And identity politics breached into the final bastions of logic completing the spread of corruption and signalling the completion of the ritual to summon the lord of chaos.
Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
111–120 of 241 posts
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#112People 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 t…
> It's also possible that the mathematician built an algorithm anchored on years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial profiling.
That possibility is explicitly excluded since the data comes from crimes reported by victims, not investigations initiated by police officers.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#113They 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 think many of the mathematicians would agree with: >This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics. They disagree that crime statistics are reflective of where crime occurs. They are more reflective of where police officers are and where crimes are most easily spotted. For example, the racial disparities in policing crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. Predictive systems that read in biased…
I would guess that the murder rate data is pretty complete.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I assure you mathematicians aren't optimizing the "visbile presence in the community". How, is this your line of work?
This is addressed at the very start of the article. It's about predictive policing.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#115Earlier 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.
If we look at theft like the OP does, wage theft vastly outnumbers other types of criminal theft.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#116This 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…
Not all crime is equal, and to present crime as purely a dollar value is a bit disingenuous. Wage theft is important, and isn't pursued nearly enough, but it isn't on the same level as violent crime, which happens primarily in disadvantaged communities.
Completely agree on proactive policing. End the drug war and it would cease to be necessary.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie.
> I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie. This is fiction .
Fiction is a really powerful tool that can be used to warn us of societal dangers while sparing us actually needing to live through them.
It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen.
Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly reports since they don't definitively tell you how the company will be doing - they just tell you how it has been doing. Prediction and imagination are not flawless tools, but they are helpful to plan for the future. (Which is amusing to say in the light of the book being discussed)
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> there is no data to suggest this would ever be a probable outcome
The data behind 911 Good Samaritan laws[1] that protect people from being arrested when they call in overdoses would like to have a word with you.
[1] https://www.shatterproof.org/advocacy/state-by-state-informa...
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#119People 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 t…
> It's also possible that the mathematician built an algorithm anchored on years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial profiling. That possibility is explicitly excluded since the data comes from crimes reported by victims, not investigations initiated by police officers.
Arrest data includes both.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie. This is fiction .
Fiction is a really powerful tool that can be used to warn us of societal dangers while sparing us actually needing to live through them. It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen. Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly r…
It's literally just made up in someone's head. It's a hypothesis without an experiment. You can hypothesise anything and everything.
If I similarly just made up a book where police surveillance was the best thing in the world would you cite that as an argument in favour?
How can you use a made up story to argue something when someone else could make up another story that disproves your point and proves theirs?