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

#221

Post by graeme » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:50 AM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #217

graeme wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment. Can you give an example of a country that does what you recommend? If you can’t, what evidence do you have that it is the solution? I’m not American. My criticism above is that the movement appears to have developed a policy idea tha…

> I’m not American. Well then. - US police are above the law, and have free union-provided legal counsel. If a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back, and the union will threaten the careers of city councilpersons, DAs and judges at the next election. A perfect circle of corruption. - DA's and judges are elected, so political from Day One of their careers. Public unions hold 20% or more of the votes…

I know that. The US police are a mob. It’s very apparent, from outside looking in.

How does that relate to my argument? My point was that attempting to tackle those factors is the actual solution.

(Would need a source on your 20% claim though. Endorsed by the police union is an appeal to voters outside the union, not an appeal to union share of electorate)

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

#222

Post by graeme » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:55 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #216

graeme wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite example: the American government spends more on health care than any other OECD government, for much less coverage. https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

It's probably not a great example, because we spend more for health care across the board, not just publicly. Doctors and nurses here make more money, and we deliver more procedures (especially outpatient procedures) than the rest of the OECD.

It’s a fair point. But are the procedures improvements over standards of care abroad? If not, my assumption was that it fit in the same category as the transit spending detailed above: more money thrown into the system, but worse outcomes. The reasons for the extra money required are complex in both cases.

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

#223

Post by graeme » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 7:57 AM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #214

rayiner wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system…

The London underground was created in 1863 though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground

Though I suppose you would have to look at the state of thr system in the 1980s. NYC may have had more deferred maintenance.

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

#224

Post by ReticentVole » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:09 AM 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.

African Americans are killed by police at the same or lesser rates than other races. However, they are killed at much higher absolute rates because they commit a significantly greater amount of crime. It doesn't take a PHD in mathematics to figure this out.

Here is just one data source from NYC: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan...

Subjects firing on Police: 79% Black

Subjects killed by Police gunfire: 69% Black

If you want to tackle Black crime, start with decriminalising drugs, and then getting Black fathers back into marriage and raising their children.

Destroy the idea that being law-abiding, studying hard, and being regularly employed is 'acting white'. Scale back welfare to make all these things more attractive, and restrict immigration to direct more job opportunities to African Americans instead of Latin American and Indian migrants.

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

#225

Post by masonic » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

leafmeal wrote: post #177

rayiner wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It did not reduce local budgets by 60%, it merely reduced local government share of property taxes by (not quite) 60%, initially, as the Brown administration and Democrat legislature leadership clawed money back to state control.

(The local share of property tax was not defined in Prop 13; this is strictly how the Democrats in power chose to implement Prop 13.)

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

#226

Post by masonic » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 11:15 AM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #217

graeme wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment. Can you give an example of a country that does what you recommend? If you can’t, what evidence do you have that it is the solution? I’m not American. My criticism above is that the movement appears to have developed a policy idea tha…

> I’m not American. Well then. - US police are above the law, and have free union-provided legal counsel. If a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back, and the union will threaten the careers of city councilpersons, DAs and judges at the next election. A perfect circle of corruption. - DA's and judges are elected, so political from Day One of their careers. Public unions hold 20% or more of the votes…

   a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back

That's not how it works. First, you conflate criminal with civil law. Second, cities don't prosecute.

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

#227

Post by rtkwe » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 12:14 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #223

rtkwe wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system…

The London underground was created in 1863 though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground Though I suppose you would have to look at the state of thr system in the 1980s. NYC may have had more deferred maintenance.

One major thing is probably that the NYC subway did 24 hour operation (recently stopped due to covid-19) so there wasn't an easy period for maintenance tasks where the London Underground seems to run 5am-12am so there's a nice 5 hour block for maintenance.

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

#228

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 12:18 PM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #220

dragonwriter wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public unions hold 20% or more of the votes No, they don't. Public employees don’t, outside of a few localities with extremely high concentrations (which are usually military, which isn't unionized) make up 20% of the electorate, much less public sector unions holding 20% of votes. > and vote in a bloc No, they don't. Law enforcement and corrections unions often don't even lean toward the same major party as most o…

In case you didn't notice, every election there's lawn signs saying "endorsed by the Police Union" or similar. So get your facts straight. If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.

> In case you didn't notice, every election there's lawn signs saying "endorsed by the Police Union" or similar.

That doesn't contradict anything I said. There are signs saying that not because public sector unions as a whole either make up the 20% of the electorate you've claimed or vote in a unified block across different public sector unions as you've claimed, but because the general public, and especially voters that consider “law and order” an important concern, are particularly likely to be swayed by law enforcement union endorsements.

> If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.

...often, quite badly. I've got a Political Science degrees from a subprogram specialized in the pragmatics of US electoral politics at all levels; “Law & Order” is, I know, entertaining to a lot of people, but it's not really a guide to reality on, well, anything.

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

#229

Post by bryal » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 12:31 PM UTC

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.

Yeah, and keep underfunding preventive measures like improved schooling. Who cares if the youth of the hood keep growing up to be offenders -- we can just arrest/kill them with the police!

Throwing police at the problem is only putting a band-aid on the symptoms, but ignoring the root cause. Violence will only beget more violence in the long run.

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

#230

Post by spoopyskelly » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #203

greenhatglack wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sub…

The funny thing is that minorities who live in these "hellscapes" also promote the ACAB mantra. So what's wrong with them?

They are criminals.