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

#111

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

bostonsre wrote: post #98

0des wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of a traffic stop is seldom due to traffic infractions. Traffic stops are an access vector, or as police call it, a point of contact.

Are there any numbers to back that up? I'm sure there are some bad apples out there that make up excuses because they think someone looks suspicious tho. But it also seems like there are a huge number of bad drivers out there that do dangerous things and having traffic laws that are sometimes enforced seems like it has to curtail some of that behavior.

Just talk to any cop. If they are honest, they'll tell you this very thing. In fewer degrees than it takes to get to Kevin Bacon, I was witness to an investigation where one individual was thrown the book to convince them to work off the charges being filed by rolling up. A traffic stop is precisely how they made first contact with people up the chain. It's like criminal investigation 101. So much so, it is part of every cop drama

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

#112

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #54

These rating systems are a generally poor representation of reality and don't solve the problem they're trying to address. With Uber/Lyft/DoorDash ratings, people one might consider "woke" will almost always give a 5 star rating unless something goes horribly wrong (i.e. an actual crime is committed) because they understand that the worker's livelihood depends on their rating. Other people will use the rating as leve…

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by bostonsre » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

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!

I think their jobs are to serve AND protect, not just serve. If police officers optimize on not making anyone unhappy, it seems like the protection part won't be done as effectively (e.g. someone who drives dangerously but never gets a ticket won't have much incentive to drive more carefully so other drivers on the road are then put at risk).

Like almost everything, there needs to be some balance. I'm not sure bad ratings due to "I was breaking the law and he gave me a ticket instead of a warning" would be best for society. But if the officer was cordial and courteous in that same interaction and they received good feedback, that would probably be a good reinforcement loop. A complete totalitarian police state wouldn't be good for society but going to the other end of the spectrum and having lax policing would also be bad for society, I think we need to try to strive for the least bad balance, which seems like it is incredibly hard to do and then of course no one will be completely happy and lots of people will complain. They have a very tough usually thankless job.

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

#114

Post by ajsnigrutin » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:56 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…

There's also a lot of bias here, since most people don't have a lot of contact with police, unless they did some bad stuff.

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

#115

Post by keybored » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

The word is Vernuftendlösunggrosseproblemenmacht.

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

#116

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

I had an incident involving someone forcibly entering my home that required police assistance. The two responding officers would have absolutely received a 5/5 rating from me. The next day the same asshat decided in his short time in my home that I was woefully short of canned vegetables, and graciously delivered a can of peas through my front window. This required a second visit from the police, and the two responding officers that morning would have received 1/5 rating from their rudeness and absolute lack of caring accusing me of "maybe smoking a little something and being just a bit paranoid". Then accused my house of being a grow house because I had a couple of Kino lamps from doing product photography. Absolute joke of a uniform and prime examples of why police have such low appreciation with the citizens.

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

#117

Post by nineplay » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

Based on some recent experiences I've been thinking that police forces need something that is almost like a JIRA taskboard. Incidence type, officer name, data, upload picture/videos etc.

It wouldn't just be for police positive/negative interaction. Any crime could be entered, any criminal behavior.

We have an incident in our school district with an individual who has shouted at children and parents and on a few occasions has tried to enter the school. Obviously bad stuff, obviously particularly concerning given recent events.

During a school board meeting it came out that the police only knew of 3 incidents out of probably dozens. There's not a clear path from seeing the behavior, reporting it to the school, reporting it to the police, and being able to put all this information in one place.

It's probably a pipe dream to think that someday we could have a dashboard where everyone could monitor these issues, but it might address a lot of problems.

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

#118

Post by keybored » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:59 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…

Surely this is some Black Mirror joke or a rhetorical question which is meant to (by inference) dismiss the original idea of rating cops as too intrusive.

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

#119

Post by throwaway894345 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

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

That doesn't contradict the parent's claim. Moreover, they're not drawn from the same population, there is a filtering mechanism that reasonably skews for police to be above-average even if we might want it to be better.

Moreover, I'm also skeptical of the simplistic idea that our policing problem derives from "too many immoral officers". It seems more likely that it's an emergent property of the incentives and constraints we put on police brass (including the police union system).

Further, if we're going to reform police, it would be nice if we focused on policies which weren't predictably counter-effective. Rather than the de-policing policies which have increased homicides by 9k/year (relative to the time period before the de-policing movement kicked off in earnest with the largest increases in the "communities of color" in whose name the de-policing initiative campaigned) for no appreciable difference in unjustified police killings, it would be nice if we instead pursued one or more of: more police training, weakened/abolished police unions, restructured internal-affairs departments, tightened background checks, mandated periodic psyche evals, etc.

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

#120

Post by robonerd » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #54

These rating systems are a generally poor representation of reality and don't solve the problem they're trying to address. With Uber/Lyft/DoorDash ratings, people one might consider "woke" will almost always give a 5 star rating unless something goes horribly wrong (i.e. an actual crime is committed) because they understand that the worker's livelihood depends on their rating. Other people will use the rating as leve…

> I don't understand why this broken model of crowdsourcing ratings is being applied over and over again to different aspects of society. It's as if the managers and MBAs of the world have given up even trying to manage people and want to outsource the task to a howling mob of strangers.

I think it's a manifestation of McNamara's Fallacy. Soliciting ratings is just one method of quantifying things, putting problems in terms of numbers so we can do math with those numbers and generally feel like we're being objective and scientific about the matter. It liberates people from having to get into the weeds of making subjective qualitative judgements.

There are obvious problems with it; McNamara's fallacy was being willfully blind to qualitative considerations which turned out to be very important to the war. Furthermore, by picking and choosing what you want to measure, and which metrics to value or ignore, you often end up with a process that although ostensibly objective, is effectively subjective.