41–50 of 241 posts
So-called Black Lives Matter costs black lives by making policing less effective. The "Ferguson Effect" has been documented. Recent headline: "104 shot, 14 fatally, over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago" https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicag... .
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The 'proactive' is just driving or walking around a neighborhood. It isn't (necessarily) doing things like stop and frisk or just going around accosting random people on the street.
It's not just driving or walking around a neighbourhood, it's doing your best to find the maximum amount of crime. Otherwise, you wouldn't need mathematical models in order to optimize the "efficacity" of the operation. The vast majority of crime where police should be involved are crimes where the victim can call the police later. For those that don't fit this criteria, either police patrols are already ineffective…
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Using math to improve the effectiveness of police is not necessarily a good thing, because this kind of works really works to perpetuate proactive policing and over-policing, as well as encodes bias.
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…
The biases are deep and insidious. They exist in each and every one of us. "Addressing" them is a complicated issue.
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Except this is not how it works. We are not accurately predicting where crimes will occur, but maximizing the amounts of arrests. Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on. Meanwhile, wa…
This is false. Socio-economically disadvantaged areas genuinely have more crime than elsewhere. They require more policing as a result. Without more policing, the crime problems get worse not better. Your sort of thinking has been tried out with disastrous results in cities throughout the US. It is actively harming law abiding citizens living in poor communities. Policing is not causing crime. People committing crime…
You have to ask yourself why there is more crime in poor areas. The answer is that we don't go looking for or don't care about the crime that happens in other areas as much, and that the socio-economic conditions lead to more crime. You can't fix these issues by sending police there to act like an occupying army. You can only fix the root cause.
As a personal anecdote, having grown up in such places, people have so many bad experiences with police that they genuinely don't want to call them when their presence might maybe help. So is sending police patrols to maximize the number of arrests and create ever more negative experiences the solution? No. You have to fix the root cause.
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Except this is not how it works. We are not accurately predicting where crimes will occur, but maximizing the amounts of arrests. Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on. Meanwhile, wa…
This is false. Socio-economically disadvantaged areas genuinely have more crime than elsewhere. They require more policing as a result. Without more policing, the crime problems get worse not better. Your sort of thinking has been tried out with disastrous results in cities throughout the US. It is actively harming law abiding citizens living in poor communities. Policing is not causing crime. People committing crime…
Do you have a source?
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Police patrols should be entirely proactive otherwise they are responses instead of patrols. The only point of police patrols is to have a moving and visible presence in the community.
There are many cases of reactive police patrols. For example, at a protest, as a response to a people feeling that it could help their community, and so on. I assure you mathematicians aren't optimizing the "visbile presence in the community". That's not something you need a mathematician for. Mathematicians are optimizing the ability of police to maximize the number of arrests by deciding which areas they should pat…
How, is this your line of work?
This doesn't seem to make sense. By more accurately predicting where crimes will occur, the police departments can reduce the amount of patrols needed.
Not that predicting where crimes will occur is really a thing - more likely you are just predicting where a population is getting policed.
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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 polic…
The victim's desires for police involvement is usually not very relevant. The victim can not provide any information to the police, but that doesn't mean that the police can't or shouldn't do anything. Respecting the victim's wishes is basically giving tacic approval of spousal abuse and honor killings.
This doesn't seem to make sense. By more accurately predicting where crimes will occur, the police departments can reduce the amount of patrols needed.
Except this is not how it works. We are not accurately predicting where crimes will occur, but maximizing the amounts of arrests. Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on. Meanwhile, wa…
From her twitter page ( https://twitter.com/mathbabedotorg/status/127394137538240512... ) : Cathy O'Neil @mathbabedotorg I'm interested in algorithmic accountability, civil disagreement, and the social mechanism of shame. Algorithmic auditor at ORCAA.