They are complaining about "racial bias" in predictive policing products. This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics. If reality doesn't support the ideology, reality must be ignored. This is the sorry state of academia nowadays.
Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
71–80 of 241 posts
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the town where I grew up the most common non-traffic emergency calls were calls of injury of which the most serious were cardiac distress. The police used mathematical models to position two SUV patrols at opposite sides of town where each contained some manner electric cardio medical device for rapid response to heart attacks.
Sure, this is also done in my city. Except that isn't the responsibility of police, but that of the EMS service/paramedics/firefighters. If the police are doing that in your town I also think that's problematic, because many people won't call if they know the police are going to come for injuries.
> because many people won't call if they know the police are going to come for injuries.
That is not what occurred in practice and there is no data to suggest this would ever be a probable outcome. At any rate people don’t have a choice on who responds if the call is to 911.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#73I wonder if any of the scientist or commenters in this thread have ever lived in a bad hood. The hoods require more and better policing, the worst offenders, who kill orders of magnitude more people are criminal gangs. You remove police - you'll get spike in homicides.
Relatively few people are opposed to the idea of police. A much larger number of people are opposed to policing in its current form in the USA.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Count me as one people would rather the cops just respond when called than cruise around looking for crime. If it's that important someone will call it in. If they want a better response time they can do what EMTs do and forward deploy.
You might be underestimating the prejudice of the people calling things in to the police. Listening to police radio for just a few hours I was astounded at the things people report to the police: 1) A man and young girl walking down a country road... the man happened to be a minority, the girl was white. Police decided to check it out. 2) A man wearing camoflague and carrying a long rifle.. in a country area, during duck hunting season. Police decided to check it out.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#75There is no question that the advancement of science has been good for humanity as a whole. Using math to improve the effectiveness of the police is a good thing. This effort - however well intended maybe - would throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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.
This depends on how you define "effectiveness". E.g. one of the measures of effectiveness should include reducing the intrusiveness of polling, particularly on groups that tend to be subjected to overpolicing.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It’s intuitive and true that poor homes and neighborhoods are going to house more crime. Now, is the solution to arrest them and send them to jail for long periods of time? I don’t know. Arguing that the poor aren’t more susceptible to crime is a losing battle though.
> It’s intuitive and true that poor homes and neighborhoods are going to house more crime.
I challenge your assumption. To me it seems intuitive that crimes are committed at higher rates by the socioeconomically advantaged, because they can get away with it.
See for example that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the general population.
https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing...
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#77They are complaining about "racial bias" in predictive policing products. This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics. If reality doesn't support the ideology, reality must be ignored. This is the sorry state of academia nowadays.
You are engaging in circular reasoning.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#78> widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat people of different races and ethnicities
Citation needed, particularly for Nature. As far as I can tell the supposed disparities are explained by the amount of violent crime the race and ethnicity commits (leading to more police interactions), but it's impolite to bring that up.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wage theft in the US is the majority of theft. Tell me, are people in socio-economically disadvantaged areas committing more wage-theft? 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…
I'm sorry but I don't take your anecdotes seriously. I've seen too many legitimate uses of police force described as "police brutality" recently to take accusations of police brutality at face value. It seems that people have convinced themselves of police brutality through popular narrative and twisted anecdotes. Removing criminal elements from communities creates safer communities, which is a prerequisite for peopl…
When the NYPD did a work slowdown, rates of crime according to their own data went down.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#80They are complaining about "racial bias" in predictive policing products. This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics. If reality doesn't support the ideology, reality must be ignored. This is the sorry state of academia nowadays.
Are you suggesting that data cannot be biased? If so, might I suggest you try reading an elementary guide to statistics? Heck, even a blog post would do.