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.
But somehow, their budget always increases...
Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
161–170 of 241 posts
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#162Earlier 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…
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…
In his defense, there are some crimes (like smoking weed) that everyone commits, but that only get prosecuted in places the police decide to patrol.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#163The 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,…
That way would be: do what Germany did before the 90s and the privatization wave.
Every city/county had their own "Bauhof" with a couple of construction workers and machines for all kinds of maintenance that a city had: snow plowing in the winter, pothole fillings and greenkeeping in the summer, pipe laying/maintenance, traffic lights and general lights maintenance, other infrastructure upkeep.
Today much of this is mandatory outsourced to the lowest bidder, with no way of accounting for regionality or quality.
To make it worse, cities and counties used to have capable public servants in architecture and supervision, which meant that for those projects where external help was needed (think construction of new projects) that work could be properly supervised and issues either prevented in the planning stage or caught during construction and remedied before that became too expensive. Nowadays, thanks to more and more budget cuts, pay in public service is a third to a half of the private sector which means that even if there were a budget no one would apply. In IT the situation is even more dire, which is why almost all major government IT projects fail, with the additional complexity that most IT projects have way too many stakeholders and no leadership.
We as Western societies need to roll back that privatization mandate, at least for areas where it has obviously failed.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am unclear what statistics you're interested in, but would be happy to look into it if you can clarify which claim I made that you dispute.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#165I 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.
I guarantee many of the privileged predominantly white ACAB crowd never lived in areas where their own mom had a higher than average risk of being sexually assaulted or brutally beaten for fun whilst being on public transport during evenings.
Their heads can’t fathom such notions and it’s hard for them to comprehend the idea of different opinion. I’ve taking a different approach IRL of not showing my cards on the subject and just agreeing with them.
The first chance I get, I will accuse them of racism and homophobia to HR so they can have some of their own medicine. It’s the only way they learn.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#166The 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…
> 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.
Education isn't part of LA City government, education comes from school districts which are not funded or controlled by cities in California (if any Mayoral candidate in California other than SF tells you they're going to fix the schools, they're either lieing or unaware of the job of their office; SF is an exception because they are a combined city and county and school districts are supervised by the counties in which they reside)
Same with healthcare and transit --- those agencies are separate from cities too, so city funds don't go there.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#167I 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.
Does it occur that the gangs are an attempt from within consistently brutalized communities to mirror their brutalizers
Nothing is anyone's fault, huh. He's not a murderer--he's just brutalized and oppressed.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quick search, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-... And then there is the fact that illegal immigrants do not call the police for their fears.
> https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-... . 3 people "screened and analyzed" 1.1 million calls and found out that there was a (presumably temporary) effect on minorities after one much-discussed incident involving minorities? The rest is cherry-picked examples and wild conjecture and not thorough analysis of the data. > illegal immigrants do not call the police for their fears. Um, that's beca…
It doesn't look great when you are presented with evidence then try to find some reason to disbelieve it.
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
> In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well.
Do you have a source for this claim? I mean we can all claim it is intuitive but just how many police, how "well funded", what equipment, and what jurisdiction?
Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The US actually spends a low amount of money on policing compared to the EU, where police kill fewer people. Further, the US also has a low number of police officers. https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli... ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. Th…
I think you mean Camden, NJ.