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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

#51

Post by netizen-936824 »

yCombLinks wrote: post #42
not2b wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#52

Post by daenz »

sureglymop wrote: post #48
daenz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very same argument could be made about rating police officers. Also, we shouldn't pretend that scumbags don't exist, they do, as both citizens and police. If you're going to cast doubt on the existence of scumbags in citizens, but not police, you're showing your own prejudice.

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…

You make a good point. I believe the idea with a rating system of police is that you tie the departments funding to the average rating of your officers. So while officers can abuse their power, if there is a reliable signal of this (reflected by their rating), they get canned to raise the overall rating of the department.

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

#53

Post by ruff7uf6rh »

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.

This criticism itself is a distraction, who is a scumbag is a different problem than whether or not scumbag feedback being weighted equally to less problematic peers is detrimental to the purpose of the system.

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

#54

Post by AlexandrB »

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 leverage to extract special treatment (similar as what happens with tipping). Finally, there's some number of people who will give "genuine" ratings, but even these are often bimodal (5-star or 1-star).

Applying the same system to police will probably change which group does what, but won't change the outcome: the ratings will be gamed and largely useless. Arguably it's even worse because of how politicized the subject of law enforcement has become.

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.

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

#55

Post by robonerd »

whatshisface wrote: post #25
theonlybutlet wrote: post #6

Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?

The police chief doesn't have to exclusively use the ratings to decide promotions, they can take other factors (like what kinds of duty the ratings were acquired on) into account.

In principle, yes. In practice, bosses get lazy and defer to the easiest metrics.

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

#56

Post by Sebb767 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #10
daenz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "the townsfolk" who would give the officer a rating in that situation, it's the person getting pulled over for a dangerous vehicle. "The townsfolk" very likely want dangerous cars stopped, but that likely won't be reflected in any ratings by the people pulled over for dangerous vehicles, so it's biased. It's naive to assume the thought process is "well, I was breaking the law, but the officer was professiona…

Why do you think people driving shitboxes (or any other crime) will give unfavorable ratings at a higher rate than people who get cited for other crimes? If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's constantly enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable resulting in "man, that's bullshit" reactions from the people being ticketed then it will show in the aggregate stats and…

> If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable

For most laws, the person breaking it will be the one that deem enforcement unreasonable. Someone speeding say the speed limit is unreasonably low. Someone driving a shitbox will think car regulations are unnecessary. Someone smoking weed will think drug laws are terrible. The problem is that these peoples are the ones that will give the rating and they won't go after the community consensus.

> Literally every trade where customers rate performance has had to grapple with this. It's a solved problem.

The problem is that police interactions are in nearly every case due to a bad situation. The "best case" is that you need to report a crime, but the police will need to enforce a law and the subject will usually not like this.

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

#57

Post by ryandrake »

daenz wrote: post #18
ct0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "scumbags" most likely know the cops at their best and worst. Rating a cop is relative as they provides a wide ranges of services. It's all relative.

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 group a suspect is in.

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

#58

Post by i_like_apis »

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.

> Who is a scumbag?

Easy question. 99% of those arrested are scumbags.

This is speaking as someone who has been to jail and met the population that gets arrested. They are the worst, and their opinion in regard to rating cops should be largely ignored.

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

#59

Post by djyaz1200 »

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 is causing issues between community and police. If you're ever talking to a police officer you're obligated to follow their lawful commands, and if you have any issue with them the forum to litigate that is court not with the police or through something like a net promoter score. If anything the experience of the people not interacting with the police aka the broader community IS the thing to optimize for. Maybe mail out surveys and ask people where the police are doing well and where they could be more helpful.

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

#60

Post by matthewmacleod »

rayiner wrote: post #30
giraffe_lady wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other way around imo. How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people." I don't think the system described in the article is good either, but this isn't why. A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. "Upstanding" is as g…

> How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people." Why? > A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. And what are those groups?

Why?

It’s kind like human rights - the majority of people who are at risk of having them infringed are unpleasant or unsympathetic characters.

I’d argue a cliché “upstanding law-abiding citizen” type doesn’t generally have that much to fear from a police interaction. They are generally being dealt with on a presumption of good faith, and have at least some access to leverage and ability to push back against unfair treatment. Someone who’s already been identified as a “scumbag” doesn’t, and that is why their treatment is more illuminating.

And what are those groups?

There are many of them and they vary by region. Police very observably interact differently with richer versus poorer groups, for example, or with groups from different ethnic backgrounds.

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