Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

news.cornell.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 115 posts

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#61

Post by sandworm101 »

zo1 wrote: post #54
sandworm101 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gunp…

And if stop-and-frisk is extended to vehicles? Would America tolerate cops randomly pulling over cars that looked "criminal"? Or we could take it a step further and just randomly search homes.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#62

Post by steele »

Work like this is critical because powerful unions subvert operating procedures and individual liberty across the country without consequence or even serious inquiry. Who watches the watchmen? Well, the watchmen are actively investigating themselves and will get back to you, pinky promise.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#63

Post by ceejayoz »

dgrin91 wrote: post #57
dr_petes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the point, though. That "these are where police arrest a lot of people" isn't necessarily "these are where the most crimes or the most criminal damage happen".

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#64

Post by policepost »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #55
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.

They talk about that in the paper, noting not police departments but also prisons (eg, Rikers). But the data is collected on a per census block level, so even though there exists some outlier blocks, the overall trends are still quite visible.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#65

Post by verteu »

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.

I'd be interested to see the source.

I found several studies by Phillip Atiba Goff that did NOT control for SES. (Easy to find a statistically significant result when you ignore confounding variables!) But none that did.

[1] https://sci-hub.ee/10.1177/1948550616633505 [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lawso... [3] https://sci-hub.ee/10.1007/s10940-020-09471-9

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#66

Post by Volundr »

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.

Also more likely to be wrongfully convicted [1] and receive longer sentences [2].

[1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/report-black-people-7-5-ti...

[2] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#67

Post by policepost »

verteu wrote: post #43
markhnthoraway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends how you read that sentence. Race doesn't matter if "low-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents" is simply stating that all low income neighborhoods have higher proportions of Black and Latino residents. Although it's kind of relevant if all downstream bias in arrests etc, say, goes away when you control for income. But I read it as "of all low income neighborhoods, ones…

You were misled. 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

Misled implies a degree of intent, the wording is ambiguous but I don't assume ill intent by the author, especially when they later spend a paragraph explaining why they did not slice by covariates.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#68

Post by policepost »

steele wrote: post #62

Work like this is critical because powerful unions subvert operating procedures and individual liberty across the country without consequence or even serious inquiry. Who watches the watchmen? Well, the watchmen are actively investigating themselves and will get back to you, pinky promise.

Probably worth noting powerful police unions. A police union is a very different thing than a workers union.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#69

Post by judge2020 »

kevincox wrote: post #46
judge2020 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Circa 2010 GasBuddy[0] was a pretty novel app for smartphones that allowed crowd-sourcing gas prices around you. I imagine OPIS[1] (now owned by News Corp), who acquired GasBuddy, or one of the other Price Reporting Agencies, is providing Google with this gas price information. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GasBuddy 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_Price_Information_Service

I'd be surprised if it was crowd sourced. Even in fairly rural areas the prices of all stations are regularly updated. Crowd sourcing things like traffic data works as even a few people driving down a road can passively report data. It seems unlikely that manually entering gas data that changes daily would be sufficient to achieve such good coverage.

You're right, i edited my comment after you viewed the page. While GasBuddy started out crowdsourced, it seems there are now price reporting agencies that log prices directly from retailers and I imagine Google pulls data from one of them.

Re: Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed

#70

Post by banannaise »

dgrin91 wrote: post #57
dr_petes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Police could absolutely patrol for wage theft. It would look somewhat different from how police patrol for other crimes, but we know where it happens and how it is committed. In fact, because wage theft can only happen in specific places and only be committed by a small subset of people, it would be much easier to prevent wage theft via patrol than almost any other crime.

Yet we treat it as a report-only crime, to be prosecuted after the fact rather than prevented by policing. It seems like that's mostly a matter of police priorities.

Post reply on HN