Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings • Hacker News Board

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#191

Post by lovehashbrowns » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 12:39 AM UTC

fearingreprisal wrote: post #178

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #69

I wonder if any of the scientist or commenters in this thread have ever lived in a bad hood. The hoods require more and better policing, the worst offenders, who kill orders of magnitude more people are criminal gangs. You remove police - you'll get spike in homicides.

I grew up in a bad neighborhood and was the victim of violence on multiple occasions. I have what the academics call "lived experience". It wasn't any kind of weird fluke, it was exactly the kind of violence you would expect from this kind of area: Being attacked by groups of improverished youths, looking to rob and assault people for money and enjoyment. The things these privileged ACAB protesters believe are absolu…

So what is your response when it's coming from someone that did live in a bad neighborhood,like me? I grew up on the south side of Chicago, around the Back of the Yards area which was particularly bad in the 90s. I've been robbed at gun point and had to live avoiding alleys, avoid wearing certain colors of clothing, have had to grow up seeing dried blood on my walks to elementary school, etc. And I still say ACAB and support defunding the police.

In your view, these are people that don't wish to integrate themselves, and in my view, these are people that never had much of a chance to begin with. The public schools I went to were so underfunded, and I am lucky that I took a different path than the one of least resistance. A lot of the people I grew up with that joined gangs were abused as kids, had learning disabilities, grew up with violence, didn't have a proper learning environment, didn't have after-school programs to go to when they wanted to avoid violence and abuse at home, etc. I'd rather take money from police departments and funnel it to actually giving those kids a chance.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#192

Post by hatboat » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #157

alexilliamson wrote: post #97

People are boiling this down to "less crime = good". Like if a mathematician can design a deployment system such that the percentage of crimes where an arrest is made increases from 15% to 20%, how can that be a bad thing? What if every single one of those additional arrests is a Black person? Well that might require an additional look. It's possible that it's all Black people doing those crimes. It's also possible t…

Statisticians will be the best of all the disciplines at teasing out that sort of bias. If the police are going to be racially biased they don't need statisticians to help them. The addition of statisticians is only going to increase the number of people who are uncertain about the model. There are two broad paths here: (1) Statisticians predict where crimes are likely to happen for the police using data. (2) Police…

I think this is a good point, however over time I believe less and less of option (2) will be used. Option (1) will become ubiquitous, and it is important it is done well. The researchers signing the letter should be exactly the ones helping improve the models used, as they obviously care enough to consider the inherent biases and societal effects.

Just because they choose to "opt out", it doesn't mean everyone else will. It leaves the task to a smaller pool of competent people (best case), or unscrupulous people out to make a quick buck or push an agenda (worst case).

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#193

Post by graeme » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:13 AM UTC

logjammin wrote: post #170

graeme wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US actually spends a low amount of money on policing compared to the EU, where police kill fewer people. Further, the US also has a low number of police officers. https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli... ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. Th…

I think you mean Camden, NJ.

You’re right, thanks!

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#194

Post by graeme » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:23 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #186

graeme wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US actually spends a low amount of money on policing compared to the EU, where police kill fewer people. Further, the US also has a low number of police officers. https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli... ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. Th…

> The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc Police unions, poor training and qualified immunity are really serious issues - but ones that are intractable to fight for on the national stage due to political gridlock. Just breaking up the unions as they stand right now and enforcing transparent employment history for law enforcement would make worlds of…

> Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment.

Can you give an example of a country that does what you recommend? If you can’t, what evidence do you have that it is the solution?

I’m not American. My criticism above is that the movement appears to have developed a policy idea that is not used in any country with a successful policing track record.

As for your claim that individual districts can’t take action....why? Cambden did. They’re hardly perfect, but it’s an improvement. They’re a local area.

And this story shows that when they did try cutting funding, before the reforms and it didn’t solve the problem. Only a concerted reform effort did.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...

Comment above was heavily downvoted, but no one has provided a meaningful reply to the stats. The numbers are clear. Compared to places with better policing, the US has a smaller number of officers per capita, and spends less.

The US does spend much more on prisons however, which is surely a mistake. To your point on shifting focus away from punishment this is one of the first places I would look to cut money: prisons.

In the UK, police killed only 3 people in 2019. There has been surprisingly little inquiry as to how they do it. I get that US police are bad, and so spending less money to get less of them might be an improvement. But to actually solve the problem it seems that changing the police is the better answer. And this will necessarily be local because most of the important stuff in the US is local.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#195

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

devtul wrote: post #64

sudosysgen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't fix spousal abuse nor honour killing by sending police to arrest people in poor neighbourhood. You fix spousal abuse by social interventions and honour killing by targeted response combined with social interventions.

Are you saying that the visible presence of the police won't stop any type of crime, or just specifically your spousal abuse example?

In general physical presence of police helps crime in the short term, but not in the media to long term, instead it likely makes it worse. The spousal abuse example wasn't mine, but the GP's.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#196

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:26 AM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #72

sudosysgen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this is also done in my city. Except that isn't the responsibility of police, but that of the EMS service/paramedics/firefighters. If the police are doing that in your town I also think that's problematic, because many people won't call if they know the police are going to come for injuries.

> because many people won't call if they know the police are going to come for injuries. That is not what occurred in practice and there is no data to suggest this would ever be a probable outcome. At any rate people don’t have a choice on who responds if the call is to 911.

In my city if there is a 911 call for a medical emergency you will get the firefighters or the ambulance faster, and depending on the emergency might not get police at all.

In any case, if you are giving anyone defibrillators and locating them to minimize response time to cardiac incidents, it would be absurd to give it to the police.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#197

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:28 AM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #153

kingkawn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We create what we look for

Are doctors creating cancer and high cholesterol?

Doctors actually fix cancer and high cholesterol, police simply takes the criminals away but does not fix crime. It's an approach to crime about as sophisticated and effective as blood-letting and amputations - works sometimes, makes everything worse when that's all you use.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#198

Post by Uhhrrr » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:33 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #62

Uhhrrr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't get help from mathematicians, they'll try to do their own analysis with Excel spreadsheets or just use their gut instincts.

And if they can get by with Excel just as good, then they didn't need mathematicians in the first place. If not, this will make someone unhappy. And this is the whole point of boycott. The police is making mathematicians unhappy. Bad cop, no donut in any dimension.

It probably won't be as good, and the people they make unhappy will be the general populace, who will experience more crime and worse policing.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#199

Post by jkaptur » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #134

pizza wrote: post #81

The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US have starved the beast [0] so greatly that the only remaining public infrastructure that functions as it's intended to is policing. For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. I…

There is no austerity. Here is state-and-local spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to present: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-re... And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location... State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor…

The London subway shuts down at night.

Re: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings

#200

Post by austincheney » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:50 AM UTC

cvlasdkv wrote: post #169

austincheney wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defunding the police is generally unpopular where I live. My big city is growing at about 22% decade over decade and will likely surpass San Jose in population over the next 10 years. It is also the lowest density big city in the US. In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well. The fastest growing area of the city is also the least policed. This not result of negligence f…

> In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well. Do you have a source for this claim? I mean we can all claim it is intuitive but just how many police, how "well funded", what equipment, and what jurisdiction?

It’s based on participation of people in things like city council attendance, bond package votes, participation on local Facebook pages, and so forth. No, I don’t have actual numbers.