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…
In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
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Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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).…
Boxers have something of a monopoly on legitimate violence in the context of a boxing ring, but that doesn't make them a government.
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#63I 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…
We don't have some infinite-regress rating system to qualify people to vote. Or to voice their opinions verbally. Or, really, for nearly anything. And for good reason - there is no objective point from which to judge.
You accept that humans are flawed, and that rating systems created by them reflect human judgement.
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#64This is clever and I agree with the comments regarding their heart being in the right place but this is a flawed approach. The customer service experience of criminals isn't the right thing to optimize and probably has nothing to do with outcomes if not inversely correlated with crime reduction. The very idea that we can view and treat police officers like we do customer service people at say the mall I would argue i…
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
some police may act as if they're above the law, but that's projection, not foundational.
edit: interesting, seems to have hit a tribal trigger of some sort, but can't tell if it's the "police bad" or "police good" contingents getting their feathers ruffled.
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#66Earlier 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.
> 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 countr…
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Exactly, if I get pulled over and issued a ticket for having a burnt out brake light, I'm not likely to actively thank and highly approve of the officer who just issued me a $100+ dollar ticket. The officer was well within the law to do so, and other citizens are safer after I get the light fixed, but emotionally I'm sure as heck going to be upset and want a little bit of passive-aggressive revenge. "Why did you pull me over and give me a ticket when I see much more dangerous cars on the road. Shouldn't you be focusing on bigger crimes?"
Maybe I'd leave a good review if the officer let me off with a warning, but officers would realize this and that would incentivize leniency. Not necessarily bad, but that could have unintended consequences.
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#68Hmmm 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…
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#69Earlier 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.
> Who is a scumbag? Easy question. 99% of those arrested are scumbags. This is speaking as someone who has been to jail and met the population that gets arrested. They are the worst, and their opinion in regard to rating cops should be largely ignored.
Re: In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers
#70I 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…
Is there a word or concept (in English, or in any language) for an ostensibly straightforward and common sense solution to a real problem, whose implementation entails creating a solution which is far larger in scale than the original problem ever was?
I mean something distinct from concepts like perverse incentives (the cobra effect, for example). I mean something like what you're talking about above. But a more illustrative, completely made-up example might be a law that was meant to make people pay their traffic tickets. Imagine that, through a series of steps which each seemed reasonable at the time, implementing this law ended up creating a global, keyhole satellite surveillance network over the entire surface of the country, with massive bunkers of computers monitoring for traffic micro-violations (".02 kmh over the speed limit, that'll be 2 cents") in real time, then notifying people with a tracking bracelet that everyone was legally required to wear, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to enforce the law we all agreed made sense at the time. And, to ensure the tickets could be delivered in a timely manner, the banks and communications companies had to support a bunch of government technology and oversight, and car companies had to build some tech into their automobiles to shut the off if you didn't pay.
It becomes dystopian really quickly, but I don't think it has to.
This silly example is just meant to illustrate what I mean: is there a name for decisions whose implementation seems straightforward, but which, step by step, create a much bigger apparatus than you originally intended?
I don't think this is entirely theoretical: there are plenty of real world examples, but I won't name them because they would probably distract from the question. Even in software development, you probably run into a situation where some product person says "can't we show this property over here?" and you say "sure, but we'd have to spend a year rewriting our entire architecture first".