The executive summary does a far better job at articulating the situation, its problems, its negative implications, and proposed mitigations than most of us will be able to manage in an HN comment.
Note that the report suggestions are not to ban predictive approaches. I think the report recommendations are reasonable under the assumption of competence and good faith among all parties. If you don't think that the limitations the report suggests are sufficient, I think that's a reasonable sign that you're not assuming good faith and competence - which is fair, but does totally shift the argument.
If you're just assuming that the police will abuse this regardless of safe guards (that's fair), you can just make that argument up front, and cut through all the shit, and then you can get down to arguing over real conflict points.
The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith. But maybe if we decide to keep them around, these recommendations, along with better civilian oversight to ensure they're actually implemented, will mitigate the dangers of predictive policing.
>>The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith.>>
There are ~650k police officers in the US employed by ~18k agencies. Can you provide more detail on how it is that that group has shown us a lack of good faith?
You can't generalize from one incident to a large group. There are bad apples in every large group.
If you can demonstrate an unusual percentage of bad behavior, compared to other developed nations, that'd be more interesting. Either way we could talk about potential ways to improve the situation.
If a large group happens to have enough issues that it's a constant social debate, and that large group happens to be PAID to be in the group (as opposed to doing something without a reward, or being born into a condition), it's a very different kind of expectation one should be talking about.
Furthermore, if that group is one of the only groups of people supposed to enforce what a society codified as its morals and ethics, there's a strong argument to be made to have a much, much lower threshold for the sample sizes needed to view problematic acts as unacceptable.
Trying to compare countries is an interesting remark.. how about this article, which will give a response to your "bad apples" rhethoric?[0]
The article is about Canada, so I guess if we set our gold standard to the US then everywhere in the world is a dreamland. How about if we compare it to the Netherlands or Norway though? Since arguably a lot of Canadian policies, the political compass, and the culture are at the very least in-between the US and those other developed nations.
Finally, striving for improvements in a system as a proportion of how badly everyone does when the enforcement of moral and social norms is pretty rarely negotiable for the majority of a population, seems to me like we're extending the benefit of the doubt to a privileged subset of a population that hasn't proven a satisfying-enough track record to deserve such gratitude.
When bad behaviour is detected within a police force, they don’t eliminate the “bad apple” they protect them. No other “good apple” speaks up against the behaviour. Thus — in line with the metaphor - the rot affects the whole barrel.
His comparison of how errors in policing are treated compared to how plane crashes are treated is very apt. I've used this lens to look at many situations since. The lack of impartiality displayed in the face of an "officer involved" incident is glaring.
Police officers and other people in that branch of government never display the kind of serious investigative interest that a plane crash investigator applies. They never approach it with fresh eyes, hoping to uncover and fix root causes.
In IT we talk about "the 5 whys" for trying to get past superficial reasons for an incident. But you can't expect to ever see that kind of approach when everything is quickly hidden behind a "blue wall of silence."
Maybe because plane crashes don't happen as often as "officer involved incidents" unjust and just and are actually a lower hanging fruit in comparison?
And the two aren't investigated by the same body of government NTSB investigates plane crashes in the US (federally created).
In some departments there exists Civilian Review Boards [0] IMO better than an internal investigations department and delegating to a federally created agency. But do they work in reality?
Do they? (work in reality)? You sound like you want to share information, go ahead.
(And I think you misunderstood something I wrote, but I'm not sure what.
I didn't mean that the same body of government investigate both crashes and police misconduct...
I meant that very often police misconduct is investigated by groups that are adjacent to the police, not impartial.
Even if/when it is a separate group, the 'blue wall of silence' is an effect deterrent to investigation and there doesn't seem to be any interest in counter-acting this.)
> Police officers and other people in that branch of government never display the kind of serious investigative interest that a plane crash investigator applies. They never approach it with fresh eyes, hoping to uncover and fix root causes.
The point I was making is that a federally created agency conducts investigations completely different than state police departments. (Not all state police departments are funded the same and share the same information about investigations especially internal) they aren't a single entity nor should they be.
The comedian takes two very different things and combines them as one and then tells the audience how absurd his creation is as if it is reality.
And to the "blue wall of silence", from the one study I scanned [0]. I think it exists, but not in all departments as the study finds too. And the only way to combat it (just like with civilians in gang ridden communities) is to have more transparency measures (body cams, anonymous reporting systems etc) and obviously more officers/civilians need to come forward with those experiences in their department/jurisdiction.
Which is why you shouldn’t assume people are going to act in good faith. If acting in good faith was universal then we wouldn’t need any form os]f security at all. This is why you have to build systems that assume that there will be bad actors.
Stop that. One, "Letting a demonstration be judged by its most violent participants but not judging a police force by its most violent cops is the language of the oppressor."
"Bad apple? That’s a lovely name for murderer. That almost sounds nice. I’ve had a bad apple. It was tart, but it didn’t choke me out. Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. I know being a cop is hard. I know that shit’s dangerous. I know it is, okay? But some jobs can’t have bad apples."
"Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'"
====
And this is not as much a joke as it sounds -- how many times have we found out the murderers have a long list of past complaints? The problem is the system doesn't exclude the "few bad apples" because it's not a few bad apples, it's a systemic problem.
This standard is not equally applied. For police, “a few bad apples” defends the majority as “good people.” For protestors, ANY property damage is seen as invalidating the whole movement as “violent extremists and lawlessness.”
This despite police having supposedly extensive training on what is lawful and protesters being regular citizens.
> For protestors, ANY property damage is seen as invalidating the whole movement as “violent extremists and lawlessness.”
This is not a universal opinion, nor is it universal among people who think most cops aren't murderers. When you say the standard isn't equally applied, who is the person or group applying it?
Primarily, the police and the federal government, who both have the power to enforce the law or not based on their biases. The vast majority of police exhibit and act upon this bias, as shown by numerous incidents of sousveillance.
No. I do not condone violence or murder. I am curious about your criteria though. What’s the differential on “enough murders” to discount the BLM protests vs the police murders that fuel them?
Also, saying that the KKK was “democrat-controlled” makes me think you’re trolling here. It hasn’t been true since the 60s, and using “Democrat” as an adjective instead of “Democratic” is a signal that you’re just repeating Republican talking points. That’s not even delving into what the KKK’s goals or actions were about.
What do you think of Kyle Rittenhouse and the president’s support of him?
Honestly the whole movement is leaderless, aimless, and senseless.
Right off the bat making it a race issue is divisive and misleading - when the statistics show people of color are no more likely than anyone else to be a victim of police violence, when considering the number of police interactions. Blacks and latinos commit more crimes. That's the uncomfortable truth.
Then they have no serious or well thought out plan to improve things - so what do they hope to gain from protesting? Abolish the police is pure nonsense. Awareness of the issue is the best they can hope for.
Per your statement about race; look into that statistic you listed more, there are good explanations. Imagine this chain - the system is rigged in deep ways against a young man of color. He probably grows up in a broken home, a poor neighborhood, with low access to schooling or opportunity. As a result, he is driven to commit crime. So police patrol his neighborhood more, so they learn to associate his kind of people with crime, so he has more police interactions. And then that statistic lands on your news feed.
Do you think the system is more fair for all people regardless of skin color? Or that crime has little relation to poverty? Or that people of color are inherently more likely to commit crime whether by genetics or culture? Then you won’t be able to follow that chain. There are a lot of interacting systems. Not questioning as an attack, just pointing out that the logic makes lots of assumptions.
Consider the problems with our algorithm for determining recidivism rates. The data shows people of color return to crime more when released. So the algorithm assigns them higher jail time before parole, which means more time out of society and among criminals, which leads to more crime when released!
That statistic, “people of color commit more crime” is a self-fulfilling prophecy or recursion of some sort, it’s harmful unless we’re using it to determine a “why” that isn’t just “because of their skin color or culture”.
If that's true, your complaint isn't with them police at all, but with the fact that "the system is rigged in deep ways against a young man of color".
To justify these protests, you would have to make the case that it's police conduct that causes black people to commit so many more crimes.
But even in your post here, you're pointing to sentencing, not policing. (Also worth noting that this doesn't explain differentials in first offense rates at all).
I’m merely talking about one statistic the poster stated. Not protests. I also only brought up sentencing to demonstrate the point that these statistics themselves lead to policies and processes that in turn feed the statistics.
Well I hope you didn't think I was implying that black people are inherently more prone to being criminals from birth. Of course it's dominated by poverty and a lack of good options for young black men especially. The US is actually the developed country where the American dream is most dream-like. Social mobility in the US is behind almost all the other developed nations. This is a real societal problem that needs to be addressed. But all the solutions are "socialist" and deeply unpopular in the US.
However, that there's a good reason for it doesn't change the statistics. Police violence against black people seems to be a non issue by the numbers. Police violence in general is an issue, making it racial is counterproductive. The protest would be better focused on things that are real, like poverty, or poor social mobility. And instead of people just aimlessly letting off steam, it should have leadership and clear goals that can actually be implemented - then maybe there's a chance they could get congress to listen to them. Right now they're accomplishing nothing and this whole movement will fade away without any real change just like the Occupy Wall Street movement.
> Of course it's dominated by poverty and a lack of good options for young black men ...
In the United States poverty in Black communities is a consequence of systemic racism, which continues to this day.
W/the “drug war” examples further below, there’s a direct link between systemic racism and police behavior in black communities. Which admittedly cannot be blamed entirely on the police. But they certainly don’t help.
Or the response to the opioid epidemic - prevalent in white communities - as opposed to how they responded to the crack/cocaine epidemic (prevalent in black communities) in the
80s. A medical response for white people - a criminal response for black people.
There’s a great 18-minute video from Bob the Tomato, AKA Phil Vischer, which lays out the sordid history in broad detail. I like this in particular because he’s coming from an evangelical Christian background—a demographic that has 60% racial resentment, the highest in the country.
IMHO radio host Larry Elder is not a valid source to back up your claim that systemic racism in the US doesn’t exist.
Let’s be clear. There is systemic racism within law enforcement and our system of justice in the US.
It’s easy to go online and find reputable, fact-based sources verifying this; the Wikipedia article I linked to linked to some.
It’s also easy to find reputable sources online which can help explain what systemic racism is and provide historical context, for those who may be unaware.
Put simply; you are wrong, sir.
“ Institutional racism (also known as systemic racism) is a form of racism that is embedded as normal practice within society or an organization. It can lead to such issues as discrimination in criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power, and education, among other issues.”
If you watched the video, you’d see he is not the source of my claims or his claims.
You have not provided any examples of systemic racism that exist in the US today. Redlining is systemic racism, but it is illegal everywhere in the US. We are talking about whether it exists, not whether it has ever existed. Obviously there was horrible systemic racism in the past.
I’m aware that there are a lot of (frankly, garbage) articles online that claim this, but the data says otherwise. Again, Larry Elder pretty thoroughly debunks this, but if you have a counter argument, I’d love to hear it.
Police violence towards people of color and many aspects of the justice system (sentencing, etc) are examples of current day systemic racism.
I know you are smart and capable enough to find sources / evidence about those things as it’s been a huge topic of conversation across the nation for the past few months.
Any reputable newspaper. Any reputable university. The Federal Government itself.
Or simply using your eyes and ears and heart and Occam’s razor.
So, if you don’t want to see, acknowledge, or believe it, that’s on you.
I’m not going to play the game where it’s my job to convince the skeptic that the sky is blue when they say “oh but it’s night right now and it sure doesn’t look blue to me.”
If you want to share a link to a reputable source mentioned by Larry Elder I’ll take a quick look but I’m not watching a video.
Also the idea that “the horrible systemic racism in the past” is all gone now, when “the past“ was only 70 years ago (1960), is silly, when you consider how entrenched racism is in America here since day one.
Police violence towards people of color and many aspects of the justice system (sentencing, etc) are examples of current day systemic racism.
No that is not an example of systemic racism. If you look up the data separated by race, you’ll see that it’s also factually not true. It doesn’t matter how many times BLM or other politically or profit motivated entities shout their slogan, that doesn’t make it true.
It’s weird to me that you refuse to watch the video. I’m not able to identify with people who reject new information that may disrupt their worldview. I watch/listen to people I disagree with all the time. I have learned a lot from them.
I’m pointing out that the sky is blue. You are the one ignoring facts. And nobody is arguing that racism doesn’t exist. That isn’t the same thing.
"The June 4 exchange was contained in a mass of city documents released on Monday that show how the police chief, La’Ron Singletary, and other prominent Rochester officials did everything in their power to keep the troubling videos of the incident out of public view, and to prevent damaging fallout from Mr. Prude’s death.
The dozens of emails, police reports and internal reviews reveal an array of delay tactics — from citing hospital privacy laws to blaming an overworked employee’s backlog in processing videos — used in that mission.
The documents show how the police attempted to frame the narrative in the earliest hours, playing up Mr. Prude’s potential for danger and glossing over the tactics of the officers who pinned him, naked and hooded, to the ground before he stopped breathing.
In a police report on the confrontation, marking a box for “victim type,” an officer on the scene listed Mr. Prude — who the police believed had broken a store window that night — simply as an “individual.” But another officer circled the word in red and scribbled a note.
OK. So. There's Jon Burge and the 'Midnight Crew', which tortured people into confessions (eletric shocks on genitals, etc) in Chicago in the '80s? Do you think those people they tortured were mostly white?
"Scores of African American men have accused Burge, who is white, and detectives working under him of torturing or abusing them during the 1970s and ’80s on the South Side. The scandal has stained the city’s reputation and cost taxpayers well in excess of $100 million in lawsuit settlements, judgments, other compensation to victims and legal fees ... In 2013, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued an unexpected public apology for the damage done by Burge to the city, calling the era a “dark chapter” that needed to be put in the past. In 2015, a reparations settlement with some Burge victims mandated that Chicago Public Schools teach eighth graders and high school sophomores about Burge’s crimes. The curriculum went into effect in 2017."
The Chicago Tribune is not a liberal newspaper; it trends center to center-right.
"In 2009, the state legislature passed a bill authorizing creation of the Illinois Torture Inquiry Relief Commission (TIRC) to investigate cases of people "in which police torture might have resulted in wrongful convictions". In some cases, allegedly coerced confessions were the only evidence leading to convictions. Its scope is limited to people tortured by Burge or by other officers under his authority, as made explicit in the law and by an appellate court review in March 2016."
Or the murder of LaQuan McDonald in 2014 and the attempted cover-up?
"At the request of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, the United States Department of Justice initiated a civil rights investigation into McDonald's death and the activities of the Chicago Police Department. It released its report in January 2017, describing the police as having a culture of "excessive violence," especially against minority suspects, and of having poor training and supervision. DOJ and city officials signed a consent decree for a plan for improvement to be overseen by the courts. Moreover, three Chicago police officers were tried for allegedly attempting to cover up events related to the shooting and were found not guilty by the Cook County Circuit Court on January 17, 2019"
If nothing else the above shows us there is systemic racism in Chicago's police.
I leave the research for Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Memphis, Missouri, Alabama, etc, to someone else.
Here's a more general article, not specific to Chicago:
"There’s powerful data collection that happens in our criminal courts. There have been studies showing that, all factors being equal, judges are rendering longer and harsher sentences for black defendants."
Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in Sentencing: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Courts
"This paper examines 77,236 federal offenders sentenced under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and concludes the following. First, after controlling for extensive criminological, demographic, and socioeconomic variables, I found that blacks, males, and offenders with low levels of education and income receive substantially longer sentences. Second, disparities are primarily generated by departures from the guidelines, rather than differential sentencing within the guidelines ... Last, blacks and males are also less likely to get no prison term when that option is available; less likely to receive downward departures; and more likely to receive upward adjustments and, conditioned on having a downward departure, receive smaller reductions than whites and females. "
The police in Canada are due plenty of scrutiny for how altruistic their departments might be [1]
> The Ontario government ended police access to a COVID-19 database on July 22 after a court challenge by civil rights groups.
> Information released during that legal process revealed Thunder Bay police had searched the database more than 150 times per day, on average, between April 17 and July 22, according to the CCLA. That amounts to 14,800 searches, or a rate ten times the average number of searches by other police forces across the province.
> Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 reported COVID-19 cases during the time the data was available to police.
Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act?
The US is not Canada. Police in Canada need safeguards too, to be sure. It's not even close to the same thing. For every 1 person killed in Canada by police, 100 are killed in America, 10X per capita. People in Canada aren't really scared of the police, certainly not in the way Americans are scared of the police. Police in Canada are part of the community, not paramilitary belligerents.
Nope, the fact that the police was checking the database has nothing to do with the performance of Thunder Bay against COVID 19, their performance is pretty in line with any remote smaller cities across Canada. In fact they tried to know why they were using it so much, and they refuse to answer. It's the lack of accountability that is the problem. May be there was a real reason for them to use it (10x more than any other city???!), but since they refuse to tell people, anyone can guess.
Absolutely. It would be interesting to know what information was in this database. It doesn't make sense that it was just a list of people. Did it include known connections? Other medical information? Travel history? And why/how was it being used?
The accessed names, addresses and medical status. These are all PII and medical information has even higher level of privacy. You want people to use medical services in confidential, it is safer for everyone that if someone suspects that they have an infectious disease that they have the appropriate medical help.
This is why Drs records and the like are very difficult for people to get, even law enforcement.
No I get they shouldn’t have had access to the data, I’m just at a loss as to what harm they could have done with it. I haven’t heard even so much as a theory truth be told.
> Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act?
The premise here is that the police force needed to search the COVID database 150 times a day to enforce the quarantine act and that when asked why they were searching so frequently they were afraid to tell the federal government that they were using the queries as a tool for enforcing the law.
I am pretty sceptical of that theory.
Of course since they lost their access more than a month ago there have been a handful of new cases.. so it seems like we also have some empirical evidence that undermines this theory.
I'd love to hear a plausible explanation for 150 searches of the COVID-19 database per day in community with just over 100K residents and a police force of around 320 employees for the purposes of genuine police work.
> I'd love to hear a plausible explanation for 150 searches of the COVID-19 database per day in community with just over 100K residents and a police force of around 320 employees for the purposes of genuine police work.
A dashboard that refreshes every 10 minutes.
I’d love to hear a plausible explanation for what malicious thing they could do with that data.
It does not seem very plausible that a small police force built themselves a dashboard that refreshes and then when asked why they were making so many requests by the federal agency didn't explain that they made a dashboard and instead refused to say what they were doing.
A plausible explanation for what they were doing with the data that was malicious was that they were looking up friends and neighbours to gossip about/harass for being COVID-19 positive. It seemed obvious to me that this was the most probable explanation from the start.
This is a Canadian article, if you would like a good overview of just how much "good faith" you should assume from the management of the largest police force in Canada you can take look at this:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-sexual-harassment-hist...
If you have 649,990 cops, and 10 bad cops. And 0 cops arrest the bad cops for their actions. You actually have 650k bad cops.
But even setting aside the issue of bad cops, the way policing is done in racialized neighbourhoods means that even if you had 0 bad cops the system would still oppress these groups through things like stop-and-frisk and various other means of over policing or "broken-windows" policing.
Good thing that the number of bad cop arrests is not 0 then. I don't get why people have issues with sending law enforcement to the places where there is literally more crime.
Because it creates a positive feedback loop. More police means more incidences of law breaking get detected as crimes, which results in more police enforcement.
Imagine a road network and police with a limited number of speed traps. If you send the speed to the places where there have been more people caught speeding then the fact that the speed traps where in that location will have a higher rate of caught speeders.
Another example is drug enforcement. Black people are searched more often then white people for drugs, which results in them being caught having drugs more often which in turn makes police think that they are more likely to have drugs.
It could also create a negative feedback loop: e.g. breaking up gangs or reducing the likely hood the a crime will go unpunished will lead to less crime in an area.
By not publicly and consistently condemning and/or holding their fellow officers accountable when they should be.
The blue wall of silence.
To be fair after the murder of George Floyd you did see some officers and police chiefs doing this in the initial round of protests.
Generally speaking though police departments have proven incredibly difficult to reform - there’s a lot of entrenched behavior, such that even if one officer isn’t engaging in anything illegal themself, the police culture brings huge pressure to bear against anyone who might condemn another officer for breaking the law.
This. "Good cops" would be pressuring police unions to crack down on bad cops, and taking the infiltration of American police departments by white supremacist militias seriously. Ergo, there are no good cops, or they are stifled into silence and might as well be bad cops.
But as someone else pointed out, this article is about Canada, so I digress…
This is such a silly claim. There have been a handful of cases of white supremacists managed to get hired. Out of 800,000 cops. Terrorists, spies, and gang members manage to join government agencies and the military as well.
Also, if you don’t know how many bad cops there are, and you don’t know how many good cops there are, and you have no clue how many good cops report on bad cops, you can’t even begin to make that claim. You’re just being an “ACAB” guy, despite the fact that you desperately need police.
True. But I do have one anecdotal story. My brother was beat up in custody by local police but they forgot they were on camera or something so my brother got a hold of the footage through a lawyer and they paid my brother enough money he was able to put it to a down payment of a house. The finding of the investigation; the officer involved was guilty of assaulting him among other things such as not telling the truth as to what happened but since he was about to retire in a month they decided they would not be taking action towards the officer. My brother is a loser who probably mouthed him off and had it coming but this officer is also a loser for losing his cool in a professional setting costing me as a tax payer money. Was he actually punished? No. So the next officer as long as he is close to retirement thinks he can get off free. In a just society you get punished. I would be royally screwed if one week before my retirement I hit an elderly patient who got out of hand. So we don't have equal laws for people and police.
Unions are a tool - a means for labor to organize and exercise power to see to the best interests of its members.
Ideally that functions as a way for labor to negotiate with management for humane working conditions, etc, and for worker solidarity.
Any tool can be abused.
Plus police unions really do seem like a special case. In part because the profession of policing is one big special case, because they themselves are part of our system of law.
Which really all should go without saying - I would hazard a guess that you already know most of what I am telling you :).
Here's a cop who tried to report on corruption within the NYPD. His squadmates got him thrown into an insane asylum. The NYPD, by the way, is larger and more heavily funded than most armies.
"desperately need police" We used to "desperately need police" to get injured and wounded people to hospitals. The reason why ambulances do it instead is because the doctors noticed that cops would sometimes beat the shit out of patients en route. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/02/12/all-black-ambulanc...
What's wrong with divvy'ing up every responsibility of "the police" and handing those responsibilities off to trained professionals?
Your link does nothing to support your claim. It’s a single anonymous anecdote. That is only good for confirming biases, not for analysis of data. I notice you also didn’t post the rebuttal.
Again. 800,000. It’s impossible not to have issues come up, and even bad departments that come and go. Obviously, they should be dealt with.
And no, the reason you need police is not for hospital rides.
Assuming we are talking about developed nations, the NYPD is not larger and more heavily funded that most armies, and that stat wouldn’t have any relevance anyway.
Your last claim goes from intellectual dishonesty to outright lying. Nowhere does that article say or even imply anything about cops beating or otherwise mistreating patients.
“ A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.”
Or just google about the LA Sheriffs department - notorious:
“ For decades, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has struggled to combat secretive cliques of deputies who bonded over aggressive, often violent police work and branded themselves with matching tattoos.
A federal judge called out the problem nearly 30 years ago, accusing deputies of running a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” named the Vikings within the Lynwood station. Others followed with names such as the Regulators, Grim Reapers, Rattlesnakes and the Jump Out Boys.”
Yes, everything you just said is in violent agreement with what I said, although I suspect that was not your intention.
The infamous LASD gang were largely hispanic, for what it’s worth.
This meme that cops are secretly white supremacists is completely absurd, and it seems as though everyone perpetuating it did not actually read the reports they reference, because they absolutely do not say that, and honestly it’s a pretty disgusting allegation to cast so broadly. If you’re going to defame a whole group, be damn sure that you’re accurate. And maybe don’t list off examples that consist of white-minority departments with non-white police chiefs and non-white mayors...
The US situation seen from French eyes is quite surprising. Here we have the IGPN, which is "the Police of Police" so when an officer does something wrong there's an inquiry about it. But more importantly, there are sanctions.
The system isn't perfect by any mean but to give you an example of how infrequent Police murders are, our local BLM movement had to find a 4 year old case as their "George Floyd".
> The system isn't perfect by any mean but to give you an example of how infrequent Police murders are, our local BLM movement had to find a 4 year old case as their "George Floyd".
Thats not same comparison though, people dont' own firearms in france like they do in USA.
You're right about legal firearms, there are much less of them in France. However criminals have no trouble equipping themselves, and Kalashnikov shootings are quite frequent between rival gangs.
It’s no excuse but my understanding is the issue here in the US is sort of the random traffic stop - what if the person the cop stops has a gun?
Thus every interaction with a probably “non-criminal” citizen or whatever carries fear and danger.
Again, no excuse at all. But I do think there’s a relation between racist (and all) police violence, and the overall violence in our society - which firearm ownership is one aspect of.
There is nothing about the mere existence of firearms in the nation that requires them to shoot at point that don't both possess them and make moves to use them on the police.
If someone hasn't yet presented you with a threat of deadly violence you just don't get to use it on them.
> Here we have the IGPN, which is "the Police of Police" so when an officer does something wrong there's an inquiry about it. But more importantly, there are sanctions.
The main role of IGPN is diverting legal action, by burying cases into their administrative enquiries and sanctions proposals. Filing a complaint at IGPN is mostly useless, you'd better file them directly in the regular justice system, otherwise it will almost never end up in the regular justice system because IGPN almost never forwards cases.
Administrative sanctions are laughable. Firstly, as I said, they are not mandatory, they are propositions, it is up to the local superior(s) to decide what they do with it. Secondly, half of them are simple warnings and blames, i.e. completely without effect. Thirdly, most of the sanctions proposals come from internal affairs between constables, the complaints filed by regular citizens are buried.
Also, there is the fundamental problem that IGPN is not an independent entity, but part of the police...
> how infrequent Police murders are
Despite people carrying much much less weapons than in the US, our police are more and more trigger happy, and when they shoot, they shoot to kill (and they get away with it, unless it was first-degree murder). They have no problem emptying a magazine in the back of car drivers, and pretend it was a life-saving reaction to an immediate threat. Take similar situations involving Police and Military: with the former, the assailant will end up with 8 9mm bullets in the body, 3 of them being lethal; with the later the assailant will be controlled (which allows for a trial way better than a Police execution), either with one 5.56mm bullet in the leg or more often without any shooting.
And then there are the "non-lethal" weapons (flashballs and tasers) which were supposed to replace gun use, but that Police now use all the time for nothing, in situations where they would never have used a gun before.
Was it last year that they managed to taze a naked (thus unarmed) man to death in a street?
> They have no problem emptying a magazine in the back of car drivers, and pretend it was a life-saving reaction to an immediate threat.
Come on, this would have been the scandal of the decade and I would have heard about it. As long as you're not a yellow vest you don't have much to fear about the French Police ;)
> either with one 5.56mm bullet in the leg
As a civilian target shooter, I can tell you that shooting a leg is almost impossible for a standard shooter, unless you're very close and the target isn't moving (but then why do you need to shoot him ?).
You should never employ a gun with the intent to "just" injure someone. A gun is lethal (even a leg shot can be fatal) most of the time and should be used (or not used) accordingly.
Predictive policing is associated with selective policing, increasing the rate of police encounters for a set of people. Getting accosted by the police because I live in an area with higher crime is a danger to my well-being, because every encounter with the police carries risk.
We're not speaking of the same thing hence my confusion.
To reduce risks with Police encounters, they have to be accountable. It seems to me that the US Police would benefit from more accountability so I gave the example of the French Police.
I have no idea what they do with predictive policing here, but if they use it I can tell you with confidence that it's not working at all.
It’s actually been demonstrated that more police in high crime areas reduces crime and increases safety. When they pull back, crime goes up. So I don’t know why people say this.
I also don’t know why people think it makes more sense to divert police resources away from where crimes are happening. Not even the linked report agrees with this.
> I also don’t know why people think it makes more sense to divert police resources away from where crimes are happening.
Because so many people who live in those communities consistently continue to say they both fear and distrust the police as the police exist today.
And because people in those communities continually say they need other forms of resources and support from our society - mainly a real path for economic opportunity, but also affordable healthy food (google food deserts), etc - and they understandably are pissed that as a society we’ll police the heck out of poor, mostly black neighborhoods, but not make sustained investments to help those communities the same way that our society does many (not all! mainly the wealthy ones) white neighborhoods.
I don’t think anyone actually wants lawlessness. People want the opposite. They want equality under the law, and for the police to be held legally responsible for when they break it, in one of worst ways possible - by killing.
Consistent and repeated acts of violence, following a similar pattern, are reported throughout the country. Even in Canada.
These acts have been dismissed as one off cases. Each and every one. Yet they point to a culture that doesn’t address or even care about these problems.
Unless we've been living under a rock, I think you, me, and the parent poster are well aware of what kinds of institutional problems police in the United States[1] have. Those institutional problems push the individuals that work for police forces into one of three directions - becoming 'bad cops', closing their eyes in response to observing the behaviour of 'bad cops', or being censured and pushed out of their jobs by bad cops.
When I observe one cop, without warning, throwing a grenade into a peaceful crowd (Not for any particular purpose. Not to make an arrest. Not to move the police line. Not to enforce an order to disperse, because no order to disperse was made. Just cruelty for the sake of cruelty.) and ~20 cops standing around him not doing a single thing about it, I think that the entire group has shown us a lack of good faith. The thrower for assaulting the public, and the rest of them for not doing a damn thing to stop him.
It's possible that there are a few departments that, when their culture is tested like this, will do the right thing. The large metro area departments that have been tested, though, have consistently failed - as have most of their suburbs. (In all fairness, the Bellevue (WA) Police Department for example has (so far) handled the protests reasonably and avoided serious controversy for their past behaviour. Their colleagues across the water in the Seattle PD, though, have demonstrated a complete inability of, as an institution, behaving with any integrity.)
[1] And yes, this thread is about Canada. And yes, Canada has similar institutional problems - despicable Vancouver and Toronto PD behaviour at the G20 protests, decades of blatant and systemic racism against First Nations persons (The Highway of Tears, and the Pickett farm murders is a systemic example of racism-by-inaction, while problematic day-to-day interactions are systemic examples of racism-by-action), excessive use of force (In Vancouver, the Dziekański affair - and the follow-up behaviour of the officers involved), etc, etc.
Even in the Frenchest Quebec-nationalist parts of Canada you have to work pretty hard at being a belligerent jerk to not get served at a restaurant for not speaking French. People tell stories all the time about this sort of stuff, you hear it second and third hand.. you go visit yourself, viola! Folks are just pretty decent and eager to engage in commerce with visitors!
Complaining about being forced to learn French in school is some classic "western alienation" Canadian politics stuff, the Canadian equivalent of Americans being angry about having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish on the IVR.. one can only sigh at the triviality of these matters..
100% agree. I grew up in Alberta but in the last few years have spent a lot of tourist time in Quebec. Hands down what the average person in Alberta seems to think about Quebec is almost complete nonsense. FWIW I don't speak French (altho my wife and daughter can, but not great). I just spend a lot of money there on skiing and culinary tourism.
That's not to say Quebecois nationalism isn't real -- but frankly it's legitimate. They are effectively a nation.
There are people who are building their political careers out of balkanizing Canada. Some of them in QC, but more and more in western Canada. They profit by telling outright lies ("Quebec using Saudi oil" or such nonsense when in fact Quebec gets the vast majority of its oil from domestic sources, mostly Albertan but some American).
Racism in Canada against our indigenous people, however, is deep and strong and disgusting. Most urban people don't encounter it as strongly because the native population is not dense in most urban areas. But just stroll through message boards, sometime... it's pretty shocking.
And there's a long history of ugly relations between the RCMP (and other police departments) and first nations in this country... Really bad stuff.
no, not really i think. It's not perfect with some glaring incidents, but overall I'd say much better. There is an order of magnitude less forces, less guns to go around, less focus on drug use and some of the forces (RCMP OPP) are very large. We had some protests basically shut down large sections of the country earlier in the year and it never got violent like in america.
My impression from my conversations with police in Ontario is that predictive policing is a force for good. If it's not the fruit of any poison tree, I'm all for it.
Isn't this just computerization of what already existed? "Hey, I need to get my arrest numbers up so let's head on down to <area of town> where we know we'll pick up at least a couple people for <mostly harmless activity>". Now the police are just optimizing the algorithm to maximize their goal.
The problem isn't the means, it's the goal itself.
Where the police can predict they're going to be arresting a lot of people, maybe instead we should be focusing on how we can reduce the problems in those areas that lead to crimes and arrests. Send some social workers, some youth outreach, open a food bank, get health workers in there.
"Tough on crime" policies gets expensive when you have to house and jail all those "criminals". It's a lot cheaper to just prevent future crime by helping people.
You might want to go on a ride-along, because you seem to have come up with an idea of how policing works that is completely detached from what they actually do.
Simply prevent future crime by helping people? Just like that right? This painfully naive, wishful thinking is causing a lot of our current problems.
Just open some food banks and send social workers into Chicago and South Central. The gangs and crime will dry right up. Hey let’s fix the Mexican cartels while we are at it!
Come on man. Have a little respect and humility and consider that maybe your untested theories aren’t the simple fix to extremely complex societal problems that nobody else has thought of before you.
OK "just" prevent future crime via... helping people.
What does that even mean? Have you costed out your helping program to show this is true. We have more social programs, care agencies and food banks than ever before, yet the problems and problem areas are as bad as ever. Let's see if you change your tune after being the victim of serious crime
In the US, the criminal "justice" system is _phenomenally_ expensive. According to EJI [1], it cost us $182 billion in 2017. There are ~2.3 million people in US prisons [2]. That's almost $80k/prisoner/year. That's a lot of social services.
How will those social programs stop, e.g., rapists from committing more rape when they're freed on bail when none of the prison reform programs so far are doing that?
Are we not better simply containing the rapists so that they cannot access a vulnerable population instead?
The point is that there are policies that can reduce crimes. Pareto is an important factor to consider. The idea is that policy captures that 90%-98% of crimes that are easy to prevent and police are there to deal with that small portion that slips through.
There's also a bunch of counterintuitive policy that the biggest hurdle seems to be moral and religious (ironic how we talk about how America's laws aren't supposed to be religious based). One example of this is how decriminalizing (not legalizing) drops rape and sexual abuse by >30%[0].
Basically what people want to do is say "Hey, we've had studies where x action caused a reduction in y crime. If we implement x (and tax it!) we can reduce y crime and thus don't need to spend as many resources for policing those actions." People often look at black markets because the big idea is "Hey, we're not getting rid of it, so why not change it from an unregulated market to a regulated one where we can at least generate tax revenue and increase safety?" (i.e. drugs winning the war on drugs, so let's make sure people have clean needles so they don't spread diseases. Or legalizing prostitution means you can better track trafficking, especially under aged.)
It is about using data that we've measured and making policy around that. This should not be controversial.
Please don't strawman me by implying that I'm advocating for freeing rapists. That's not productive, nor is it discussing in good faith.
Let me give you some stats from the Wikipedia article I linked, which I encourage you to read:
"tough-on-crime" laws adopted since the 1980s have filled US prisons with mostly nonviolent offenders.
46% of state prisoners serving > 1 year are serving time for a nonviolent offense. (I flipped this around from "54% of state prisoners serving > 1 year are serving time for a violent offense).
15% of state prisoners have been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious infraction.
And here's the source the Wikipedia article links called "Why Texas is closing prisons in favour of rehab" [1].
That's hundreds of thousands of people serving harsh sentences for nonviolent and drug offenses. It's pretty well known at this point that the US criminal justice system has serious problems and is--again--extremely expensive. I encourage you to google around and read up on it.
For what it is worth, Your position cant be strawmanned if you don't explain it.
If your core position is that money can be saved by avoiding incarceration, you would probably get a more productive response by stating it explicitly as well as how it relates to the post you respnded to:
>What does that even mean? Have you costed out your helping program to show this is true. We have more social programs, care agencies and food banks than ever before, yet the problems and problem areas are as bad as ever. Let's see if you change your tune after being the victim of serious crime
It is a strawman because the response made suppositions that the gp did not imply. That is not a good faith argument. Forcing positions upon people is not a productive means of discussion.
I felt that the post was just interjecting with a fact and did not explain how it relates to or modifies the parent post. It is hard to respond without supposition if they fail to put forth an argument. I read the interchange as follows.
>mabbo: states that we should focus on crime reduction, not enforcement
>ticmasta: questions if crime prevention is economically or practically viable. They propose that increased expenses have not and will not result in a reduction of "serious crimes".
> Camgunz: points out that incarceration is expensive and this could support a lot of social services.
> Natsu: questions again how social programs will stop violent crimes like rape when existing programs have failed.
> Camgunz: Dont strawman me, Nonviolent incarceration is expensive.
Camgunz seems to be talking past the question of if social programs can work and reiterating that incarceration is expensive.
Nah it’s well proven that social programs work. I was pointing out that most people in prison aren’t violent offenders, let alone rapists, and that we shouldn’t let those kinds of arguments sway us.
It’s worth saying that people don’t stop being rapists or raping people once incarcerated; further there are hundreds of thousands of rapes each year in the US. If incarceration is supposed to stop rape, it’s not working.
I think the crux comes down to this section of the exchange.
> Camgunz: points out that incarceration is expensive and this could support a lot of social services.
> Natsu: questions again how social programs will stop violent crimes like rape when existing programs have failed.
How __I__ read this (and I'm guessing Camgunz) is that camgunz provides context to ticmasta's questions about being economically viability by noting how much we spend within the prison system. Implying that this is the metric that we are working with. There was an assumption made here, which is extremely common, that policy just adds cost and does not reduce it somewhere else. What Camgunz is suggesting is that by spending money elsewhere we can reduce the costs mentioned. IMO a net even would be a gain in the sense that we are being more humane and maximizing individual freedom (considering being in jail means pretty low individual freedom as well as potential long term consequences like being unable to vote in the future).
Natsu then made a non-sequitor argument that is commonly associated with dog whistling (it may not have been intended this way, but that is part of the power of dog whistling. By definition it is coded language). The supposition that Natsu implied was that rapists are going to rape and this cannot be prevented, therefore we should just contain them. The data does not support this nor is it effective because we can only prosecute those who have already committed an action or are in the act (this isn't Minority Report, we don't do pre-crime and I think we'd all agree that is highly immoral). Further Natsu said that prisons already do not solve the problem, therefore we should just contain them. The context of the discussion was about reform, which acknowledges the fact that prisons do not accomplish this. Starting with mabbo we get a claim that we should be focusing on crime prevention, which would include (presumably) changing how prisons work. With a focus on reformation as opposed to punishment. Additionally, Natsu's statement is associated with an "all or nothing" approach, which is not what anyone here is suggesting and is a common technique used to derail a conversation, because there will always be outliers in data (i.e. letting perfection get in the way of improvements). Simply, the discussion is about reduction not abolition. Lastly, the jump to rape is one to extreme cases. A drive to an emotional appeal above everything else.
Simply, the response was not in good faith and had a high potential to be intended to derail the conversation. It exhibits many of the tactics that people use to perform such a task (again, it resembles dog whistling enough that it is reasonable to be taken that way).
I will also direct you to my response to Natsu where I link evidence of a negative cost policy (legalizing and taxing prostitution) that fulfills said objectives. I also stress the focus on reduction over abolition. There are many other policies similar to what I mentioned, including reform around marijuana laws (referencing back to Camgunz, which would you rather have? Spending 80k/yr for a non-violent pot dealer (max punishment is several years) or taxing pot, regulating to increase safety, de-stigmatizing and allowing people to seek professional help if it is negatively impacting their lives, and reducing funds that go to cartels that also contribute to migrants fleeing their countries and heading to America? The former costs a significant amount of money while the latter distributes money through the economy and allows taxes to be taken off the top). Not all policies will end up working like this, but again, this isn't an "all or nothing" situation, it is about improvement through iteration and utilizing the data that we have to make better policy. These two are low hanging fruit but do illustrate the point being discussed here.
I read your post a couple times and I think I get where you are coming from.
I think the disconnect between us comes from the different assumptions and emphasis we made filled in for each post. You assumed that Ticmasta ignored indirect costs in a cost/benifit analysis. Camgunz addressed this as you point out. And I assumed that tomasita's central point was that additional spending does not reduce crime or recidivism, and camgunz sidesteped the issue. I imagine Natsu's reading would be the same, given that they restated the same ting, but with more inflammatory language.
I tend to agree with you and camgunz that decriminalization of many activities is attractive based on it's own merits. That said, I think that it is also important to acknowledge that not all problems can be solved by dumb money, solved by smart money, or solved at all.
The problem comes down to a few parts. 1) The language is similar to that used by dog whistlers. 2) We have higher expectations from people on HN and expect them to be more familiar with subjects they are responding to. 3) We require good faith arguments here [0] 4) that aren't lazy 5) and can't be disproven with a simple search. ( 6) (which wasn't violated in this case) we expect people to read the article). HN has always had higher standards and expectations than other forums. I'm happy to get conversations back on track, because it is a problem we're facing a lot in society (in general), but now the conversation is derailed.
[0] There's three parts to communication. 1) The idea intended to be conveyed. 2) The words said. 3) The idea that was heard. The three things can convey three different ideas. A good faith argument means that you are trying to understand what was intended. It usually means giving the benefit of the doubt.
I agree with everything you said about communication and still stand by my original point and suggestion.
Camgunz would have a more productive conversation if they added more context to their post, describing how it relates to the parent.
I agree that the other posts could be improved as well.
I don’t think that there was any dog whistling. As I understand the the term, it Requires a hidden meaning, and rape is simply inflammatory and hyperbolic. The exception is if you think that the poster was intentionally using “rapists" as code for blacks and Hispanics. If so, I didn’t pick up on the intentional racist angle.
Oh yeah, totally agree about the money thing. It’s also important to have plans that can survive beyond one government. The Finnish school system is a great example of a relatively radical reform that took more than a generation to bear fruit. There’s a lot involved for sure.
Nice, thank you! Yeah that was my point, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, etc. I felt like the rape hypothetical was too hyperbolic to be good faith.
You did a way better job with this than I did, thanks again.
That's just one example of an offender who is unlikely to be reformed. There are many others. It's interesting, though, that down thread, the one program given as an example of this is legalizing prostitution, which many women have been and are forced into both by economic and violent means. Let me just say that that's not the best example to give if you're arguing that you're not advocating that.
I'll agree that rehab is good--if and when it works. There's a lot to be said for helping people obey the law rather than punishing them for disobeying it, especially with laws like mask wearing during a pandemic. But I think that, even there, you'll find some level of compulsion needed and it's odd that this specific example is one where I find other people, though hopefully not you, ready to flip-flop.
Finally, I was more interested in bringing up containment as a reason for incarceration and the choice of criminal example was not something I gave any real thought to. Containment is somehow consistently absent from these discussions about the purpose of prison, even in some scholarly works, despite being rather important. Nobody would write about infectious disease without mentioning quarantines, yet containment is widely ignored as if everyone is cribbing from some list and no purposes that are not on the list even exist.
Yeah, agree about legal prostitution—it’s in practice highly abusive and exploitative. I wouldn’t advocate it as a remedy. But the point there was that there are policies besides incarceration that are super effective at curbing violent crime, and I think it serves well as such an example.
I think the occurrence of incorrigible violent offenders is far lower than most people think. It’s certainly not .7%. We couldn’t get through high school or even a basketball game if that were true. There’s also a lot of evidence that violence is learned, not born, and therefore can be treated.
But I also know there are people out there that are incorrigibly violent, and that state resources are finite and we don’t have the means to fix everyone’s problems. I’m not saying abolish prisons. I am saying legalize soft drugs, put money into education, therapy, rehab, and other social programs, stop imprisoning people for inability to pay fines and other oppressive garbage, don’t give people felonies for nonviolent offenses (unless we’re talking white collar crime), and clean up prisons so they’re not gulags of abuse.
Well, I can agree with a fair bit of that, it's just that things like this tend to get taken too far. You see, my own mother died as the victim in an unspeakable manner. In my own home. When I was a teenager. I've seen more than a few people who think that letting the man who did that out of prison is somehow a good idea. I simply cannot agree with that under any circumstance.
But yes, prison culture is itself dangerous and needs to be disrupted. I'm fine with things like so-called creative sentencing and diversion to try to keep people out of the system to begin with. It's just that some things are the thin end of the wedge.
There's some minority, like Dahmer, who simply need to be contained. Period. There is some core group of utterly unrepentant people who have done things too terrible to be permitted freedom again.
I almost never see anyone acknowledge that part of the problem and it's frustrating given what I've lived through.
Now, to be fair, one place I might agree with such a program is for picking up people for public intoxication. If the police respond, the person is likely to be uncooperative and/or hostile because they expect to get arrested, but perhaps if we have someone taking them to get medical care (and help them into rehab) some of this hostility would be avoided and we might not end up with people overdosing on drugs dying in police custody.
We also have more police violence and a more militarized police force than ever before.
When a dude pulls up to me in a tank and beats the fuck out of me because I’m dealing pot (Oh and whoops happened to be black), who is in the wrong? Maybe they should, you know, have a social worker talk to me instead? Do we need tanks and grenades to solve these problems?
Let’s see if you change your tune after a cop beats your face in. Or arrests you for some charge they just made up. But they won’t, because you probably don’t look like the people they do that to.
I genuinely despise your complete lack of experience or perspective. I guarantee you have never had some jack-booted thug screaming in your face about you breaking some law, while he beats your buddies head in. In the back, his partner just laughing. And then you go to jail, and your friend is dead.
I think this is where a lot of people get angry and something "the other side" doesn't understand. Much of this is about the punishment not fitting the crime. It isn't about "no punishment" or "letting everyone go in absolute anarchy" but rather that a non-violent pot dealer shouldn't be beat up. Jail? Sure, because that's the law (even if I don't agree with the law and wish to change it). But I can think of VERY few instances where beating up a criminal would be acceptable in a civilized society. Punishment should be focused around minimal harm done (with a goal of 0 harm) and a path forward to reduce chance or relapse of that behavior.
What is missing at least in the US is different degrees of response from the government to different incidents.
Guy is seen selling pot. Someone calls saying her neighbors are yelling at each other. A kid is caught shoplifting by a store owner. A student threatens a teacher in school. Someone's drunk and starting fights in a bar. School guidance Councilor thinks one of their students are being abused at home. Man dressed in black sneaking around outside your house.
In the USA, each of these incidents are responded to in the exact same way: Fully armed law enforcement swooping in to violently control the situation, crush skulls, and arrest anyone they can justify arresting. There is no attempt to fit the response to the incident. We seem to have only one tool to solve every problem: Law Enforcement. And Law Enforcement has only one tool they use to do their job: Ultra Violence.
Each of those above scenarios can be better addressed by some social worker or other unarmed government employee. Yet we keep sending in the militarized skull crushers for everything.
"Ultra Violence" is such a silly term. Anyway, cops don't response to those cases you mentioned by crush skulls. Anyway, the people you send to deal with those cases have to be ready for the worst otherwise you are risking their lives. I don't think you will be able to find people want to go deal with those situation without any backup or deterrence.
I completely agree. I think we agree that the punishment (ultra violence from a cop) does not fit the crime. I see the US as asking too much from cops and giving cops more military. Training (albeit __far__ less than the most basic of what is needed to handle situations) convinces them that they are experts in how to handle the situations. Military gear convinces them that these are the tools that they should use. In other words, if you expect someone to fix your computer don't hand them a hammer and train them by teaching them html.
Specialization is an okay thing and is often successful.
the report discusses multiple different types of predictive analysis, including the type you refer to (location and time based) but also personal: predicting which people might commit crimes, based on social media surveillance. that's a long ways from what police have always done.
> predicting which people might commit crimes, based on social media surveillance
Well that's terrifying and more reason than ever to get off social media.
But even still- if some system can say "This person has a strong likelihood of committing a crime", maybe we should get right down to the personal level, and send someone who can help prevent the crime.
What makes you think this system is in any way accurate for individuals? The system can say it, and it'll even retroactively be true - if the police start watching someone for a crime, they'll find one. It's arbitrary policing outsourced to a third-party tool under the cover of "algorithmic correctness".
I think you might be underestimating how dumb many criminals are on social media. They pose with their guns, show their gang tattoos, are friends with other gang members, post stacks of cash. Half of their pictures are them giving the middle finger in the hand not holding their gun. They post pictures of stolen items and even try to sell them. This isn’t minority report that we are talking about.
How would you propose they "prevent" the crime? How would you create a system whereby the political persuasions of everyone in chain of command would be inclined towards genuine prevention and not just gunning for an arrest?
How would detecting a likely crime fit into the idea of probable cause for a search?
Do you know that the algorithms detecting these "probable" criminal situations are not discriminatory? How would you know?
There are lots of good arguments against the use of these technologies, but disproportionate effect on marginalized communities may be ironically a less powerful one to people who believe in them, because the intent is to find indicators independent of the experiences of individual enforcers. Anyone with experience in marginalized communities knows it is a good bet to predict the self-sustaining effects of marginalization, which are violence, drugs, mental illness and exploitation by people there to take advantage of it. Doesn't take rocket science to predict where that's going to happen and to be there when it does.
The real solutions are way upstream of a police encounter, where these predictive models would have a way more viable impact in elementary and high schools where people can be nudged and diverted from police encounters in a more subtle and constructive way.
But even then the tech still reinforces and systematize the aggregate bias (or experience) of the data analysts, with the real danger it just becomes a justification, the same way statistics are always used, which is the way a drunk uses a lamp post - for support and not illumination. Whether it's teachers using it to mark and isolate kids from positive peers, or police using it to divert them from a bigger incident, it's the same underlying belief in social engineering that problematizes "other" people and tries to "fix," them.
We should begin by recognizing that these ML systems are weapons, not "solutions," and regulate the use of them in the context of weapons against an enemy other, then ensure someone holds personal individual accountability for that decision, including the social and political aspects of it.
The second order effect is that more-focused enforcement methods will necessarily mean more confrontations with people prone to violence, which creates a selection bias toward violent encounters with police, which makes these systems all the more dystopian.
I was contracted by The Government of Canada to help them with a recommendation engine that was built to help people. The problem? Some criminals had reverse engineered the algorithm and were using it for really, really horrible ends.
What would you have had me do? Not reverse engineer the criminal's reverse engineering? Did I help GC make a "predictive policing" app because they could now alert the RCMP to these bastards?
It's a balance. We need privacy, but we also need security. My take on it is that we should start with good faith and only surveil where it makes sense (embassies, airports, etc) unless there is some sort of signal (in the ML sense) of bad faith. From that point on it should go through the crown's lawyers (like it does in Canada), but ultimately we need to stop murderers, human traffickers, and other people that make the world worse.
I agree that some ML systems are weapons, but I don't think they all are. Some are benign. Some start off off as benign then get turned into dual use, like the one I worked on. But not all weapons are necessarily bad. We need a government that can actually protect us.
I'm saying the tech is a weapon you use to target something, ideally for good reasons, but it's still a weapon and it's the targeting decision that needs accountability. Knowing what I do about tech, I don't think privacy and security are a trade off or zero sum.
I do think privacy and surveillance are a trade off, and surveillance is what you have when you don't have security or trustworthy systems. I agree there is actual evil in the world, and it's particularly where you don't expect it.
The law isn't designed to fight evil. As a society, a better cultural understanding of evil would do more to improve our ability to deal with it than blunt technical weapons to surveil it.
I agree that the law isn't designed to fight evil, but many laws are designed to fight evil. It's a subtle distinction, but one worth pointing out.
Surveillance is part of sense-making for law enforcement and even though I don't think that security and privacy are always at odds, and there are definitely cases where they are not zero-sum, when dealing with persons of interest in criminal investigations it tends to be the case that degrading a suspects privacy improves societies security. But it should be done right. Warrants, probable cause, etc.
There are two entirely different matters being conflated here:
"Where will crime happen" prediction, which is based on crime reporting data for the most part and, as a sibling by comment by
motohagiography articulates very well, the solution is upstream. This tool is useful, but problematic. Especially with "more encounters with police lead to more charges of all types" issues.
"Who will commit crime" predictions are just plain problematic; they discard the entire premise of innocent until proven guilty that is supposed to underlie Canadian enforcement and jurisprudence as well as tend to be self fulfilling prophecies.
> No one is being punished by the system predicting that they will commit a crime.
It seems very obvious to me that any system that would send the police to my door to question me when I have not in fact committed any nor am suspected of any actual crime that has occured it is punishing me.
The inconvenience alone is a punishment. The increased probability that I will have some unrelated matter used against me is a punishment. The fact that my neighbours see law enforcement officers visiting me is a punishment.
It's problematic because of the demographics of the areas and of the people who are predicted to commit crimes, of course. If the system doesn't spit out a perfectly egalitarian, proportional representation of the population down to an infinite level of granularity, it must be wrong; just like all the other machine learning systems that have been revealed to have incredible bias by similarly pointing out things that agree with observable, measured reality.
This is dumb. Predictive policing algorithms predict where the police will be, not where crime takes place: as crime data is simply a measurement of policing activity.
If there is bias in policing, it would therefore be amplified.
>crime data is simply a measurement of policing activity //
Are you thinking of a specific jurisdiction's specific statistical set here, because that's not true in general.
In the UK I know we have perception surveys of the public that ask 'have you been subject to crime' and those statistics are not measures of policing as many crimes reported in the survey won't have been reported to police.
Example for me: someone scratched my car body work ("keyed" it), I didn't report it as I wasn't going to claim on insurance and knew the car park owners had reported similar occurrences in the recent past (I spoke to them: 'yeah, happens a lot here'). Crime survey would show a crime against my property; police statistics wouldn't.
This is my first thought as well. If police go to a place, there is more likely to be a recorded instance of a crime investigated in that place, and thus the algorithm will be more likely to send the police there in the future.
The crime map for Vancouver is interesting - I'm glad to see that the tool reported in the article is at least exposed to the public.
A break-and-enter, or a theft from/of a car, or vandalism against property, for example, are going to be recorded regardless of whether there's a police officer within 5 miles of where they occur. (Because people file a police report to get an insurance claim.)
The distribution of public nuisance arrests, or drug-related crimes, or people jumping the turnstiles at the subway, or parking tickets, or speeding tickets, or DUIs, on the other hand, are almost entirely going to be closely correlated with which areas you deploy police to.
Ban x from using this technology. This is hard to do when the technology isn’t bound to its physical matter (software or algorithms). The technology will go everywhere eventually because it’s easier to distribute than ban.
Why would you have to pay? It’s an algorithm, run some data through it and you’re now more efficient than your fellow officers. You can do more work in less time.
Sounds crazy now but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was normal in the future.
Let's algorithmically predict which police officers are most likely to commit misconduct, and then follow them to catch them in the act if and when they do.
The second page of that link shows the authors retracted the paper, and they also issued a correction.
> we want to correct a sentence in our significance statement that has been quoted by others stating ‘White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.’ This sentence refers to estimating Pr(shotjrace, X). As we estimated Pr(racejshot, X), this sentence should read: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’
They retracted the paper because of political pressure, not because of any factual errors (this is pretty clear in both the timing of the retraction and the retraction statement).
> While our data and statistical approach were appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, they are inadequate to address racial disparities in the probability of being shot.
That's not what my comment addressed. It addressed the probability of non-white officers shooting to kill being higher than that of white officers. I think that conclusion is still supported by the paper (as in the last line of your quote).
Being profiled so deeply by government on an individual level using automated systems is the holy grail of the police state and is the most advanced and worrisome form of mass surveillance. It is possibly fine today, but over the course of 50-100 years there will surely be severe and scary problems with this
Of course understanding that this is Canada:
I don't recommend this kind of approach. It might solve the immediate problem but, does not address the cause. Having police visibility during "peak" times will resolve the issue of crime in a specific area and time but, will not solve the crime from not happening somewhere else. Also, I don't know who is working on these reports and whether or not they apply their own biases. The US already has an issue with over policing. This would definitely exacerbate it.
Social scientists have wanted to predict when victimization, abuse, suicide is going to happen for a long time.
This is the other side of the coin.
I suggest that as long as 'individuals are not targeted for culpability' - ie they are looking in 'general terms' and especially for 'victims' then maybe this might work?
'Jane Doe is at very high risk of abuse from a family member' -> maybe we should just check in.
'123 ABC St. is at very high likelihood of break-in - maybe just cruise on by to 'show a presence'.
All of this said, I often wonder if these 'algorithms' just reproduce with cops on the ground, managing relationships already know.
'Yes, thank you computer, Jane Doe who's been beaten by her husband 3 times is 'at risk''.
'Yes, thank you computer, 6th and Finch, aka 'crack corner' is at 'high risk' of crime'.
Part of the problem is that police are being tasked with the impossible: to increase closure rates on crimes for which they have little evidence.
This is part of us in Canada both underfunding social services _and_ offloading the defence of person and property on to the state.
If we properly funded mental health, low income housing and food banks and also allowed citizens to defend their property and their family... Well I suspect that police would have less to do.
I recall a former RCMP officer who created something similar only it was for historical data not used to try to predict anything. This "Person of Interest" (sci-fi TV show) level of prediction seems impossible.
Although giant powerful computers are used by stock analysts to predict trends. Stocks aren't people but there is a direct link between human emotion and stock buying and selling.
I don't know whether PP algos work or whether they're fair or what the trade off between fairness and effectiveness should be. But I am amazed the number of commentors here who think the devs behind the algos are not smart enough to normalise data for police numbers in an area!?
It's a difficult problem area. I would bet naively normalizing the data would introduce many new concerns. Does the amount of crimes reported scale linearly with police presence? If not, your data is now going to be skewed. How do you count police numbers in an area? Man hours, individual officers, or something else? Keep in mind that not all officers are going to be responding to the same type of crime and so police hours are not interchangeable.
IMO machine learning algorithms are brittle and prone to breaking in unexpected ways. In the past, organizations who should have known better and should have been smart enough have produced bad machine learning systems. Policing is a highly sensitive area. It's okay to be very concerned.
The concept of criminality as a protected career category is a political litmus test of no other content. May as well just ask if people are "D" or "R".
They do and they are -- alot of the tech/methodology was initially developed for identifying and proactively intervening high-risk individuals for counter-extremist purposes. Governments do things like buy search engine ads to counter misinformation, etc. This type of capability can be applied to things like opioid intervention.
The problem is that the issues are being "attacked" from the perspective of criminality vs. public health or other scenarios. When you look at correlating factors with say, opioid abuse, things like transportation, access to healthcare, etc are prominent.
This is no different than the human profiling that Police engage in. Except now we have logs and we can track the decisions that are being made. We can adjust the algorithms rather than re-train humans. We can replace an algorithm quickly if it doesn't give us the results we want, whereas removing bad cops takes years, if it's even possible.
Secondly, Canadian police operate differently than American ones. They aren't perfect, but don't read this article with the lens that American media has shaped for you about their own police forces.
You’re right: there is no difference; they both don’t work and are unethical. The idea that someone may commit a crime based on things they are doing is abhorrent. It runs against the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
It’s the same idea as “violent video games cause violent people;” It’s not true. If you play an online FPS like COD, should we be watching you more closely because you may end up shooting up some place?
EDIT: previously said “guilty until proven innocent”
You aren't contributing honestly. The police systems work, but they have problems. And again, don't view Canadian policing with an American lens.
Toronto, for example, has an independent division of police called the SIU, Special Investigations Unit. Any time an officer is involved in a violent altercation, the SIU is onsite and investigating. Not perfect, but better. They also have a mental health unit that responds to non-violent calls where people are in distress. Again, not perfect, but better. Toronto and Vancouver both operate safe injection sites. Toronto recently put up hundreds of homeless people into vacant apartments to get them off the street.
All this to say, I don't see these programs in the US. You guys aren't even trying to improve your Police. Don't view canadian police with an American lens.
I'm not sure you want to look at the SIU as some paragon of justice holding police to account. The SIU is not a division of the police, being under the purview of the provincial government, but it sure is staffed by a whole lot of former police (nearly all white too) who seem to have no problem finding other police innocent of any wrongdoing. The most recent stats I read were that 97% of cases are cleared without charges and you can count on 1 hand the number of cops who actually went to jail over their 30 year existence. Their "mental health unit" didn't do much to save Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and the feckless SIU wasn't much better in investigating. They also don't deserve any credit for the current investigation of Ejaz Choudry's murder, another person with mental health problems being "assisted" by police while in distress.
Absolutely police systems work, as long as you're not on the side that's being policed.
As someone who experience with both Canadian and US police, I think the differences are less than they appear. Especially when you take into account Canada has 1/10th the US population (so you’d expect 1/10th of the incidents).
I’ve had several friends who have been tuned up by either the RCMP or provincial police. Sure, you’re less likely to get shot than in the US, but my anecdotal experience suggests there are plenty of bad apples in Canada.
Hell, they are still trying to clean up the RCMP. You see some pretty egregious behavior in the small town detatchments.
Nope, they're not the same, but I've lived on both sides of the border and see a high degree of similarity. Out West, we don't have much of a black population. The issues with policing here are stark when comparing indigenous to non-indigenous populations. We had an analogous incident to Trayvon Martin a few years back; white dude murdered an indigenous dude, was tried by at white jury and got off scott free: it's not just the police, it's also the broader culture that has seen indigenous peoples as vermin since first contact. We have police shooting to kill instead of de-escalating. Even in Vancouver, I see cops treating white arrestees with dignity and respect whereas I see them pinning black and indigenous people to the ground as their first move -- almost every single interaction that I've witnessed. Toronto had a program very similar, and with similar impact, to NYC's stop and frisk program. White criminals go largely unmolested, while even middle class black and indigenous people get harrassed on the regular.
Militarized cops carrying long guns and wearing body armor show up to nonviolent oil protests and do what they can to escalate the scene. Liberals were outspoken against declaring nonviolent oil protests an act of terrorism until they got in power, and then the story was "we don't want to take this enforcement tool from the police." Generational trauma from the residential schools, a "soft genocide," remains unaddressed to this day and white citizenry doesn't seem to understand why folks want to topple statues of John Macdonald. The medical system is still forcably sterilizing and removing children from indigenous women.
The main difference is that the genocide in canada was largely effective; the black population in the US wasn't eradicated to the same degree, so the racialized politics aren't as visible here.
We need to remove a bunch of duties from police, and hand them to social services, mental health care workers, and unarmed bylaws enforcement. Just like the US. That will free the police up to investigate actual crimes, and work to improve the lives of people who are shat on by our society.
> Even in Vancouver, I see cops treating white arrestees with dignity and respect whereas I see them pinning black and indigenous people to the ground as their first move -- almost every single interaction that I've witnessed.
This is nothing but an anecdote; you don't know the whole situation in these cases, you're probably just walking by, you don't know what happened beforehand, you don't know what level of threat these individuals posed. It's also almost certainly a case of bias confirmation, you're paying attention to the demographics during an arrest and chalking up datapoints when you see what you're looking for. Are you everywhere in the city? Do you have a representative sample of policing? Not even close.
You're just looking to see this happening, and nowhere in your mind does it possibly occur to you that these perps might have been disrespectful, might have fought back, might be "known to police" already as a troublemaker that's causing yet again another incident despite living in a city with nothing but programs and handouts and tolerance for the antics of the homeless.
> nonviolent oil protests
Illegal trespassing, in many cases, and the show of force is to make it clear that there will be no violence, because none will be tolerated. If anything, it should help make it far more clear cut that there cannot be any pushback on these issues. It doesn't matter what your opinion is on the subject, it matters what has been decided by the government, and it's probably better that a protestor realizes that they have no hope of violent resistance rather than giving it a try.
> The main difference is that the genocide in canada was largely effective
Is this really how my fellow citizens view their own history? What an incredibly biased, anti-White narrative. No wonder folks like you want to deconstruct everything that is well-built, predictable, and good about our nation as we have it today: you view it all as an evil inheritance that was stolen, rather than a beautiful workable system hewn out of cruel nature.
> We need to remove a bunch of duties from police, and hand them to social services, mental health care workers, and unarmed bylaws enforcement.
I'll give you this: it might actually have a chance of working here, to some extent, because of how nonviolent people generally are and because we don't have a massively armed population.
Still, there will be incidents where these unarmed support officers are going to be physically overpowered, abused, beaten, even raped; there will be incidents when people get away who should be caught; and when it happens, we'll all just have to remember that that wouldn't have happened if sufficient force had been present.
> work to improve the lives of people who are shat on by our society.
One of the big dichotomies between people like you and people like me is that it never seems like your side is willing to admit to the large numbers of people in this position who themselves shit on society rather than the other way around. Again, we have as many opportunities for a leg up here as there have ever been, anywhere in the world.
In particular I think the Beothuk in particular might have opinions on this.
There is a good reason to have an honest reckoning with history and then move forward from there, not for the purposes of blame but rather to start with a sound basis in fact for making decisions about the future.
> It seems like perhaps there is a lot of Canadian history that you haven't reckoned with.
Perhaps instead it's simply that I am an adherent to the great Western tradition of the last two thousand years: namely, the sins of the father are not the sins of the son.
I see narratives like this as an attempt to bludgeon Canadians into accepting blame for the actions of others which are deliberately contextualized by "historians" to make them sound as evil as possible.
Great, there were some battles in the past. My ancestors, like everyone else's, fought battles for their existence from the dawn of time. How many subgroups were wiped out in Europe as they vied for dominance? Should I feel bad for them, too? Do you? Should people just be passive, do you think that will work game-theoretically in the long term?
> an honest reckoning with history
All "honest reckonings" that have come out in the last hundred years or so are used to demonize western people; small wonder that people are beginning to question whether it's really honesty, or an attempt to disenfranchise us within the nations we created and brought to greatness.
I think that if accepting the truth of what actually happened is viewed by you as being "bludgeon[ed] into accepting blame for the actions of others" is a problem with how you personalize the actions of others in the past that you view as part of your identity group as opposed to an attempt to blame you personally.
If I quote John A Macdonald saying ".. refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense" and then quote Mackenzie's response that he's not starving them enough - how is that offensive to you personally? It seems like it could only hurt you if you believe that you are on the "team" of the governments of that day - why would you think that? Let's all be on the team of justice and fairness and not take personal offense at the ignorance of the leaders of the past (or the present for that matter)!
> a problem with how you personalize the actions of others in the past that you view as part of your identity group as opposed to an attempt to blame you personally.
I can accept what happened, from the historical record, while denying that it needs to have massive historical relevance to current events, or that it implies any requirement of action. I can accept what happened without accepting that it is okay for it to be used as a method of attacking my identity group, none of the living population of which have committed such acts.
The fact that the deaths of these people will be brought up for hundreds of years with no path to redemption on the part of my identity group is a problem. What I take from this is that there is to be no "burying the hatchet", so to speak; that my children will also be blamed for this with the same severity that I am, as will my grandchildren, as will people in the year 2300.
It will NEVER stop being a bone of contention as long as it continues to have narrative power to attack my group; it will never stop having this power until it is simply denied its power and shrugged off as the actions of another century.
> If I quote John A Macdonald saying ".. refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense" and then quote Mackenzie's response that he's not starving them enough - how is that offensive to you personally?
It is offensive to me personally because quotes like this are not part of the mere study of history, but are brought up specifically to be used as a justification to literally behead the statues of the founders of my country. These statues, like all public art and memorials, are supposed to stand as historical artifacts and truths regardless of the actions these people committed. This justification to tear down statues in turn becomes one of the many steps on the road towards overthrowing my country and my culture entirely. One look at what is happening in the USA today is all it should take to make it clear that this is just the means to an end: once every statue is removed it will be on to the museums, and they're already working on the textbooks.
> Let's all be on the team of justice and fairness
As long as the old-stock, historical Canadian nation gets a seat at the table and gets to be represented for what it is, that's fine; I want justice as much as the next person. In fact, I am of the belief that we've got just about the best justice system in the world here, and I only want to see it improve. It is clear to me that for this to work, the improvement needs to come in a form that doesn't demonize White Canadians as genocidal people, or as inheriting the sin of genocide, as though we came across the nation and murdered everyone we saw with impunity. Such a thing could not be further from the truth.
> I can accept what happened, from the historical record, while denying that it needs to have massive historical relevance to current events, or that it implies any requirement of action.
Apply this logic to me walking up to you on the street and beating you and stealing all your money and two days later saying, "I acknowledge what happened, but I don't think it is relevant to today or implies any requirement of action to remedy."
Likewise apply this logic to me seizing all the property of your parents when you were an infant and then you as an adult approach me about this and I say, "I acknowledge what happened, but I don't think it is relevant to today or implies any requirement of action to remedy."
Likewise apply this logic to me seizing all the property of your grandparents when your father was an child and then you as an adult approach me about this and I say, "I acknowledge what happened, but I don't think it is relevant to today or implies any requirement of action to remedy."
Without worrying about why I might have done those things above when I did them or just how much responsibility I might have for the actions, the various mitigation or explanations, that an injustice occurred and that consideration should be given to righting it seems trivial to acknowledge. Just consideration, it doesn't even cost anything!
Just because it’s not the USA doesn’t mean it will turn out rosy. It does a lot of harm when everybody assumes that “bad things won’t happen here, so in this case it’s fine”
Part of the argument of the "abolish the police" movement is that putting cars in high-crime neighborhoods becomes as self fulfilling prophecy. More police mean more crimes, even for slight infractions that someone in a lower crime neighborhood (read: white and middle class) would likely get away with.
I think the issues here are much more nuanced than rhetoric can encompass, but the problem with preventative policing strategies is that they seem to find a way to justify themselves, making them ultimately self defeating and that perhaps preventative policing should be replaced with other preventative measures.
Somehow a neighborhood gets the label "High Crime".
If the label is created due to the sum of reports from community and reports from officers, we could remove the officer generated reports to create a less biased label.
So you’re saying the presence of police cars makes someone more likely to steal my bike? Someone is more likely to commit an armed robbery in front of the cops?
Unless you are talking about speeding tickets, these are really bad arguments. Which is to be expected from anyone who thinks “abolish the police” will improve anybody’s life who isn’t named El Chapo.
I think the policing problems of the US may not be applicable to Canadian cities such as Vancouver (referenced in the article as being tracked using https://geodash.vpd.ca) since the vast majority of crimes in Vancouver are property crimes, and thus likely citizen-reported.
That being said it does feel like violent crime is increasing here, as the COVID pandemic has exacerbated the already-ongoing opioid public health emergency.
I would assume the algorithm predicts the actual type of crime, or at least category (e.g. violent versus theft versus moving violation). Then it's still up to the department which crimes to target (which I really hope would be the crimes with victims).
I’m not referencing persecution, but surveillance. I’ll admit that it is a gray area. But dubious or outright false criteria are used all the time until a court orders the police to stop.
As for “putting more patrol cars in high-crime neighborhoods,” that is somewhat different IMO because a high-crime neighborhood actually commits more crime (assuming accurate reporting). But, for example, “plays violent video games,” is a meaningless statistic with no correlation to reality.
> The idea that someone may commit a crime based on things they are doing is abhorrent. It runs against the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
That's nonsense, it has nothing to do with the presumption of innocence, that only comes into play at a trial.
Law enforcement often looks at things that aren't crimes to predict crimes. An obvious example: people grooming minors online. It's totally legal to talk to a twelve-year-old on the internet. It's totally legal to meet twelve-year-olds you've talked to on the internet. But it's highly suspicious when you're 30, and if the police hears about it, they'll very much be interested in checking that out, even though you haven't committed any crimes yet.
It's a different question whether these systems look at things that are strong predictors of criminal activity or not.
I agree with the unethical part but I'm not so sure about the statement that they don't work. Check out this video [0] which talks about profiling at Ben Gurion airport.
The ship may have sailed, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push back against further abuses of power. It’s easy to give more power to them, but much harder to remove it.
The executive summary does a far better job at articulating the situation, its problems, its negative implications, and proposed mitigations than most of us will be able to manage in an HN comment.
Note that the report suggestions are not to ban predictive approaches. I think the report recommendations are reasonable under the assumption of competence and good faith among all parties. If you don't think that the limitations the report suggests are sufficient, I think that's a reasonable sign that you're not assuming good faith and competence - which is fair, but does totally shift the argument.
If you're just assuming that the police will abuse this regardless of safe guards (that's fair), you can just make that argument up front, and cut through all the shit, and then you can get down to arguing over real conflict points.