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In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

washingtonpost.com

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Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#11

Post by ben_w »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #8
theonlybutlet wrote: post #6

Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?

If the townsfolk (who pressure the politicians who pressure the chief who pressure the officers) would prefer that to you hassling them over those kinds of transgressions then yes. Weed, fireworks on the 4th of July, teenagers fishing without licenses, there's all manner of things that are illegal at the state level yet locally accepted when done tastefully that the cops should not be ticketing people for because the…

Do you want to eat vegetables and exercise right now vs. do you want to snack and chill right now?

Do you want to be healthy and strong in 15 years, or obese in 15 years?

Are your answers to the first compatible with your answers to the second? Even if they are, do you recognise that most people demonstrably don’t? That’s just an analogy, of course — most people want cops to be tough on criminals and recon at least one law (that their community chooses to keep) is dumb and they should be free to ignore it.

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#12

Post by daenz »

I think their heart is in the right place (officers should have direct and transparent reputations to people). But in order to implement this "correctly", you need to go one step further into a dangerous territory: the ratings that an officer receives should be weighted by the rating of the person who rated them. Absolute scumbags shouldn't be able to hurt reputations in quite the same way as upstanding people. If you have 5/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1.0. If you have a 1/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1/5.

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#14

Post by ct0 »

daenz wrote: post #12

I think their heart is in the right place (officers should have direct and transparent reputations to people). But in order to implement this "correctly", you need to go one step further into a dangerous territory: the ratings that an officer receives should be weighted by the rating of the person who rated them. Absolute scumbags shouldn't be able to hurt reputations in quite the same way as upstanding people. If yo…

The "scumbags" most likely know the cops at their best and worst. Rating a cop is relative as they provides a wide ranges of services. It's all relative.

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#15

Post by tehlike »

jandrese wrote: post #5
cato_the_elder wrote: post #2

It's Black Mirror already.

I'm not sure I agree. If they are rating these public servants on their service to the public that would be within the scope of a job review. Or think of it as one of those "how was your service today" questionnaires you get sometimes. This isn't about policing someone's personal life. But on the other hand, Yelp reviews are already problematic and extending them to civil servants probably doesn't help the situation.

someone above commented: "Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?"

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#16

Post by overrun11 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #10
daenz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "the townsfolk" who would give the officer a rating in that situation, it's the person getting pulled over for a dangerous vehicle. "The townsfolk" very likely want dangerous cars stopped, but that likely won't be reflected in any ratings by the people pulled over for dangerous vehicles, so it's biased. It's naive to assume the thought process is "well, I was breaking the law, but the officer was professiona…

Why do you think people driving shitboxes (or any other crime) will give unfavorable ratings at a higher rate than people who get cited for other crimes? If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's constantly enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable resulting in "man, that's bullshit" reactions from the people being ticketed then it will show in the aggregate stats and…

It's not a "solved problem" because your proposed solution wouldn't even work. Officers have discretion over who to engage/pull over which makes it totally different from most customer facing roles.

If the rest of the police force is doing the right thing and not modifying their behavior to get a better score then a single officer can always perform better than average by avoiding potentially negative encounters. This doesn't even get into differences in job duties/ patrol area that can totally skew the data even if every officer plays by the rules.

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#17

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Ratings systems suffer from an 'outlier syndrome', where most ratings are from folks at the ends of the bell-curve. Even averaging such data doesn't come close to any kind of true measure.

One can imagine Police work would be subject to such effects even more strongly, as they deal often with people at their worst. It's the job after all.

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#18

Post by daenz »

ct0 wrote: post #14
daenz wrote: post #12

I think their heart is in the right place (officers should have direct and transparent reputations to people). But in order to implement this "correctly", you need to go one step further into a dangerous territory: the ratings that an officer receives should be weighted by the rating of the person who rated them. Absolute scumbags shouldn't be able to hurt reputations in quite the same way as upstanding people. If yo…

The "scumbags" most likely know the cops at their best and worst. Rating a cop is relative as they provides a wide ranges of services. It's all relative.

Which is why their rating is still counted, but its biased by what society thinks of the person doing the rating. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of better here. If ratings are something people want to do, you have to bias ratings with additional context, otherwise there is no mechanism to help separate ratings from honest and dishonest people.

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#19

Post by dragonwriter »

linkingday wrote: post #13
cato_the_elder wrote: post #2

It's Black Mirror already.

no, a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia. and we already live in it. giving citizens a way to speak up about potential abuses is in no way harmful

> a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia

“State“ or “government“ is just whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular (usually geographically bounded) context.

So, apparently, dystopia is universal.

Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

#20

Post by giraffe_lady »

daenz wrote: post #12

I think their heart is in the right place (officers should have direct and transparent reputations to people). But in order to implement this "correctly", you need to go one step further into a dangerous territory: the ratings that an officer receives should be weighted by the rating of the person who rated them. Absolute scumbags shouldn't be able to hurt reputations in quite the same way as upstanding people. If yo…

Other way around imo. How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people."

I don't think the system described in the article is good either, but this isn't why. A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. "Upstanding" is as good a euphemism for it as any I guess but we should eliminate that not formalize it.

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