Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by tootie » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #210

tootie wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think your sentiment is probably in the right place, but the last thing we need are "aggressive law enforcement" officers.

I mean appropriately aggressive. There's still plenty of horribly dangerous people threatening citizens. It's part of the reason police in the US are so primed for violence.

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

#312

Post by tux1968 » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:44 PM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #240

TallGuyShort wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If crime being caught by a drive-by patrol is a significant way in which crime is being caught, to me that screams "victimless crimes". I break victimless laws all the time, sometimes with my police officer friends and neighbors present, sometimes on private property miles from any public roads. I never seem to get busted for it. So if 10-block patrols of "troubled areas" really saw an increase in enforcement action,…

Exactly. Vice or maybe Vox did a short with an ex-cop who mentioned this concept. He said they made a lot of arrests of black men carrying illegal switch blades. But said that white people carried those illegal blades just as often. Including many police officers that he worked with. But since they mostly patrolled in black neighborhoods, they of course made many more arrests and citations for carrying an illegal bla…

There is an argument to be made that carrying a knife should not be a crime for anyone, and that we all have a right to carry a knife to protect ourselves or even use a tool.

But lets accept for a moment that reducing the number of knives on the street reduces violence and protects innocent people. If you accept that premise, then you have to say it's beneficial to society that the police remove as many knives as possible: whenever someone gets arrested for a knife violation it's a good thing, regardless of their skin colour.

And given that we have limited enforcement resources, we should focus most in those areas with the most knife crime victims. So while i accept everything you relayed in your post, the proper conclusion would change quite a bit if there are many more victims of knife crime in the black neighbourhoods... I do not know if that is the case, and i'm not implying the answer is more likely one way or the other.

But if in fact more people are getting stabbed or robbed at knife point in black neighbourhoods and you accept that knife laws are good in general, then it's good that such laws are more strictly enforced in that area, to help protect all the innocent people in that area who might fall victim.

And this principle really is colorblind. For instance many people speed in their cars everywhere, but we should more heavily enforce speed limits near high traffic and pedestrian areas and locations where accidents keep happening.

Now, maybe the rate of knife crime is worse in white neighbourhoods, in which case it really is a miscarriage of justice that more black men are getting charged for illegal blades. But I don't think you can say one way or the other without knowing and considering that statistic.

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

#313

Post by tootie » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:44 PM UTC

coffeemaniac wrote: post #213

tootie wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Crime has decreased everywhere since then (not just NYC) while the US prison population has increased 500% over the past 40 years. > Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of policing. Thanks for pointing out very clearly what you believe to be the purpose of policing. For a lot of cops as well, brutality is the goal. What we're seeing rig…

Crime dropped faster and more consistently in NYC than almost anywhere else in the US. Plenty of big cities have been nearly immune to the national trend while NYC has done better and better.

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

#314

Post by kelnos » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:44 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #147

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…

Predictive policing does nothing more than sending policing resources where crime is more likely based on statistical models. It does not racially discriminate and it is not racist. It does not harm anyone. I feel that this is posturing and shooting the messenger. If crime is statistically higher in "black neighbourhoods" the issue will not be solved by pretending it isn't. If the technology does not work then of cou…

> It does not racially discriminate and it is not racist. It does not harm anyone.

False. I agree that the software itself is not racist, but the decisions it makes are only as good as the data you feed it. If you feed it racist data, then you will get racist decisions from it. And given that policing has had racial biases for centuries, all we have is racist data.

And the more you act on its racist decisions, the more racist feedback it will have to act on, giving you more racist decisions in the future.

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

#315

Post by godelski » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

lobotryas wrote: post #281

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.

Often we use stories to draw parallels. If you watch a movie or read a book and think "that's not a precise depiction of the issue!" I don't think anyone is going to disagree with you. I think you are failing to see similarities and are focusing on the differences. The differences are there for entertainment. I mean... come on... we don't even believe that humans have psychic abilities/magic. But that doesn't mean that it can't be a compelling and worthwhile story. Even Gattaca, which is much more scientifically reasonable, has many shortfalls and exaggerates things to tell a better story.

There's numbers between 0% and 100%. I'm not claiming Minority Report is 100% reality (that's ludicrous!), but that doesn't mean it is 0%.

Take your trolling elsewhere.

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

#316

Post by gweinberg » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #152

tomohawk wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the answer is for pedophiles. Hopefully it is not this: https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-wit... The point being, some sort of predictive model is always used to evaluate sentencing and release. Is 5 years enough, or will that pedophile attack more kids when they get out? How about 10 years? Gee, they don't seem to be attacking children in prison, maybe we should release them earl…

What percent of a population will act is not a good gauge of the percent chance of an individual acting.

Unless you have special relevant information about the individual, the fraction of the group to which the individual belongs which will act in a certain way is the probability that the indivdual will act in that way.

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

#317

Post by kelnos » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #299

tomnipotent wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does not racially discriminate and it is not racist. It does not harm anyone. This is a dangerously irresponsible statement. If police are disproportionally spending time in specific neighborhoods, and arrests are disproportionally made from that population vs. actual crimes committed, this will be captured and reinforced in the predictions. So yes, it's racists and it harms people.

So you're saying that more police presence is harming people. How? If there's no crime there are no arrests or reports after all... Your reply is rather aggressive for not apparent reason. As I said this is highly political in the middle of the current hysteria.

> So you're saying that more police presence is harming people. How?

If the police were trained well, then I might agree with you. But they're not. They're trained to expect every encounter to result in an attempt on their lives. They're trained to escalate instead of de-escalate, meaning that a run-of-the-mill interaction is more likely to result in violence than it needs to be.

Labeling what's going on now as "the current hysteria" is painfully dismissive of the real harm that police are doing to people.

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

#318

Post by mytailorisrich » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #310

mytailorisrich wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that more police presence is harming people. How? If there's no crime there are no arrests or reports after all... Your reply is rather aggressive for not apparent reason. As I said this is highly political in the middle of the current hysteria.

> So you're saying that more police presence is harming people. How? Ask the disproportionate number of Black men in prison. Ask white rapist Brock Turner why a white judge wanted to let off "because he's a good boy", or the Central Park Five or the Georgetown Jacket Three that spent decades in prison because white cops and prosecutors assumed their guilt based on the color of their skin. If my posts sounds aggressiv…

You moved from police presence to sending innocents to prison... That's quite a step.

Predictive policing is nothing more than police presence. If police arrests innocents and the justice system sends them to prison that's quite another issue. On the whole I suspect that the number of innocents sent to prison is rather low.

There's hysteria alright on 'racial issues' at the moment.

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

#319

Post by lostlogin » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #306

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…

If we want to stop neighborhood gang violence in the long term, we need to work on why people join gangs, and what they are fighting over. We can't do that with police, who generally don't come into the situation until after it's too late and things have gone wrong. But if most of our money is going to the police, then what resources are available to do the longer-term work on gangs and neighborhoods? In software dev…

Talking with police is interesting. I talked policing with a police officer who had worked in New Zealand, the UK and Australia. These are countries that are relatively close in culture and the differences in policing described by the officer were striking. A lot of this was in relation to what the police role was and how other services cooperated (or didn’t). It would be great to have a description of system differences from an officer who had worked in more systems.

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

#320

Post by snowwrestler » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #212

godelski wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant specifically arresting people before they committed a crime. There is a fine line between that and putting someone under watch, but I think Minority Report was pointing out that this line might as well not exist. Personally, I think putting someone under watch before they have committed a crime or there is reasonable suspicion that the person is about to commit a crime is unconstitutional. I do not think stat…

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.

The reality is that the police can pull you over at any time for no reason at all, and you are still required to follow their orders.

There is no remedy available in real-time. The law says that you must always follow police instructions. So if the police pull you over for no reason, and handcuff you on the side of the road, you must submit to the handcuffing. If they demand to search your car, you must submit to that. It is only later that you can move to have evidence dismissed, or file a complaint.

I know this goes counter to how we [1] think the law works. But this is how things work in reality. If an officer acts illegally during a traffic stop, and you physically resist it (e.g. grab them to keep them out of your car after refusing a search), you have committed at least one crime and possibly several. Now you can really be arrested, or if the officer is afraid for their life, shot dead. Even though there was nothing behind the initial pull-over.

[1] Edit to add:

By "we" I mean people to whom the police usually show deference and respect; a group to which I belong, and with which I'm assuming there's a big overlap with HN readership. BTW this deference is part of what is covered by the term "privilege."

There is certainly another group of people who have direct experience with getting pulled over for no reason. Consider the stories told by the former police chief of Detroit:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/11/floyd-kill...

> When I was chief, a white DPD officer pulled me over one night. He approached my unmarked vehicle and without looking at me, asked for my license and registration. Wanting to see how far this would go, I said, "Yes officer." At some point, he recognized who he had stopped and immediately apologized. My question to him was, “Why did you stop me?” He said, "I thought it was a stolen car." The officer was reprimanded for his actions.