction to that brutality, where other police and their strongest supporters reflexively excuse the inexcusable, that have made people like these mathematicians realize that sending the police doesn't solve the problems that their models are pinpointing.

If the mathematicians want to help people, they'll model the broader causes of poverty, injustice, and inequality. Then we can try to solve the real problems, rather than "I heard there was a problem, let's send in people with guns until it gets better."

> I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie.

This is fiction.

So maybe address the biases?

People who live in areas that experience high incidence of criminal activity also want to have crime reduced. They want someone to establish order—when you have a vacuum, someone will fill it, usually someone with even less oversight, though occasionally you can luck out with a benevolent dictator of sorts.

So yes people in those areas want policing —though they may also want some reform as well. Few people want no police. They know that’s a recipe for a power vacuum and the domino effect that has.

It depends on what your implicit model of policing is. I think the real issue is that most police departments in the US are commonly dual-tasked with providing violent crime prevention _and_ front line social services.

In this setting, it's less clear which "side of the force" is most impacted by the scientific input, but I think it might be reckless to simply cut them off without finding a better model for providing some of their more critical social services. In particular drug, mental health and domestic abuse interventions which sadly seems to be a very large portion of their workload.

There is likewise no question that many individual scientists and mathematicians have engaged in rank psuedoscience to apply a seemingly rigorous veneer to state abuses. Crucially, this does not necessarily depend on the malfeasance of the scientist (although that helps). The root of the problem here is that American police cannot be trusted as good-faith collaborators in any academic research. Any academic research done with police has an unnacceptably high risk of being weaponized against innocent people.

> Using math to improve the effectiveness of the police is a good thing.

There isn't a mathematical definition for "police effectiveness" and any attempt at a quantitative metric for that sort of thing should be viewed with intense skepticism. If your "police effectiveness measure" is skewed towards making more arrests, then that metric clearly has problems and, if used by an actual US police force, would just result in excessive violence and lawless arrests against innocent black people. This is just an example but the risk is real. The fact that such a metric might be theoretically possible is not a good enough reason for engaging in research which will affect the lives of real people.

The only scientists who should be collaborating with police departments are sociologists and psychologists - and, as the hoary history of psychology demonstrates, even they should be treated suspiciously.