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Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

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Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#11

Post by squarefoot »

"This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws."

Translation: "We can't put an article online without cramming it with cookies, analytics and other annoyances that serve no other purpose than profiling users; we actually don't want to protect your data, but they caught us with the pants down and enacted laws to prevent all this, so we'd rather block access from the EU than do the right thing, that is, protecting your data by removing that junk."

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#12

Post by lupire »

RajT88 wrote: post #3

Community improvement should be the focus of policing efforts. Not maximizing penalties. Systemically, you are going to have better long term outcomes.

> Community improvement should be the focus of policing efforts.

Why drag police into this? The basic problem with policing is sending in strangers with guns to do social work. The PD isn't the only city agency.

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#14

Post by hinkley »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

This is like solving homelessness by putting spikes on benches to keep people from sleeping there: It doesn't solve the problem, it just pushes it out of your jurisdiction.

For certain classes of crime, pushing the criminals out also increases the crime rate.

I recall reading about a study on this where pushing criminals out of a 'bad neighborhood' caused the crime rate in that area to drop, but the rate in two adjacent neighborhoods went up by 60% of the drop in the 'bad' one.

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#15

Post by car_analogy »

squarefoot wrote: post #11

"This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws." Translation: "We can't put an article online without cramming it with cookies, analytics and other annoyances that serve no other purpose than profiling users; we actually don't want to protect your data, but they caught us with the pants down and enact…

> we'd rather block access from the EU than do the right thing, that is, protecting your data by removing that junk

This phrasing is misleading. It's not "protecting our data" (implying they need to take extra precautions to prevent our data, defenseless on its own, from falling into the wrong hands).

It's refraining from actively spying on us. There's no "protection" needed - if they just do nothing, that would comply with the GDPR.

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#16

Post by O__________O »

Topic reminds me of the book, A Burglar's Guide to the City:

https://www.amazon.com/Burglars-Guide-City-Geoff-Manaugh/dp/...

Which started out as a blog: https://bldgblog.com/

Unlike the book, this city appears to think the solution to all their problems is to remove the architectures causing issues, instead of trying to make city planning and management choices that enable positive behavior; successful areas don’t have abandoned building, bus stops that function as distribution point for illegal drugs, etc. Police are the last profession that should be making choices like that for a city. Using this sort of thinking, what’s next, make warrentless, no knock searches legal and require every lock uses a masterkey the police have?

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#17

Post by wizofaus »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

This is like solving homelessness by putting spikes on benches to keep people from sleeping there: It doesn't solve the problem, it just pushes it out of your jurisdiction.

Maybe, but that's assuming criminals are no more likely to opt instead for going clean if circumstances change in such a way that committing crimes becomes less rewarding than it is for homeless people to "opt" for purchasing/renting a home if circumstances change that make sleeping rough less attractive.

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#18

Post by Stevvo »

squarefoot wrote: post #11

"This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws." Translation: "We can't put an article online without cramming it with cookies, analytics and other annoyances that serve no other purpose than profiling users; we actually don't want to protect your data, but they caught us with the pants down and enact…

The headline is "Our European visitors are important to us." Clearly they are not. I most often see this on US local news sites.

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#19

Post by pacarvalho »

squarefoot wrote: post #11

"This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws." Translation: "We can't put an article online without cramming it with cookies, analytics and other annoyances that serve no other purpose than profiling users; we actually don't want to protect your data, but they caught us with the pants down and enact…

It is a tricky thing. At some point someone needs to be paid for writing the article. I can think of 3 ways to accomplish that at the moment:

1. Government subsidizes media. No cookies or profiling required. However, unclear if one government should support articles that are mostly read abroad and, of course, there are many issues with this related to equitable distribution of funds and impartiality.

2. They can run ads. However, ads tend have better ROI when well targeted which requires profiling. For instance, if I am reading an article about suits. If they know my age they can make sure to show me people around my age wearing that suit. Which makes me more likely to envision myself wearing it and thus buy it. Cookies (or similar) required.

3. A paywall where the reader pays for it directly. However, we seem to be very resistant to that idea given we were trained to use a "free" (sell your data model) internet. Nonetheless, by seeing your browsing history from your account server-side (no analytics cookies needed) they can place you in cohorts server side. So not that much more private. If anything, less private since they have your real data through your payment method.

Ensuring privacy while still getting access to free things and not bankrupting companies (especially small ones) is a hard problem.

Re: Fighting crime by checking buildings, not suspects

#20

Post by wizofaus »

hinkley wrote: post #14
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

This is like solving homelessness by putting spikes on benches to keep people from sleeping there: It doesn't solve the problem, it just pushes it out of your jurisdiction.

For certain classes of crime, pushing the criminals out also increases the crime rate. I recall reading about a study on this where pushing criminals out of a 'bad neighborhood' caused the crime rate in that area to drop, but the rate in two adjacent neighborhoods went up by 60% of the drop in the 'bad' one.

That would be an argument against any attempt to clean up crime that wasn't done at a greater-city-wide scale. And maybe that really is true - the only genuinely effective measures you can take to reduce crime have to be applied to a sufficiently wide area. I'm not sure if we have enough data points to draw that conclusion though.
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