Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API • Hacker News Board

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#181

Post by falcrist » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

fredophile wrote: post #175

falcrist wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. The reason it's strange is because if the government is a democracy (representative or direct), there should already be a mechanism for collective bargaining. The fact that this is often insufficient strikes me as a pretty strong indictment of our systems of government.

I believe your argument is that in a democracy, public sector employees can vote for politicians who will represent their interests and this is equivalent to collective bargaining. Please let me know if I've misunderstood you because I don't want to argue against a straw man. Let's consider teachers as an example. The top search result in Google tells me that 2% of the population of the US are teachers. With collecti…

It's not just direct voting. There are plenty of other ways to influence culture to sway other voters.

And given the limited number of candidates and the frequency with which our elections come down to a few percent, they certainly wouldn't have to sway 48% of the population to influence how elected representatives treat them.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#182

Post by ronanyeah » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

aahhahahaaa wrote: post #67

Incredibly telling that the police still pull this type of thing despite how laser-focused everyone is on their behavior right now. It's almost as if they've been institutionalized to think they're better than everyone else. Defund the police and use the money for mental health and human services. Local police service data should be randomly audited by the feds and independent third parties.

Open crime data should be mandatory for every police force, let citizens do the auditing.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#183

Post by fingerlocks » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

lazyasciiart wrote: post #148

thaumasiotes wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see that all the time. You can read articles in major newspapers about the "rubber rooms" where teachers who can't be fired -- but who certainly also can't be put in front of a class -- are required to spend their workdays.

If police unions would do that to the officers who kill or beat prisoners, many people would be satisfied.

I would not be satisfied if my tax dollars paid the salary of police officers that killed and beat people, rubber room or otherwise.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#184

Post by fredophile » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #157

fredophile wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any sources to back this up? My understanding is that non-unionized groups like charter schools do not outperform public schools. Many charter schools appear to outperform but once you account for the fact that they can choose their students, removing all of the low performers and putting them in the public system, they no longer show a benefit.

This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or u…

Thank you for the link. I agree that this is a very politicized issue and that can make finding objective info tricky.

I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However, I don't believe these differences were statistically significant. While there probably are some states where charter schools outperform they seem to only perform the same as public schools in South Carolina. To me this doesn't add much weight to the argument that unions lead to worse teaching outcomes. I will also say that I'm not an expert, my cursory reading of one report doesn't change that fact, and I'm definitely open to changing my opinion on this in the future but I don't have the time or interest to read all of the reports in the link.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#185

Post by darawk » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:01 PM UTC

gbrown wrote: post #176

darawk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or u…

Can you point to anything specific that addresses the objection raised? Nobody contests that brick and mortar charter schools have higher performance - the issues come down to the resources they receive and the fact that they have unique abilities to shape their admission.

It's in the studies, but the gist is that they try to compare 'matched students'. So, they try to remove the selection effects by comparing comaprable pupils in each school type. I'm sure it's possible to quibble with exactly how they do this, of course.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#186

Post by twic » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

anonAndOn wrote: post #180

thaumasiotes wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see that all the time. You can read articles in major newspapers about the "rubber rooms" where teachers who can't be fired -- but who certainly also can't be put in front of a class -- are required to spend their workdays.

In at least one major school district, the beginning the year shuffle for matching the unfilled classrooms with the unwanted staffing is called the "Dance of the Lemons". Those that don't get an assignment are still clocking in every day at HQ & assigned useless tasks like creating lesson plans (that nobody will ever use). Wouldn't that be great if violent cops were assigned to create Public Safety materials all day…

Years ago, the police wronged me, and i raised a successful complaint. I got an apologetic phone call from an officer who, i got the impression, had the job of sitting in a police station making apologetic phone calls. He spent about forty seconds apologising, then went on an umprompted several-minute rant about how the police knew who all the criminals were, and if the government would just give them guns (this was in the UK), they could end crime tomorrow. I think it's simply connecting the dots to assume he was stuck on phone duty because he was a colossal liability to have walking around in public.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#187

Post by mtgp1000 » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

zorpner wrote: post #146

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passive-voice is the most appropriate for the vast majority of news stories.

Passive-voice is frequently nonfactual. Cars do not run people over (unless they are rolling, and not being driven); guns do not shoot people (unless they experience a mechanical malfunction). This phrasing is _designed_ to mislead, to divert blame from the responsible parties, and has no place in the vast majority of news stories.

It's purpose is to presume innocence, a tenet which seems to be rapidly fading from society.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#188

Post by jakelazaroff » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #144

sangnoir wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently encountered a Reddit comment that might clear your confusion, paraphrased thusly: "We never see the any teachers union consistently come out in defense of pedophiles amongst their members"

We see that all the time. You can read articles in major newspapers about the "rubber rooms" where teachers who can't be fired -- but who certainly also can't be put in front of a class -- are required to spend their workdays.

Why can’t they be fired? AFAIK, tenure generally does not protect teachers who do grossly illegal acts, such as assaulting a student.

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#189

Post by fredophile » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

falcrist wrote: post #181

fredophile wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe your argument is that in a democracy, public sector employees can vote for politicians who will represent their interests and this is equivalent to collective bargaining. Please let me know if I've misunderstood you because I don't want to argue against a straw man. Let's consider teachers as an example. The top search result in Google tells me that 2% of the population of the US are teachers. With collecti…

It's not just direct voting. There are plenty of other ways to influence culture to sway other voters. And given the limited number of candidates and the frequency with which our elections come down to a few percent, they certainly wouldn't have to sway 48% of the population to influence how elected representatives treat them.

Can you give me an example, other than voting, of how democracy is collective bargaining?

You're not considering wedge issues? What if the candidate that would improve your working conditions also has a stance on an issue that you are strongly opposed to? For example, do you vote for the candidate who will give you a small raise but also disagrees with you on abortion? What if all of the candidates feel like siding with you would alienate more people than your voting bloc would bring?

Re: Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API

#190

Post by darawk » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:04 PM UTC

fredophile wrote: post #184

darawk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or u…

Thank you for the link. I agree that this is a very politicized issue and that can make finding objective info tricky. I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However,…

So, it's certainly not the case that charters are uniformly better in every case. There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire purpose). But what that does is it allows them the freedom to experiment with new styles of education, without filtering it through the bureaucracy of the union. In effect, that means there's going to be a lot more variation in outcomes amongst charters, particularly at first. Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools.

On the surface it's not obvious that this is attributable to the union. But if you dig in a little bit to what actually differentiates charter schools, the main thing is the absence of the teacher's union. At least, to my understanding, from operating in the space a little bit, and from people I know that operate more deeply in it than I did.