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

reuters.com

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

#341

Post by banads »

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…

Why is the money given to the police the only allocation you are wanting to drain for this cause?

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

#342

Post by ThrustVectoring »

bhntr3 wrote: post #184

The problem with predictive policing is in the name. Inference (ML) predicts the future from the past. If the past is racist, then inference will create a racist future. Since racism is systemic[1], especially when it comes to policing, predictive policing is actively working against an anti-racist future. There may be statistical ways to factor out systemic racism. There are two reasons I don't think that works: 1.…

There's a fundamental tension between generating equitable outcomes and using race-agnostic decision-making processes. This is true for racial policy in general, not just policing - for instance, university admissions has to choose between admitting an unfairly large number of Asians on the one hand, and penalizing Asian applicants merely for being Asian on the other.

If generating a racially fair predictive policing algorithm was merely a question of optimizing for one of these desiderata, it'd be possible in principle. You either ensure that the appropriate racial ratios pop out for the neighborhoods to patrol, or you ensure that racial information and their proxies aren't used in the algorithm. If any algorithm is unacceptable unless it does both, well, you're probably going to be disappointed.

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

#343

Post by lutorm »

metrokoi wrote: post #292
jjeaff wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For myriad of reasons, we know clearly that controlling for no other factors, crime is higher among black populations. So to extrapolate that any one person is more likely to commit a crime because they are black is the definition of racism. It is not ok to assume that someone might be more likely guilty or more likely to commit a crime based on the color of their skin. Even if you had perfect historical data. It's j…

>So to extrapolate that any one person is more likely to commit a crime because they are black is the definition of racism. But it's true, a black individual is on average more likely to commit a crime. How can recognizing an obvious fact be racism? Aren't you also racist for recognizing that crime is higher among black populations? It's racist to treat a black individual as if they have committed a crime or treat th…

You missed the "controlling for no other factors" qualifier.

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

#344

Post by banads »

jjeaff wrote: post #229
onetimeusename wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the claim when data is said to include systemic racism and bias? Is it that race data does indeed predict higher crime but that biased policing causes the crime rate to be misreported as higher because police only focus their attention on certain areas? Is it that police actually cause crime due to racist beliefs so that they must in some way entice crimes to be committed? Is it that crimes are equal between…

For myriad of reasons, we know clearly that controlling for no other factors, crime is higher among black populations. So to extrapolate that any one person is more likely to commit a crime because they are black is the definition of racism. It is not ok to assume that someone might be more likely guilty or more likely to commit a crime based on the color of their skin. Even if you had perfect historical data. It's j…

>For myriad of reasons, we know clearly that controlling for no other factors, crime is higher among black populations. So to extrapolate that any one person is more likely to commit a crime because they are black is the definition of racism.

What about controlling for poverty? That seems to be largely ignored in this discussion, even though it was a central tenent of Dr. Kings mission before he was assassinated.

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered"

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

#345

Post by dv_dt »

misja111 wrote: post #301
dv_dt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crime rates nationally dropped also during the same time - and not all areas had the same analytics. It's really not clear if the reductions were from the NYC stats or in particular "agressive" law enforcement.

From the article that OP linked to: "Since Compstat was introduced, crime rates in New York City have dropped dramatically. From 1993 to 1995, the total crime rate declined 27.44 percent across the city." National crime rates dropped as well in that period but nowhere near 27%.

Seems like national stats maybe lagged NYC a little, but from a slightly different range of 1994-2000 on this chart the drop was (eyballing) 35% for homicides.

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/police-budget-spe...

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

#346

Post by monadic2 »

SkyBelow wrote: post #321
bhntr3 wrote: post #184

The problem with predictive policing is in the name. Inference (ML) predicts the future from the past. If the past is racist, then inference will create a racist future. Since racism is systemic[1], especially when it comes to policing, predictive policing is actively working against an anti-racist future. There may be statistical ways to factor out systemic racism. There are two reasons I don't think that works: 1.…

>The problem with predictive policing is in the name. Inference (ML) predicts the future from the past. If the past is racist, then inference will create a racist future. Since racism is systemic[1], especially when it comes to policing, predictive policing is actively working against an anti-racist future. One thing that constantly annoys me is that while people are becoming well aware of how racist our legal system…

While discontent with policing has bubbled up in the form of outrage over racist policing, I don’t see any obliviousness to gender at all—I mean I saw a sign just yesterday that read “bring our black men home”. It’s just very difficult, apparently, to express the nuances of systemic bigotry as expressed through policing in even something as short as a modern speech.

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

#347

Post by squarefoot »

Am I wrong or they have completely missed the point, or perhaps are just making noise to pretend they're somehow assessing the problem? The point shouldn't be sending more cops here and less cops there but stripping racist fascist drugged psychopaths of their uniform, their badge, their weapons and their immunity - all of them and for good - then leave real cops who deserve them do their job. All it takes is one criminal cop to kill an innocent, so playing with numbers won't achieve nothing. As of today, the Police has no quality control, or its parameters are messed up to a point most of them became worse than the criminals they should fight against.

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

#348

Post by cgriswald »

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.

In both cases it doesn’t actually work. In the case of the data-backed nonsense it’s been used to justify holding people past their prison sentence. In this case it’s demonstrably worse. In the general case anything that’s “sciency” but doesn’t actually work leads to bad outcomes because people are far more likely to buy into it or at least less likely to call out obvious BS.

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

#349

Post by agilebyte »

rudolph9 wrote: post #93
agilebyte wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had access to granular data like this, wouldn't it lead to further gentrification and a further rift within a society?

How so? What is your though process on this?

Given a choice between two neighbourhoods, would I want to move to one that has grow ops or a high rate of social services checkups? Some of that data is already easily available and I know it is being used by real estate agents already. The people that can avoid these neighbourhoods will, which leaves only those that can't. Gentrification.

The neighbourhood I grew up in was heavily mixed (along social strata) which prevented these problems from arising in the first place.

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

#350

Post by tasuki »

snowwrestler wrote: post #320
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.

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 tha…

That was a good and very moving article. I don't understand though: why was the officer reprimanded for his actions?
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