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Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

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Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#51

Post by giraffe_lady »

PaulHoule wrote: post #34
londons_explore wrote: post #5

Next logical step: Police departments park disused cars overnight in rich neighbourhoods so the stats don't show they are 'targeting' poor areas disproportionately...

If I was worried about people speeding in my neighborhood I would find some Crown Vic or other common vehicle used as a police car that doesn't pass inspection (maybe even a blown engine) and leave it parked by my house. If it is a real used police car all the better.

Police mostly stopped enforcing traffic laws where I live in 2020. You can run red lights in front of them and they won't bother.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#52

Post by dr_petes »

verteu wrote: post #39
dr_petes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that those areas have more crime because they have a disproportionate amount of cops to observe crime.

They have a much higher murder rate too. Murder is not caused by "cops observing crime."

Murder is just one crime. Take for example Wage Theft. Which accounts for as much as $50 billion a year ^1 (more than robberies).

And yet, you won’t see cops arresting a manager at a store for stealing from their workers.

[1](https://inthesetimes.com/article/wage-theft-union-labor-bide...)

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#53

Post by policepost »

verteu wrote: post #45
policepost wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because low income white neighborhoods did not receive the same treatment. At least that's the inference I drew.

You inferred wrong. From the paper: "we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates." [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020

Interestingly, you are correct, but you omitted the rest of the paragraph where they articulate why, emphasizing that across booth residential and commercial neighborhoods there is a striking difference in policing.

> We note that we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates for two reasons. First, if New York City residents of different races face different levels of police deployments, that disparate impact is itself important; it can also bias algorithms trained on downstream policing data irrespective of the true causal mechanism. Second, controlling for other factors in policing data can be difficult to interpret, introducing concerns about omitted variable bias and model misspecification which make it difficult to identify which factor is truly the “cause” of higher police deployments. For the sake of transparency and simplicity, therefore, we report results by stratifying each variable separately, noting that these disparities are themselves important but that multiple causal mechanisms may underlie them.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#54

Post by zo1 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #44
TeeMassive wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is it because of their race or is it coincidental with the higher crime rate?

No. The big question is whether we want cops to be "randomly" stopping and frisking any people regardless of race/location. The idea that armed people are allowed to just accost people on the street to conduct cursory searches seems incompatible with basic liberties. It is a stone's throw from the "papers please" interaction that so many Americans loath. (I was about to say uniformed, but cops don't always wear unifo…

No. The big question is whether we want to live in a society that requires the police to randomly stop and frisk people in order to stop crime. There is crime, I don't think anyone can dispute that.

Honestly, I personally have no problem with criminal-looking individuals being stopped and frisked in high-crime areas. And I say this as someone that's been profiled as a white person in a black country, and held at gunpoint by assault-rifle wielding police.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#55

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

nati0n wrote: post #4

The paper itself is quite interesting, and also contains the maps illustrating where NYPD is deployed more often. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593013.3594020

A lot of the hot spots are just police stations. Most stations don't have enough reserved spaces and cars end up scattered around the neighborhood. That isn't an indicator of ongoing policing activity.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#56

Post by steele »

TeeMassive wrote: post #37
dmoy wrote: post #8

Remember that the federal government is still of the opinion that NYPD is disproportionately targeting black people with its stop and frisk policy, today . That is, almost a decade after it was ruled unconstitutional in federal court. (Edit: "it" being stop & frisk as a whole, not just the targeting of minorities)

The big question is it because of their race or is it coincidental with the higher crime rate?

Who is reporting detecting and reporting crime that dictates those rates? Why are some areas of towns so racially segregated?

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#57

Post by dgrin91 »

dr_petes wrote: post #52
verteu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a much higher murder rate too. Murder is not caused by "cops observing crime."

Murder is just one crime. Take for example Wage Theft. Which accounts for as much as $50 billion a year ^1 (more than robberies). And yet, you won’t see cops arresting a manager at a store for stealing from their workers. [1]( https://inthesetimes.com/article/wage-theft-union-labor-bide... )

Wage theft is also not the type of crime that is caught by police on patrol. Having more cops in a neighborhood wont stop wage theft. Wage theft requires reports of misconduct and an investigation.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#58

Post by banannaise »

protonbob wrote: post #17
dr_petes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that those areas have more crime because they have a disproportionate amount of cops to observe crime.

And that would be a poor argument. Common sense would say otherwise.

Common sense is a poor argument.

"Crime" has multiple elements: the law, the act, the observation, and the prosecution.

We disproportionately outlaw things that poor people do. ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.") We disproportionately observe poor people, as shown by this article. We disproportionately convict poor people, who can't afford bail or good legal representation.

Yet people always want to jump to that other element. The disproportionate crime rates can't be due to all those other things, it must be due to them committing more crimes.

The only thing we can say for sure is that poor people commit different crimes. They use different drugs and in different settings; they are more likely to commit theft than embezzlement; they are more likely to cause property damage than violate building codes. The rest is made murky by an unfair legal system and a societal tendency to treat crimes of poverty as individual in nature and crimes of wealth as systemic failures.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#59

Post by ceejayoz »

jwestbury wrote: post #31
tjpnz wrote: post #7

>Areas with more police vehicle images included wealthy commercial zones and low-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents. Does this really surprise anyone? Lower income areas have more crime. I don't understand why race is a factor here.

Because even after controlling for income, American police still disproportionately mistreat Black people. I'm struggling to find the data right now, but I believe the source was Phillip Atiba Goff. The tl;dr is that Black people are treated violently by police at a rate of several times that of white people, even once you control for socioeconomic status.

One of the best illustrations of this is a fascinating study about police stops and sunset time. They were able to demonstrate that when the sun is up (i.e. the driver can be seen), black drivers are more likely to be pulled over, but when the sun goes down, it equalizes. As a bonus, they controlled for other factors by looking at these stats around when daylight savings switches.

https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/black-driv...

> First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day — around 7 p.m. — when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.

> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables — the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#60

Post by chongli »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #27
protonbob wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that would be a poor argument. Common sense would say otherwise.

It's important to note that common sense itself is a bias. It's a bias towards what we already think. Don't mistake that as trying to say that for "we should avoid priors" - that's not possible. What would it take for you to soften (not move) your priors on the common sense that "police aren't co-creators in crime through the act of observation"?

police aren't co-creators in crime

Police aren’t co-creators of crime, they’re co-creators of crime statistics. Crimes that go unreported, with no arrest made, are invisible to crime statistics. When the police arrest someone and charge them with a crime, it counts as both an arrest and a reported crime.

So even if crime were uniformly distributed across the city, if police spent the majority of their time in one neighbourhood they’d make more arrests there and so it follows that the statistics would show higher crime in that neighbourhood.

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