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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

#501

Post by roamerz »

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.…

I’m trying to figure out how PP is the problem. You send police to a high crime area and they incarcerate people that break the law. Let’s instead send the police to a zero crime area. The cops have an easy shift and arrest no one. That high crime area now has businesses and such moving out because they can’t afford the losses. They take the jobs with them. Now people in the area are unemployed and soon become homeless. Now you have a problem that is spiraling out of control. You think the people that are now left in that area are happy because their lives went from poor to shit? How is that helping?

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

#502

Post by adamsea »

briandear wrote: post #370
r00fus wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy - when someone wants a well-check or reports mental health or substance abuse or maybe even rape, that should go to someone other than police. Showing up with a gun to some events is guaranteed to make things worse.

A rape investigation should be done by a social worker? Are they trained criminal investigators? Is a social worker familiar with the rules of criminal evidence? The job of the police is to investigate crimes and present evidence to the DA. For welfare checks or mental illness incidents, then of course a social worker or analogue could be a better choice. For investigating criminal acts, that’s specifically what poli…

The baby’s already been tossed my friend.

The police actually have a terrible record when it comes to handling the crime of rape.

They downplay it, deprioritize it, etc. Read about the massive backlog of rape kits.

Literally - rape crimes that are reported to the police, and that they deprioritize or ignore.

https://www.rainn.org/articles/addressing-rape-kit-backlog

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

#503

Post by adamsea »

banads wrote: post #336
Misdicorl wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horseshit. Police response to violent incidents in 'problematic' neighborhoods is already extremely slow. The threat of gang violence is not mitigated by police response. The threat of gang violence is mitigated by providing much better options for people who would otherwise join gangs. Police presence is immaterial to the lack of gangs in affluent neighborhoods.

What is horseshit? Nothing in your response is contrary to anything the person said that you're responding to

Yes it is man.

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

#504

Post by socalnate1 »

tpmx wrote: post #384
strbean wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And somehow in this small sleepy town, the same 2 blocks have consistently been the "you can always get heroine/meth/crack here" blocks for about 30 years, and they can't predict the need for a squad car parked there.

So, a) an incompetent or politically stymied police force b) predictive policing from prior crime data works

This was a very clever comment, and I don't think most folks understood it.

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

#506

Post by dralley »

ryankemper wrote: post #357
vmception wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swing and a miss, overpolicing has nothing to do with violent crime. It has to do with nonviolent infractions that marginalize people to begin with. Being actually caught with illicit substances , or caught for the unpaid ticket. These things are evenly distributed across society, but when overly targeting minorities it further marginalizes them. Exhibit A) YOU might not be able to relate to people that routinely hav…

> These things are evenly distributed across society This is an unproven assertion. You should provide evidence of it, because on its face it is a completely ludicrous claim. Rates of illicit drug activity, violent crime, etc are _not_ evenly distributed in society. Not even close. > Exhibit B) Silicon Valley openly brags about microdosing acid to perform at work at their half million $ jobs. Overpolicing would ensna…

>Quite simply, the reason people that microdose are not getting thrown in jail is because they're not doing the other things that would lead to them getting discovered, i.e. engaging in crime or driving a car with significant (meaning, more than a person can safely swallow to avoid arrest) quantities of lsd.

Counterargument, it's well documented and studied that policies like "stop and frisk" and to some degree traffic enforcement disproportionately target minorities. Most of the people in SV "microdosing on LSD" are not.

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

#507

Post by ACow_Adonis »

lostlogin wrote: post #449
NickNameNick wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on that? I'm really curious about what the differences were.

The guy was quite down on his time in Australia, and the aggressive policing he was expected to do. He contrasted that with his time in the UK and (particularly) in NZ the role seemed to allow more tolerance and leeway and was described by him as 'progressive'. The NZ police aim seemed to be to get compliance without police charges or fines by engaging in a less combative manner. He described quite harsh measures tak…

Aside from a notable exception in the Australian Capital, it's worth noting that in Australia you have the Federal Police (AFP) which is responsible for policing federal offences, but the states are responsible for enactment and policing of most things that Americans would consider "everyday policing".

The main issue this represents in your story is that it's not correct for the most part to present an "Australian experience" of policing, as the laws and enforcement are state level matters (of which there are ~8). A level i think we're missing might be city-based law enforcement? Each state has its own laws, population, and police force. while it's true we're not going to have as much variation as say France vs Sierra Leone, policing in QLD/ACT/NSW/NT/VIC is liable to be fundamentally different. furthermore, we've got federal gun control, and in a federal welfare system that would almost look like a universal income to many American contexts (indeed, I recall one discussion I had recently with an online friend about where the UBI rates being discussed as impossible were effectively the ones our welfare system currently provides), notwithstanding the difference in practice between remote indigenous/rural/urban/ migrant law enforcement.

All this can make it somewhat frustrating drawing analogies between the American experience and the local one (and I'm not just talking about Americans drawing lessons from ours, I also mean Australians being influenced by portrayals of American law enforcement and issues in popular media/culture). I imagine that's just as frustrating as pretending that law enforcement is the same across a nation as diverse as America.

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

#508

Post by gotostatement »

Mirioron wrote: post #493
snowwrestler wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The biggest reason why people join gangs is because they're there. It's a cultural problem above all else. People like blaming it on poverty and lack of education funding and all kinds of other things. Yet compare former Soviet countries to the US. All of them spend less on education than the US does. Their populations are likely poorer than even the poor in the US. Their quality of life is lower, however, gangs aren…

> The biggest reason why people join gangs is because they're there. It's a cultural problem above all else.

I'm going to challenge you to find a citation to back up this belief before you continue going through life believing it, because it's a dangerous one, rooted in ignorance, that causes racism.

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

#509

Post by bhntr3 »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #232
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.…

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…

I don't know enough to advocate a solution in the "defund the police" debate and I agree that I don't have enough personal experience from my aeron chair (which, as you know, I was actually born in.)

But, excluding the less police argument, how is the prevalence of violent crime in low income African American neighborhoods a justification for predictive policing? Given the risk of propagating bias and a history of racist policing messing up the data, wouldn't it just be better to keep humans in charge? They've been disappointing recently but I still think they have potential.

Maybe it would be helpful if I put better links here. I didn't expect this comment to get so many responses and my link was a bit flippant. This research probably does a better job of explaining the position than I do.

Here's a Stanford survey from 2016 in Oakland that showed that African Americans are ~4.5x as likely to be stopped as whites despite representing a smaller percentage of the population, that they are 4x as likely to be handcuffed in a stop, 4x as likely to be searched in a stop and 2.5x as likely to be arrested in a stop (which is, as mentioned, 4.5x as likely to happen.): https://news.stanford.edu/2016/06/15/stanford-big-data-study...

I got interested in racist inference due to this Harvard paper that showed that google search ads were much more likely to suggest arrest records for African American names than white names: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.6822.pdf

I accepted that implicit bias is intrinsic and difficult to weed out when I heard about studies showing that resumes with African American names received much lower response rates than white names: https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...

I remember reading somewhere that this effect even persisted with African American studies professors selecting grad students. I can't find that paper but this HBS article describes the phenomenon and discusses how the response rate effect is even present when the company claims to promote diversity within the application: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

I also advocate for learned epistemic helplessness (https://scienceforsustainability.org/wiki/Epistemic_Learned_...) even if I don't always practice it well. I'm only claiming to have knowledge in the small area of predicting bad behavior using machine learning. It's probably best to find a person of color with personal experience and a better knowledge of the literature for anything else. Of course, you already know that. I hope you're doing well!

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

#510

Post by metrokoi »

jjeaff wrote: post #489
metrokoi wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Recognizing the fact isn't racist (although one should qualify those facts with all the many factors not taken into account, like how much more likely a white person is to get away with the same crime). But acting on that data is definitely racist. It is punishing innocent people because other people that have a similar skin color have committed crimes.

>Recognizing the fact isn't racist

Apparently it is, because all the other replies are gobsmacked that I even mentioned this. We're not discussing observations and observable facts anymore, we are creating a world where a certain side is right no matter what and straight statistics are false in they do not support that side. It doesn't even matter that I stated that treating individuals based on their race is immoral, there is no complexity or further discussion, even if that complexity and further discussion could actually be beneficial to solving problems the black community is facing.

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