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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

#71

Post by yCombLinks »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #51
yCombLinks wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I could argue that police come from the same population as anyone else, therefore a significant portion of police will also be scum

I certainly agree with that, no argument here.

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

#72

Post by daenz »

ryandrake wrote: post #57
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.

This encourages an undesirable outcome: Police now know that Group A's ratings will be more heavily weighted and Group B's ratings will not be heavily weighted. They will then be incentivized to treat Group A with kid gloves and mistreat Group B, regardless of what caused the police interaction. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider what the police might use as a proxy/heuristic to figure out what gr…

I think you meant they would mistreat Group A more, if they are more heavily weighted, but I do see your point.

I agree that this is a danger. Fortunately, with additional data available, data scientists will be able to show any biases more clearly. If it happens with a rating system, it was happening before the rating system, except now there is the benefit of more data.

Similarly, you could also show if people from Group A (the more weighted group) also rate the police lower, despite similar treatment as those of Group B. The data will cut both ways.

EDIT>> Nvm, you were using "weighted" to mean "the weight of their vote", not "the weight applied to their vote."

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

#73

Post by tifik »

garyfirestorm wrote: post #64
djyaz1200 wrote: post #59

This 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…

the customer service experience of citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries - to whom the police serve!

> citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries

I was always curious about how true this statement actually is. I understand that the state runs primarily on money from taxes, but what part of that is actually coming from local citizens pockets? I imagine there are places where most money comes from tourism or goods exports.

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

#74

Post by clairity »

throwntoday wrote: post #45
nxm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "...and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble."

this is why tickets should be income-contingent, if not wealth-contingent (much trickier and more invasive, so unlikely).

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

#75

Post by vorpalhex »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #66
robonerd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Speaking of domestic violence, want to post some statistics on the amount of cops that are domestic abusers? Or the ones caught drunk behind the wheel and get let off.

Why not post the amount of cats that are orange or scarecrows in overalls? What does the rate of cops being DV cases have to do with this comment?

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

#76

Post by kaibee »

clairity wrote: post #65
sureglymop wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

no, police are not above the law. they're only "special" in that they enforce the law, which requires exceptional privileges and responsibilities ordinary citizens don't have. but they're otherwise fully under the same legal jurisdiction as the rest of us. 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 c…

de facto vs de jure

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

#77

Post by karmelapple »

I've always found it interesting that when I'm pulled over for a traffic violation, a police officer can use their discretion on whether to punish me.

I've been pulled over a few times for speeding, and a couple times I simply got a warning, and other times I got a ticket and had to pay a fine.

If I committed a crime, why should an officer have that leeway? They caught me, I should have to pay the consequences... right?

I've wondered if part of the reason for that discretion is a tacit admission that the fines / consequences for these tickets are simply too high.

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

#78

Post by throwaway894345 »

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.

The inverse is also true--some people decide whether or not police are reputable or scumbags based on prejudice. Thankfully in either case, reputation systems (whether a formal ratings system or an informal social reputation) can tolerate outlier reviews and consequently "argument's like the parent's" are not a particularly good way to dismiss criticism of someone (if someone is designated "a scumbag", it's on the preponderance of their reviews, not just those of one or two prejudice people).

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

#79

Post by vorpalhex »

tifik wrote: post #73
garyfirestorm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the customer service experience of citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries - to whom the police serve!

> citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries I was always curious about how true this statement actually is. I understand that the state runs primarily on money from taxes, but what part of that is actually coming from local citizens pockets? I imagine there are places where most money comes from tourism or goods exports.

You don't typically pay your money on a tour to the state. You pay it to a hotel, an amusement park, etc who then pays it to the state instead of employees.

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

#80

Post by scythe »

karaterobot wrote: post #70
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…

Because it's related to your comment, this is a good a place to ask something I've been wondering for a long time: 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 pervers…

>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?

You're thinking of the phrase "nuking a housefly", or some similar metaphors that fit the pattern "[large weapon] a [small animal]"

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