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Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

nature.com

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Re: Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

#81

Post by scarmig »

standardUser wrote: post #31
scarmig wrote: post #18

It seems likely that police have divested from minority communities, which I agree is a genuinely racist outcome. There are complications, though. In the 90s, leadership figures in minority communities rightly called out under policing as a serious issue that hurt their communities and needed addressing. Nowadays enforcement actions, although increasing overall quality of life and decreasing violence and premature de…

When so many common, consensual and mostly-harmless activities are criminalized, especially in communities with less resources to keep things in private homes, "perfect enforcement" becomes impossible by design. Instead, law enforcement have a vast catalog of infractions and suspicions they can use to target people at their discretion. Before we can ever hope to have equitable law enforcement, we need to reform this…

What does enforcement of law look like to you? As in, how do we concretely deploy police resources and use them to improve public welfare?

Is the answer basically "officers only use force against individuals who are actively committing violence against them at that same very moment and otherwise just exist and don't engage with any particular person more or less than any other"?

Re: Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

#82

Post by aaomidi »

daenz wrote: post #55
aaomidi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police are protected more than medical professionals. Also we’re not talking about medical professionals here and mixing them into the conversation is muddying the water.

>Police are protected more than medical professionals. If that was the case, then why isn't there 250x the public outrage when a medical professional makes an error that kills someone, since they kill 250x more than police do each year[0]? And I'm not muddying the waters, so I don't appreciate the accusation of bad faith. I think the professions are comparable in nature, but there's a huge discrepancy in how they're…

Again I’m saying they’re literally afforded less protections than cops.

They do not have qualified immunity.

Re: Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

#83

Post by civilized »

w-j-w wrote: post #23
civilized wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too fancy for anyone to be confident in what it's doing or whether it reflects real patterns. 0.90 AUC doesn't mean everything you can get this model to tell you is real, especially if you are trying to tell a causal story. Now, show me a plot of your data with a trend line and I'll often be able to tell you if there's a real pattern in your data.

Are you trying to claim that the model would better understand the complicated, real world of law enforcement if it were MORE reductionist?

No, I'm not talking about how best to set up the model. I'm saying that complicated neural network models have no track record of yielding reliable insights about social phenomena. They are untested. Any insights they supposedly provide must be verified by a human analyst checking the data to see if it really looks like the model says.

This isn't a new or surprising principle, and it also applies to much simpler models. Any scientist knows that, if you fit a line to data, you better plot the data with the line before you make any big claims about what that line tells you about the world, because the data underlying that fit could look lots of completely different ways with different implications [1]. These authors did the equivalent of fitting the line and telling us all about its formula and the big implications of the formula without ever plotting it with the data.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet

Re: Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

#84

Post by civilized »

civilized wrote: post #9

So, they fit a fancy model, played with it, and claim the result says something about the real world? I have never seen a valid social science result derived by this method. This is just fancy model lovers dabbling. If the patterns they claim are real, they can be exposed with much simpler and direct methods. Let's talk after that's been done.

I want to temper the grumpiness of this comment a bit based on the productive discussion we had in the threads.

The authors developed an impressive model and got interesting results, and I appreciate the stated intent to shed light on enforcement bias patterns. However, I disagree with their claim that they have successfully done so in this paper. They have only provided an interesting prediction which needs to be verified with careful data analysis.

If increased crime in poor areas leads to decreased enforcement, we should be able to see this with well-chosen analysis, reporting and visualizations. We should be able to see examples of the claimed phenomenon happening in full context and have the opportunity to consider alternative causal explanations. If the claim still stands after this has been done, it deserves to be taken seriously. At present, the complexity of the model and the fact that Granger causality != Real causality prevent us from drawing any conclusions.

(The above does not refer to the claim about rich communities draining resources from poor communities, which seems to me like pure speculation. I can draw no logical connection between this claim and the results in the paper.)

Re: Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

#85

Post by mulmen »

civilized wrote: post #15
mulmen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those simpler and direct methods? Have they been done?

If the response to increased crime in poor areas is a 35% decrease in enforcement, as the paper claims, this will be obvious in simple plots of crime and enforcement over time in those areas. No social scientist worth their salt would just report some model-generated plots and claim it represented something about the real world. That's just hypothesis generation. Confirming the hypothesis requires direct data analysi…

> If the response to increased crime in poor areas is a 35% decrease in enforcement, as the paper claims, this will be obvious in simple plots of crime and enforcement over time in those areas.

Will it? Are you looking at reported crimes or investigated crimes? If the cops never show up do people stop calling? I’m not sure how a simple plot tells the whole story here.

Re: Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

#86

Post by [deleted] »

feet wrote: post #79
scotty79 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admit only minority people into the Police force. Problem solved. If a Policeman kills minority unlawfully then it's just minority on minority crime so nobody will care.

Found the racist Further reading (I'm not typing all of this again): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31926859#31955340

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