So we were low-key moving toward minority report?
Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
521–530 of 643 posts
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#522Earlier 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…
While I acknowledge this (especially your last observation regarding the shameful state of U.S. prisons), and laugh at the ignorance of the claim that E.E. street gangs not having had easy access to firearms (they very much had, especially post-Yugoslav Wars), I still think that less policing has the potential to improve things.
Harsh policing would not change culture, even if it was done fairly, in the interest of community welfare. But U.S. policing is far from fair: U.S. police instill fear, rather than respect in the public, even in many moderately well-off areas that are free of street gangs. Legal and regulated prostitution, a definitive end to the drug war, would allow us to significantly defund the police, and pour those into efforts that could actually help. Moreover, this would decimate the revenue streams of many street gangs, which immediately reduces their "coolness factor".
There is some concern that most of the money freed up by this could end up poured into efforts that have a track record of not working. Alas, I think this is fairly likely, but it's no big loss: currently, all of that same money is being poured into different efforts that still definitely do not work. And if we get lucky, a fraction of the money may actually go to efforts that actually have a positive impact on cultural problems.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
One starting observation I'd venture is those countries (and Canada) base their policing on Peelian principles, which establish a basis of policing and the relationship with the public. The US police culture had different roots. Edit: for reference, the list of principles that were issued to each new police officer in London from 1829 onward. 1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and dis…
The problem is that these principles work great in a homogeneous society where everyone has some kind of stake in the societal outcome. If you take people with a particular skin color and enslave them and otherwise systematically discriminate against them to varying degrees over the course of 400 years then these principles break down. It is going to take a long, long time -- probably multiple generations -- for Amer…
The reality is that US police kill all races at shockingly high rates. Black people are killed at a higher rate, but they are a minority of those killed. The problem of the US police system is excessive use of force against all races, compounded by racism.
Take the UK for example. The UK also has a history of importing slaves, it also has minorities living in poor neighborhoods, it has a similar degree of income inequality as the US, but the rate at which UK police kill civilians is orders of magnitude lower. The UK has as many police killings in a quarter century as the US has in a month, despite having a fifth of the population.
The US police system’s approach seems to be to fight fire with fire, not prevent the fires in the first place. Hence the call to defund the police and invest in prevention. But I think defunding is only part, the police need to be retrained to prevent and deescalate, not to respond to all resistance with deadly force.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Throwing police at the problem of gang violence hasn't solved it. It hasn't made the neighborhoods safer. That is not true. We have solid data from New York during the Giuliani era and more recently Camden, NJ. Whether or not we agree with how they accomplished that is another matter. For example in New York a massive increase in arrests for nonviolent crime and much more proactively policing in order to check for…
Some of the reduction on crime may have come at the cost of racially biased stop and frisk. This data shows 9 out of 10 people stopped were innocent. It also heavily showed that black and latino people were stopped much more frequently. https://www.nyclu.org/en/Stop-and-Frisk-data I am glad that stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional. https://civilrights.org/edfund/resource/nypds-infamous-stop-...
How stop and frisk was used in the Guiliani era was a lot different than the Bloomberg era. The practice went to court early on and was found constitutional. During Bloomberg’s stint it was expanded dramatically and that’s when it went back to court and was declared unlawful.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#525Looking 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…
IDK about the others but maybe we don’t bring up Minority Report because that system actually worked for the most time. It took a major conspiracy by the chief of police himself to make it frame Tom Cruise’s character. Other than that, murder was basically nonexistent and people were happy.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you agree at some point this country was systemically racist? Surely you would agree during slavery it was? I'm going to assume you agree, so then can you explain when systemic racism ended? And what caused it to end? Can you also help me understand how you are so sure that the negative impact to Black people while this country was systematically racist does not still hurt people today?
The logic of your argument seems to be: "There was slavery, so there was systemic racism." Am I right? Then you extruded that argument into: "Because there was slavery, there is also systemic racism today." This is quite a leap, especially considering that slavery was ended on a particular date due to a civil war. Since then, several settlements has been made with racism (systemic or otherwise), some of the most impo…
No I'm asking for you to tell me when systemic racism ended in this country because the crux of your argument is that it has ended and the effects of it historically don't linger today. Can you explain the fact the net worth of a typical white family is $171,000 and the typical net worth of a Black family is $17,150? Are Black people in this country inherently predisposed to making less money or are there systemic reasons for that?
It's odd you continue to focus on crime statistics, something I haven't mentioned at all, as a way to push back on the narrative of systemic racism. For anyone who is Black or a person of color, we know first hand systemic racism is much more than that.
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#527Earlier 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…
At least in Russia law enforcement and organized crime are fully integrated. People join police instead of gangs if the want to get into extortion and racket. When clans clash, you can see rooms full of money in a colonel’s house that would put a drug lord to shame. And prison culture might be getting less popular, but it still has a strong presence.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#528Living in a country with an inefficient police department is not fun. Ask anyone from you know who came from Cuba, Brazil, Honduras, Venezuela, or South Africa. Living in a country with an extremely efficient police department is not fun either. See: China and Singapore. There is a balance. Banning soulless social credit-tier stuff like this is a good step in the right direction. Another problem with stuff like "pred…
> Living in a country with an extremely efficient police department is not fun either. See: China and Singapore.
I lived in Singapore it was one of the best times of my life. But you know what? I never even saw the police there. I can't even tell you how their uniform or cars look like. But also I didn't smoke pot or vandalised; I respected the rules that that community set up.
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#529Earlier 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…
> There's a worrying trend in the conversation these days that has shifted from "there's a serious problem with racism in how police go about their job" to "we need less police". The conversations aren't about less police, they're about defunding the police and putting that money to better use. If the police choose to reduce their numbers in order to afford riot gear, tear gas guns, armored personnel carriers, warrio…
> The conversations aren't about less police, they're about defunding the police
cutting police budget = less police
Re: Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In statistics there is a thing called bias, which can cause a lot of problems if not correctly handled. An example of bias is historically most black people default on their loans. ML is deployed to predict if someone might default on a loan. Because ML does not understand bias, it sees the person is black and denies them for that, purely off of the fact that black people historically have defaulted more on their loa…
> Bias is when ML sees something not relevant as a pattern and uses it as a feature to determine the future.
This alone does not fit the definition of statistical bias. Statistics is not capable of proving causation. So a completely trivial fact or feature can be a great estimator nonetheless. Of course if the system changes then you have a problem (with or without a causal model).
If historic data is warped by police of course, then you're using a biased sample and will indeed get a biased estimate that way. But if you correctly use randomly sampled data and a method that has been mathematically-proven to be unbiased, then if your model says to deny loans based on race, you would likely make fewer bad loans more by following it versus ignoring this information.