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

#121

Post by tartoran » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #56

alexilliamson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "making policing less effective"?

He means policing that results in increased homicide rates and reduced homicide clearance rates. Don't you want to solve crimes and put murderers in jail? And scare others away from delinquency?

Yeah, and arrest and imprison some black folks who smoke pot making it look on paper that the crime is reduced big time. I am all for reducing crime and making the country safer for everyone. I don't think policing it more is the answer though. Going to the root of the problem is a whole lot more effective in the long term. Some reforms are clearly needed.

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

#122

Post by waffle_ss » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

bdamm wrote: post #96

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 b…

> The complaint of "black lives matter" is that there is a pattern of police abuse towards non-violent black people.

Again I have yet to see any convincing data that supports this. There's a marketed list of names of victims, some with video footage, but I can also show you names and video footage of non-violent victims of other races being killed by police.

I certainly support police reform (within the bounds of common sense), and continuing to try to lift black folks up, who I agree have been systematically discriminated against for hundreds of years. But doing it under false pretenses has already opened up a Pandora's Box of racist moral panic when it's simply not there.

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

#123

Post by alexilliamson » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

google234123 wrote: post #109

alexilliamson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than 50%???? Ha! Try closer to 10% in Chicago. Yes I want murders solved and think there should be someone doing that job. However, the police aren't doing that so why help them with whatever it is that they are doing.

A large issue is that people refuse to help them. How do you solve a crime if no there are witnesses willing to talk...

That's the problem in Chicago. CPD has destroyed whatever trust the community had in them.

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

#124

Post by mikedilger » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 9:00 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... .

Roland G Fryer's recent work shows that for every investigation over a white cop shooting a black person allegedly wrongly, 179 extra people die due to the severe reduction in policing (up to 90%!) over the next two years. Roland G Fryer is a black economics professor at Harvard. His papers are working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and as such not peer reviewed. When he discovered in 2016 that (if you do the math properly) police are actually more likely to shoot a white person in a life-or-death situation, he said it was "the most suprising result of my career."

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

#125

Post by infogulch » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #46

sudosysgen wrote: post #39

Earlier 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?

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but it doesn't seem to me that you'd need fancy predictive mathematics to get reasonable solutions for community visibility.

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

#126

Post by bitcurious » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

psychometry wrote: post #86

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.

Would you also like a citation for the statement "racism exists"? There are some truths that are so plainly obvious and supported by mountains of data that it's absurd to demand a citation for them.

If someone made the claim that X people are the genetically less intelligent than Y people, I could point to a dozen times and places in history where that would be considered “plainly obvious,” amongst them America itself a mere century ago. The only reason it’s not today is because we have data to the contrary.

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

#127

Post by ptero » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

pizza wrote: post #81

The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US have starved the beast [0] so greatly that the only remaining public infrastructure that functions as it's intended to is policing. For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. I…

It is tempting to blame the lack of funds for the problems in the US public infrastructure, but problematic management seems to play a much bigger role. Almost any public infrastructure project around me: paving local roads, repairing a bridge or doing the Big Dig takes much longer than planned and ends up with huge cost overruns. And is plagued by corruption, cronyism or incompetence (often, pick at least two).

Yes, we should rebuild the infrastructure. If more money is required we should find it. But we should find a way that holds the bureaucrats accountable on both the costs and the schedule; otherwise we will be throwing good money after the bad. My 2c.

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

#128

Post by austincheney » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #89

pizza wrote: post #81

The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US have starved the beast [0] so greatly that the only remaining public infrastructure that functions as it's intended to is policing. For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. I…

And this is exactly where the "Defund the Police" movement comes from and seems like an extremely good movement to pursue - shift that budget balance back in favor of specialized agencies that can better support social needs rather than forcing it all onto the police force. I really just wish it had gotten a better name since that title for the idea really divides people before they even open their minds.

Defunding the police is generally unpopular where I live. My big city is growing at about 22% decade over decade and will likely surpass San Jose in population over the next 10 years. It is also the lowest density big city in the US. In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well. The fastest growing area of the city is also the least policed. This not result of negligence from the city but just the geographic direction the city is growing towards and the funding limitations to meet the growing needs of the community. There are plans to put a precinct in my area of the city, which is strongly wanted, but it won’t happen if the police are defunded.

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

#129

Post by BGthaOG » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #112

alexilliamson wrote: post #97

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 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.

Minorities are less comfortable calling the police in the first place.

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

#130

Post by II2II » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #3

I don't know enough to agree or disagree, but to me having academics even ask questions on the ethics of their work is the most important thing; if one's work affects the real world then you can't duck responsibility for it.

Yes, academics should be asking questions about the ethics of their research. This is particularly when it is applied. Some of the research discussed in this article raises legitimate concerns regarding ethics that need to be addressed if it is going to be of benefit to society, and there are good reasons to believe that it can be a detriment to society regardless of how it is pursued.

That being said, I am tired of people vilifying the police and taking indiscriminate actions against them. The reality is that law enforcement performs a valuable role in society, yet it is also an institution that has serious issues to resolve. Those issues will be difficult to address with an antagonistic relationship. It creates barriers to questioning when the police are needed, what roles are better fulfilled by other institutions, and how we ensure that officers are accountable to the communities that they serve.

I suspect that it would be far more effective to place pressure on the government rather than the police simply because the scope of the problem is outside of the domain of the police. It is legislation that dictates what roles are taken by the police and which are taken up by other agencies (as well as how funding is allocated between those agencies). Legislation also determines the what and how of police accountability, which limits the consequences that officers face due to acts of negligence or malice.