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Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
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Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: This was not a well-thought out post lol and I'm deleting it.
I’ve been to plenty of protests in low income areas, and the push to defund the police is coming from them, not the higher income areas.
A question to ask is what are the demographics? Is the support a plurality, old people, young people, homeowners, a silent majority a vocal minority, do we know?
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
or crime is a function of income inequality, and ways to fight it are police (reactive) or preventative social spending (proactive.) it's like arguing over fire departments vs electrical code. neglecting the latter leads to more of the former. Even things like urban planning, where you put your low income housing. If you build low income housing in high income areas, it prevents ghettos from forming.
Is there evidence for this though? The great crime decline in cities like NYC were due to increased policing and the “broken window” policy, along with stop & frisk.
I was under the impression that this is more likely related to the reduction in lead in the air. At first glance that seems plausible. See murders by year[1] and the presence of lead[2], the timelines seem to match.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#Murders...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-c...
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only one answer is socially acceptable, regardless of what statistics indicate. And we are building a dangerous world by going down this unscientific path. I am genuinely concerned that this will bleed into ML science and we may find ourselves collectively pursuing a rabbit hole of bad science in a vain attempt to reconcile empirical data with ideology.
Note that even you only mentioned whether answers are socially acceptable (in your view), not which one is true.
That's the fundamental problem. We are ruling out possible results in advance, based on arbitrary social conventions, not data.
This is fundamentally unscientific and will lead to stagnation at best, regression at worst, and progress only in the unlikely case. At some point we will have to reconcile the fact that the same mathematical and scientific techniques which we correctly apply to other sets of data produce unacceptable results any time models are conditioned on demographic data.
What then?
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#75Honest question here. Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is “over policed”?
I think the real answer is both. The fact is, lower income neighborhoods do have more crime. That's just common sense. People do what they have to to survive.
This results in heavier policing, which then creates a cycle. You put people in prison for a felony, and when they come out they don't have many options. They're in a worse place then when they went in. Not many places hire prior felons. So then they end up committing crime again and going back. For more on this google "incarceration cycle" or similar.
This also obviously has a bad effect on future generations. Kids are growing up on a single income cause one of their parents are in jail, and that makes it more likely they'll too eventually be forced to enter crime.
I believe, and the data shows this, that the vast majority of people don't commit crime because they want to. They do it because they feel like they don't have any other good options.
The only real way to break this cycle is try to do things besides policing and incarcerating. Focus on rehabilitation and social services. The initial investment will likely need to be huge, but in the long run, I think it would pay off.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: This was not a well-thought out post lol and I'm deleting it.
I hear what you are saying but disagree to a point. How many of these people getting arrested for the serious crimes have pre existing arrests / convictions for minor crimes? Once you have a couple of minor arrests and you are in the system, finding a career and advancing yourself becomes increasingly difficult. I would make an uneducated assumption that if they had not gotten the minor infractions and had a future p…
In the UK we have what's know as youth offending services, the main aim of which is to keep youths out of the courts and criminal system by utilising more appropriate methods of disposal for minor offences like drug possession.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only one answer is socially acceptable, regardless of what statistics indicate. And we are building a dangerous world by going down this unscientific path. I am genuinely concerned that this will bleed into ML science and we may find ourselves collectively pursuing a rabbit hole of bad science in a vain attempt to reconcile empirical data with ideology.
This preference for ideology instead of data reminds me of weird stuff that would happen with science in the Soviet Union. You had things in the Soviet Union like Lysenkoism[1] where a kook got power and explained his science in ideological terms and his theories, unsupported by data, were adopted and defended to the detriment of agricultural production. Workers adopted the theories because people were so afraid of c…
> Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress scientific opponents.
Wow, so what sort of rationale can we make of this? Is the logic, "Stalin supports bunk science theory", "other scientists critique said theory", "therefore they indirectly critique Stalin and reduce his legitimacy/credibility"? Something like that? Are politicians expected to grasp every scientific thing they must evaluate accurately? Why wouldn't they accept and admit 'yah maybe we got this one wrong, sorry honest mistake' than to go out and murder folks. That seems widely overreactive.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this is absolutely true, I'm not sure it's a reasonable argument for defunding the police today. You wouldn't defund the fire department today, because in ten years buildings will average a better standard. The social issues need to be dealt with first, which could take some years. On the other hand, that the police have become what appears to be a poorly trained, violent militia is indeed a problem that should…
If fire departments were carrying out the same injustices as police, then it would be pretty reasonable to push for the same massive changes in fire departments.
Of course there needs to be massive changes in the police, I'm just not sure the GP's argument justifies it.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
More policing may indeed catch more minor crimes that would otherwise go unobserved. But the morgue has a pretty close to 100% set of data on murder victims. It's hard to argue that those are caused by catching more criminals. (And in fact, murders in high-crime neighborhoods are less likely to be solved. If anything, murders are caused by this failure to catch first-time murderers, before their second go. Their vict…
But how does the level of policing in an area affect murder rates? I don't know the answer, but from statistics I've seen, it seems pretty clear that police are not exactly great at solving murders.
You should ask some homicide detectives why that is.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, law and order has to be standardized for everybody, regardless of background. Pot was decriminalized in many states already. Are there other things you would like to decriminalize? There are avenues for those, but it’s not a fast turn-around, those things take time.
In our society, everyone is a lawbreaker. There are so many laws that surely everyone is guilty of breaking some law. This results in police being able to discriminate by selectively enforcing laws. Since everyone is probably doing something illegal, police do racist things by profiling people who are 'probably doing [something illegal]' without sounding racist. It's a common pattern in societies where the laws are s…
Equally and fully enforcing laws seems about as likely as equally and fully eliminating bugs from all software to me