In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by lukev » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

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…

This is the premise of Nosedive, Black Mirror S3E1.

Spoiler: it does... not end well.

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

#42

Post by yCombLinks » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

not2b wrote: post #28

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…

Who is a scumbag? Some police officers decide that some people are reputable citizens and others are scumbags based on prejudice, and arguments like yours are a great way to dismiss any criticism of them.

I'm heavily critical of the police, and they deserve a lot of criticism. But there are lot's of people (half my family) that are just scum. Algorithmically it may be hard to fairly weight, but on a personal level it's not hard to put people on a pretty consistent scum spectrum. If the people lower on the spectrum are critical of a certain cop, I can't weight it highly for reputation evaluation of that cop. The same for any information said scumbag provides about others.

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

#43

Post by cortesoft » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #20

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 g…

> 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 absolutely agree, but the point was not that it doesn’t matter how cops treat “scumbags”, but that you can’t trust some people’s word on what they experienced. I think it is certain that there exist both cops who lie and non-cops who lie, so we need some way to filter out the signal from the noise.

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

#44

Post by thfuran » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

throwaway787544 wrote: post #27

daenz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But this is also a premature optimization and potentially YAGNI. Yes, you want down-weighting because of one potential complication. But you haven't even built and operated this system yet, so you don't know if this workaround you're applying will even be necessary or will end up causing larger issues. One example of this is "voter fraud". It is possible to commit voter fraud, and so certain parties want strong ident…

>YAGNI

But not the ordinary YAGNI. You're Absolutely going to need some way of dealing with low-quality input.

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

#45

Post by throwntoday » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

nxm wrote: post #36

derac wrote: post #3

Gave me a ticket 1/5

This^. The rating system puts the public in danger as a result if the right punishment (proper fine) is not given.

Fines are stupid to begin with. If they are too low nobody will care and the sheer number of people breaking the law makes enforcement pointless. If they are too high, they can send the average person into financial ruin, and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble. Even a ticket of a couple hundred dollars insane to the average American.

In either case, without any proper oversight, this money just ends up going towards the funding of police departments, who are then incentivized to give out more tickets. Ultimately they act as tax collectors rather than protection for those living in their jurisdiction. Our people used to run bad cops out of town, now we can't even be bothered to fire them.

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

#46

Post by mellavora » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

ameister14 wrote: post #31

dragonwriter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> "Whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular context" Are you sure that's the definition of "state" or "government?" I don't think it is.

I agree that the definition is problematic, though commonly accepted. The argument for goes back to Hobbes, and thus is in one sense foundational to western democracies.

But it runs into problems when you look at the other aspect of western democracies, which is that power resides in the people and is only conditional granted to authority figures (i.e the "king" rules by consent of the governed, not by divine right). Thus the people have the ultimate right to legitimate violence.

Also remembering that Hobbes was arguing for a king, not an elected representative...

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

#47

Post by rootusrootus » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

peanut_worm wrote: post #23

I can think of so many issues with this it could fill a book. How about just holding police accountable if they commit a crime?

Easier said than done. Aside from some headline incidents, cops do things regularly that would be considered a crime if done by anyone else. It's part of the job. It's also the fundamental premise for qualified immunity. It's largely why we have so much trouble holding obvious bad cops accountable.

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

#48

Post by sureglymop » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #32

not2b wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is a scumbag? Some police officers decide that some people are reputable citizens and others are scumbags based on prejudice, and arguments like yours are a great way to dismiss any criticism of them.

The very same argument could be made about rating police officers. Also, we shouldn't pretend that scumbags don't exist, they do, as both citizens and police. If you're going to cast doubt on the existence of scumbags in citizens, but not police, you're showing your own prejudice.

The actual problem is that police are above the law. What I mean by that is, unlike citizens they are in a position where they might break a law without any repercussions or abuse their position of power.

The only real way to deal with this would be to police the police in a realistic manner. Bodycam and location data of their every move would need to be available for that. Currently, police can simply turn these off.

Yes, there are scumbags in both ordinary citizens and in police but one of these groups of scumbags already gets "policed". (Disclaimer: I do think that this idea is not the right way to deal with this problem.)

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

#49

Post by cortesoft » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

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…

Unless you are the person pulled over, you aren’t going to know that a particular cop pulled over a dangerous driver. How would a citizen who wants bad drivers to be pulled over be able to rate the cop highly? Which cop would they rate? How would they know how many dangerous drivers there would be on the road without the cops?

Imagine the town has absolute perfect police, who only every pull over dangerous people, only arrest criminals, and never harass or bother innocent people.

What would these perfect cops score as their ratings? Probably really low, because the only people who they interact with are going to be criminals and dangerous people, who will obviously hate the cops.

Of course, cops aren’t perfect, but my point is that you can’t use a system like this to determine that.

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

#50

Post by robonerd » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

not2b wrote: post #28

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…

Who is a scumbag? Some police officers decide that some people are reputable citizens and others are scumbags based on prejudice, and arguments like yours are a great way to dismiss any criticism of them.

> Who is a scumbag?

There are marginal cases for sure, but let's not pretend that true scumbags don't exist just because the demarcation line is subjective; that's like pretending there's no such thing as a ripe banana because the green fades gradually into yellow with no clear line between them. Look beyond the marginal cases and it becomes clear that the difference really does exist. There are people in this country with numerous DUIs and domestic violence convictions, obviously such people are scumbags.