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Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

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

#171

Post by refurb »

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…

40 years of austerity? Last I checked federal, state and local budgets are several-fold bigger than 40 years ago, even accounting for inflation.

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

#172

Post by cvlasdkv »

perl4ever wrote: post #137
krohling wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conse…

This seems like a plausible criticism, but it also seems like a plausible criticism of all data and derivates about human beings (and probably other things).

It _is_ a plausible criticism of all data and why we want such large (and diverse) sets of them.

source: work with data and am not terrible at my job

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

#173

Post by downerending »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #69

I 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.

No doubt, and at least anecdotally, that seems to be happening in real time.

As to the larger question, I'm having a very hard time seeing adding knowledge and science as a bad thing. Without those, any proposed improvement to policing (including abuse) is simply flailing guesswork.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

graeme wrote: post #148
munk-a wrote: post #89

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by uoaei »

SilasX wrote: post #29
uoaei wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie.

I urge you to try to learn something from the material you praise, to the point that you can articulate the insights in your own words.

Oh, pretentious snark is fun. I can do it too.

You have made the erroneous assumption that I cannot articulate the insights, and further the erroneous conflation between "cannot" and "will not".

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

#176

Post by uoaei »

chrisseaton wrote: post #120
munk-a wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All theory is made up until we have a practical example to compare against.

Using the logic you've already employed, one could conclude that the entire anthology of philosophical texts also have zero bearing on reality because "they're all made up".

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

#177

Post by leafmeal »

rayiner wrote: post #134
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…

There is no austerity. Here is state-and-local spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to present: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-re... And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location... State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor…

Prop 13 (passed in 1978) reduced budgets substantially for local governments in California --- roughly 60% state wide [1]. Perhaps that's what they were referring to.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13...

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

#178

Post by fearingreprisal »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #69

I 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 grew up in a bad neighborhood and was the victim of violence on multiple occasions. I have what the academics call "lived experience". It wasn't any kind of weird fluke, it was exactly the kind of violence you would expect from this kind of area: Being attacked by groups of improverished youths, looking to rob and assault people for money and enjoyment. The things these privileged ACAB protesters believe are absolute nonsense. These kids were not out there assaulting people because the system had let them fall through the cracks. These were individuals who had purposefully eluded ever integrating themselves in the system. The gangs would act in their own self interest to the fullest extent until the police stopped them.

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

#179

Post by metrokoi »

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…

>On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than letter ones

Likely a large portion of what they saw was a product of racial and political demographics. Whites are a larger percent of rural populations than cities. [0] White people on average rate police much better than non-whites. [1] Of course whites may rate police better because they live in rural areas, but the gap in satisfaction between whites and blacks is too great to be accounted for by more whites living in rural areas. Also rural people are more likely to be conservative and conservative people rate police much higher. Rural officers are in less danger in rural areas, so they may not need to be as alert and forceful because they know their lives are not in danger as much.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-... [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...

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

#180

Post by jxramos »

I've always wondered if there's a probabilistic argument to show just how biased of policing there is by quantitating somehow the arrests made on a given subpopulation and somehow show how improbable it would be to randomly achieve a given arrest disparity to another subpopulation under the presumption of equal offending by those subpopulations. Is there any math to explore such a thing, sort of like flipping a quarter and hitting heads 5x in a row, that sort of thing.

To use a less charged example say I have three populations of fish, and all swallow coins in the same proportion as each other. In this universe sharks make up 10% of the fish population, sea-bass 30% and rockfish 60%. Exactly 5% of each fish type has a coin in their belly at any given time.

So if we have a world of 1000 fish, then we're talking 100 sharks, 300 sea-bass, and 600 rockfish. Of those 5 sharks, 15 sea-bass, and 30 rockfish have coins in their belly. To measure anything other than those counts of 5% per subpopulation, is there a way to measure how improbable that would be with random selection and subsampling and what not? Does this question even make sense and is well defined enough? My stats strengths aren't the keenest.

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