Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings • Hacker News Board

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#91

Post by josefresco » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

Bostonian wrote: post #9

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... .

You missed a step.

Police brutality and systemic racism caused a group to rise up and demand justice. The populace took notice, a movement was formed (BLM) and overall trust in law enforcement was lowered. Crime rose as a result.

It's not "so called" Black Lives Matter, it's "so called" equal and just law enforcement that caused the The "Ferguson Effect"

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#92

Post by mikaeluman » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

I don’t understand this. Usually the answer to bad algorithms is to produce better ones, through research.

What is the alternative? To give up and stay out? Ethical considerations are great. Define fairness and set a valid goal for the algorithm that takes fairness into account.

Do the signatories presume a non-quant approach would be less biased towards this supposed “systemic racism”?

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#93

Post by trhway » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

i think that it shouldn't be boycotted, instead all such work should be done in public. And not just through the crutches of FOIA. It should be in the open to start with. There should be no NDA (except naturally for whatever PII is protected by law). Police should publish all the data. Any contracts on working with that data, any resulting models and their application should be in the open.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#94

Post by Siira » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

coffeemaniac wrote: post #70

mc32 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, when you're witnessing multiple instances of officers willingly and enthusiastically assaulting defenseless and innocent citizens/journalists on the street every day, you're past the point of "bias" correction. These instances are not the result of some nebulous ingrained tendency to view others as less than themselves, they're the result of a coordinated and deliberate attempt to assert power. Your assertion t…

Please cite some statistics for such sweeping claims. That every other fool repeats a mantra doesn’t make it true.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#95

Post by krohling » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #71

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.

I don't think that's accurate at all. These algorithms are only as accurate as the data being input into them. The current system of policing is deeply flawed and as a result the "data collected from crime statistics" will be skewed by these inherent, systemic biases. Mathematical optimization against a flawed dataset of this kind is highly likely to create a feedback loop of increasing bias with terrible human consequences.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#96

Post by bdamm » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

waffle_ss wrote: post #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.

It's impolite to bring that up because OF COURSE there are more violent crimes committed by a group that has been systematically discriminated against for hundreds of years. What did you expect? So, what should we take away from that? Well, we should expect everyone to receive the same treatment from government organizations (and many non-government organizations) that deliver services to people, without bias. Just because black people may commit more violent crimes as an adjusted ratio among black people compared to other ethnicities, is not a reason to treat a specific individual who happens to be black any differently from an individual who happens to not be black. The complaint of "black lives matter" is that there is a pattern of police abuse towards non-violent black people. So while you may be right in saying that there are more police interactions with black people than with other ethnicities, you are not right in saying that justifies the disparity in how peaceful individuals are profiled and abused. In fact, your reasoning perpetuates that injustice.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#97

Post by alexilliamson » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

People are boiling this down to "less crime = good". Like if a mathematician can design a deployment system such that the percentage of crimes where an arrest is made increases from 15% to 20%, how can that be a bad thing?

What if every single one of those additional arrests is a Black person? Well that might require an additional look. It's possible that it's all Black people doing those crimes. It's also possible that the mathematician built an algorithm anchored on years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial profiling.

Will the mathematician be able to say, "hey cops can we take a second look?". No. Can the police be trusted to dig into the nuance themselves? Also no. Is racism active and documented in police departments across the country? Yes.

Should everyone who has any ability to do so stand up and say, we won't support this shit, which is what these mathematicians are doing? I think yes, but that's obviously my opinion.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#98

Post by young_unixer » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

The deeper question: should heuristic methods be used at all by police?

I mean not only artificial heuristics like machine learning, but the ones people have always used, e.g.: "acting really weird means the person is probably on drugs/commiting a crime".

All prejudices we use are heuristic techniques. Some are badly calibrated and give bad results (e.g. racism) but some may give accurate results (e.g. "poor neighborhoods have a higher crime rate"). Should these techniques be used when they're accurate?

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#99

Post by LegitShady » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

tj-teej wrote: post #20

A lot of comments here are missing the point of boycotting, it's an expression of power with the concrete goal, it's not individual decisions of whether the mathematicians feel the work is "ethical". Yes, having more liberals working in policing is probably more inline with the goals of those liberals than not, but that's not the point of a boycott. If the police can't get the help they need from mathematicians becau…

>If the police can't get the help they need from mathematicians because of a large enough boycott then it gets them to the table and forces them to reform.

They will just hire someone else. Google was making AIs for the chinese government that almost certainly have deep ethical issues and it was barely a thing. Now helping the police is a boycott issue?

The question is not "do the police want a seat at the table", its if you want the people working with police to be only people who disagree with you and reject your position?

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#100

Post by waffle_ss » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

rickhanlonii wrote: post #85

waffle_ss wrote: post #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.

"Widely documented" means that it's trivial for you to look up the data yourself.

I obviously have, primarily the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), the Bureau of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and the Washington Post's police shootings database. If you compare the police-citizen homicide rate of the latter to the violent crime rate by race/ethnicity of the former, it's quite proportional.

If you're basing your opinion off of highly publicized gruesome videos, I can show you less publicized videos of other races being killed by police too.