Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 643 posts

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#281

Post by lobotryas »

godelski wrote: post #99

Looking at all these comments, did no one watch Minority Report ? The whole film was about the difficulties and ethics of "precrime" and arresting people before they even committed a crime. Obviously we aren't doing that here, but stories often exaggerate a bit. I'd also like to add another good series that explores this topic even more than Minority Report : Psycho-Pass . Psycho-Pass is more extreme in that there's…

But this is not “pre crime”. Someone in those areas still has to break the law to be arrested. What you write has zero connection to reality.

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#282

Post by r00fus »

treis wrote: post #156
basch wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to bring Then Now up everytime precrime comes up. Until it goes off the rails in the end, its one of my favorite articles of all time. The paragraphs I yanked below, dont do its craziness justice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... "But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether sex offenders are likely to commit crimes again after they have been released. In America…

The options here are having the judge make the decision based on their gut feeling or they can make it based on data. It's really hard for me to believe that gut feeling is better than data.

When the data is just as likely to be false as it is to be true then it’s worse than useless as a decision support mechanism.

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#283

Post by ncallaway »

metrokoi wrote: post #249
lostapathy wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody commits minor infractions of the law regularly. Putting someone under watch, by a cop who needs to report that he enforced something, is going to ensure they get picked up sooner or later. There's a saying to the effect that a good cop can find a reason to pull any car over if he follows it for just a couple minutes.

Do they? What are these minor infractions that would get picked up on? Likely drug or gun charges. Most people don't own guns illegal or use illegal drugs. The only common infraction I can think of is speeding, but that's not what these criminals are being picked up for. Cops don't follow a single individual around waiting for them to go 5 over the speed limit.

I'll give a partial list and refer to the RCW since that's a state I'm familiar with. Again, the entire point is the driving code is long and complicated. There are many many reasons you can be stopped.

Explore the entire RCW yourself on driving rules here: https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61. I encourage you to read the entire section and ask yourself if you ever have a driving trip longer than 3 blocks where you don't violate one of these laws:

- Speeding (even 1 mph over the limit for only 1 second). 46.61.400 (2)

- Speeding (even if at/under the speed limit if the officer things the roadway is unsafe for that speed, subjective to the officer making the stop) 46.41.400 (1)

- Speeding (failure to slow down at an intersection, hill crest, bend in the road, or when pedestrians are nearby, subjective to the officer making the stop) 46.41.400 (3)

- Passing on the right (except in specific situations) 46.61.110 & 46.61.115

- Driving too slowly (driving too slowly such that you impair the normal and reasonable flow of traffic; note for extra fun that the normal flow of traffic is often above the speed limit and this particular law doesn't provide an exception for driving at the speed limit; subjective to the officer making the stop) 46.61.425

- Failure to signal (both turns and lane changes, even into your own driveway) 46.61.305 (1)

- Failure to properly signal (not signaling a full 100 feet of travel before turning or changing lanes) 46.61.305 (2)

- Illegal wide turn. 46.61.290

- Reckless driving (subjective to the officer making the stop) 46.61.500

- Failure to come to a complete halt at a stop sign. 46.61.190

- Failure to stop between 15-50 feet of the rail from a mandatory stop rail cross (note, the distance measured is from the nearest rail, not the stop sign) 46.61.345

- Expired tabs (even by a day). 46.16A.030

- Anything not street legal about your vehicle (headlight out, taillight out, cracked windshield, window tint).

> Cops don't follow a single individual around waiting for them to go 5 over the speed limit.

This is a preposterous statement and absolutely false. This happens all the time when an officer becomes suspicious of a vehicle. It's literally routine policing that you would learn at the academy if you took officer training.

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#284

Post by throwaway894345 »

rickyplouis wrote: post #254
throwaway894345 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your source (a blog with a pretty transparent agenda) didn't mention that the neighborhoods commit them at a fairly consistent rate, it only said that Chance The Rapper said that he saw people at Millennium Park not social distancing. Chance omitted that police broke up the crowd at Millennium Park as well: > Monday protesters in Millennium Park were dispersed by police after gathering too closely as well. - https://…

The Block Club is a local non-profit news organization, it seems a bit disingenuous to delegitimize them by calling them a "blog with a pretty transparent agenda". The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little to do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND local news sources. Your last…

> The Block Club is a local non-profit news organization, it seems a bit disingenuous to delegitimize them by calling them a "blog with a pretty transparent agenda".

We can agree to disagree I guess. They're not exactly subtle about their biases, but then again, neither are mainstream media outlets these days.

> The fact that the mayor is black and lesbian has little to do with the disproportionate enforcement of crimes and bringing up her race/sexual orientation is a poor way of denying the legitimacy of the claims made by Chance AND local news sources.

Is this satire? Of course the mayor's identities have nothing to do with the claim--as I said, I put that in there to head off predictable identitarian rebuttals. The mayor's identity would only "invalidate" Chance's claims if you believed that the racial, etc identity of the claimant is paramount and the content of the claims is unimportant--this would be textbook bigotry so I'm sure this wasn't where you were going. No, Chance's claim is invalid because it's an anecdote and one which is incorrect at that (per local news sources as well as the mayor, anyway).

> Your last point seems to be the only real argument made but the majority of arrests have more to do with petty and drug related offenses as opposed to firearms according to the U.S. DoJ.

I don't see what that has to do with Chicago's covid experience.

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#285

Post by starkd »

r00fus wrote: post #274
alfalfasprout wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that, in general, you're going to have biased training data (with a bias that's difficult to measure) and so inherently policing recommendations will be biased. This is particularly problematic when it comes to arrests for crimes that are inherently 'selective' in their enforcement. Eg; drug-related crimes, public intoxication, loitering, trespassing. But the fact is... violent (fatal and nonfatal) crimes do…

From studies I’ve read it is noted that most of those calls could be handled by a social worker or other non-violent responder. The problem is the police budget has dwarfed and subsumed all non-violent requests as well.

Not sure You can always separate out violent from non-violent events. The police are expected to deal with a whole community in a holistic way.

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#286

Post by kelnos »

tootie wrote: post #185
riazrizvi wrote: post #63

> Used by police across the United States for almost a decade, predictive policing relies on algorithms to interpret police records, analyzing arrest or parole data to send officers to target chronic offenders, or identifying places where crime may occur. The promise of the software made in a sales pitch or on the website, is a far cry from the reality of what such software delivers. That's fine when it's business, t…

NYC has used analytics since 1993 and it's widely credited as contributing to the incredible drop in crime. I don't buy for a second that ending these kind of programs will help anything. Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of policing. We need effective and aggressive law enforcement as much as ever. We need to root out the worst abuse…

> NYC has used analytics since 1993 and it's widely credited as contributing to the incredible drop in crime.

I see the "NYC did X in the 90s and it caused crime to decrease" thing pretty often, but from what I've read, the real reasons for crime reduction in NYC aren't well understood, and when compared with crime reduction on the national level, NYC isn't really all that special; crime was dropping at similar rates throughout the country (and the world, even). So I'm not convinced that a NYC-centric examination of policy is at all representative. Not to mention that NYC itself is not a representative place, so what works in NYC may have no connection to what works elsewhere.

> Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of policing.

That's not the issue. The issue is that police are being sent to places, and because the computer told them to expect crime, they are primed to find crime, even if it's stuff they wouldn't bother with under normal circumstances. The simple act of saying "this neighborhood is a hot spot" makes it a hot spot, regardless of whether or not it actually is.

Put another way: the computer sends the police to places where there probably are some problems, but much fewer than police are primed to expect, so they end up creating problems in addition to any they solve. They get this "warzone" mentality where they feel like they're going into an "us vs. them" situation, where anyone on the street is assumed to possibly be a criminal. That's a recipe for unnecessary violence.

> We need effective and aggressive law enforcement as much as ever.

Effective, yes. We severely lack this in many places and need to work hard to fix this. Aggressive, no. That's why we're in the position we're in: aggressive assholes on a power trip who just happen to also be racist and think they're above the law.

> ...and show them that bad behavior will be punished severely.

That attitude suggests that you aren't really interested in making society better, just that you want to punish people for doing the wrong thing. But I suppose this shouldn't surprise me; based on incarceration rates and the state of prisons in the US, it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in prevention and rehabilitation, just "sticking it to those bad people".

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#287

Post by kriro »

I think there's a big difference in using it to predict who will commit a crime (a big nono imo) vs. where a crime will be committed. For example allocating patrols by likelyhood of breakins seems acceptable to me and might even free up resources for more important tasks. Same for mundane stuff like more patrol cars/checks for areas with more potential speeding violations/car accidents due to reckless driving etc.

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#288

Post by pdabbadabba »

dorgo wrote: post #279
riazrizvi wrote: post #63

> Used by police across the United States for almost a decade, predictive policing relies on algorithms to interpret police records, analyzing arrest or parole data to send officers to target chronic offenders, or identifying places where crime may occur. The promise of the software made in a sales pitch or on the website, is a far cry from the reality of what such software delivers. That's fine when it's business, t…

>because software becomes a black box. Is the brain of a detective not a black box? >But here we are talking about people's lives, far stricter processes should be in place Yes. And I want these stricter processes to protect me from software as well as from humans. Why discriminate between software and humans?

It's not perfect, but at least a detective can be deposed.

Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first

#290

Post by fpgaminer »

I think many commenters here fail to understand the real world consequences these racist algorithms have had. Go watch the ethics section of Lesson 6 in the Fast AI course (https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=6); it covers many ethical topics, predictive policing being one of them. It's amazing that ethics aren't mandatory in computer science education. Should have learned our lesson 80 years ago when IBM happily computerized mass genocide.
Post reply on HN