Well, yes, the problem is the idea of policing itself.
How do you determine if the police are being successful? If there are more arrests, are they more successful? Perhaps you ask about crime statistics - but those statistics are recorded by the police. I think we all have anecdotal stories of police refusing to take police reports or saying that something is a civil matter, or simply witnessing violations of minor laws (jaywalking, littering, etc.) and doing nothing. Not only does this mean that police can very easily control crime statistics, it means that if your actual goal is preventing some specific crimes, it's not guaranteed that the police are actually working on it.
One theory is that the function of the police is to maintain order, by which is meant the status quo. Police exist to make sure that white neighborhoods don't start to feel like black neighborhoods, and that black neighborhoods don't start to feel like white neighborhoods. In that model, the two data-driven approaches (predictive policing and DICFP) fall into the same trap that any hacker on HN who has run into office politics is familiar with: the data isn't being used to decide what to do, it's being used to defend an existing decision by powerful people and argue that the decision is right. Should we keep text-based content or pivot to video? Facebook's PMs, who keep the official record of whether people watch videos, have data claiming we should pivot to video. Should we keep patrolling the same neighborhoods we've always patrolled? The police, who keep the official record of crimes, have data saying that crime is bad there.
But then one could no longer dismiss all inconvenient data with a simple "the police are racist". So one keeps one's head in the sand and sticks to that line.
For many crimes there might not be bodies to count.
So I think that just from a math point of view(no race/social stuff interpretation) , you can be in a situation where the starting data combined with bad algorithm will keep you stuck in a local minimum.
Probably math people can model this issue with abstract terms not to offend any color of politics you prefer but you have the issue of bad implementation and as always garbage in is garbage out, so you might need an algorithm that starts with zero input and uses random data and converges slowly , but you still need a way to make sure you keep the algorithm evolving with changes over large time (maybe reset it and make it start over after a few years)
Indeed, it opens up the topic to a wider question - why are some things counted as crimes and others not?
For example, why isn't wage theft included in the NCVS?
Surface-level answer: because in most jurisdictions, it's not a criminal offense. Steal $100 from your employer? Go to jail. Your employer requires unpaid overtime adding up to $1,000? A slap on the wrist at best.
Yet employees are victims to billions of dollars of wage theft every year! "Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed workers experienced at least one pay-related violation in the week prior to the survey. On average the workers in the three cities lost a total of $2,634 annually due to workplace violations, out of an average income of $17,616, which translates into wage theft of fifteen percent of income." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft . Does the NCVS list that over half of employees are victims of wage theft?
Why, it's almost as if the laws were structured against poor people in favor of business. Hmm, and ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the poor population.
What about the illegal collusion between Silicon Valley companies to suppress worker wages? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... . Were all 64,000 employees counted as victims in the NCVS? Again, no, because that was a civil suit, not a crime that the police should be involved in.
But again, why is it under civil law, not criminal? (There's no hint that this wage theft is due to racism.)
Or, were the events leading to the lead poisoning of the water of Flint, MI and its coverups a crime? If so, why isn't the population of Flint included as victims? If not, why not?
Or, in discussions related to the 'school-prison nexus', when disproportionate disciplinary actions are taken against students of color, are those students counted as victims? Why or why not?
You are correct. All this inconvenient data indeed makes people dismiss the 'simple "the police are racist"' and replace it with "the system is both racist and biased in favor of the rich".
A moment ago the conversation was about violent crime and "over-policing creates racist bias in crime data". Now it's about laws treating corporate crimes more leniently.
You raise good points, and use them to deftly move past all the claims of racism that homicide statistics and victim surveys largely (but not entirely) refute.
I think the wage theft point is relevant (I was going to bring it up too) for two reasons:
1. Directly, wage theft affects people's ability to get out of poverty and build wealth. Wage theft is a problem that disproportionately affects lower-income people (because they're more likely to rely on wages, instead of salaries or investments) and is disproportionately worse for lower-wealth people (because they can't as easily absorb a loss of $1,000 by covering it out of savings). We know, from those very same victim surveys, that poverty correlates with crime. In fact https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/household-poverty-a... points out that poverty correlates with being a victim of crime.
2. Less directly, but more interestingly from a philosophical standpoint, wage theft is a great example of a crime where how you classify it impacts statistics. Victim surveys tend to look at robberies. Wage theft isn't a "robbery," but if you lose $1,000 from your employer, that's much worse for you than being mugged at knife-point and losing $100 from your wallet. And if you look at homicides: Los Angeles has 200-something homicides per year. It also has 40-something police-caused deaths per year, which are generally not called "homicides." It also has 200-something deaths from car accidents a year, which are also generally not called "homicides." You're equally dead through any of these means, but crime surveys create a specific definition of "violent crime" that only looks at certain forms of violence.
And you've deftly moved past the question "How do you determine if the police are being successful?"
Is your metric only homicide statistics?
geofft commented "police refusing to take police reports or saying that something is a civil matter". My examples were meant to reinforce that issue, where crime statistics place far less weight on theft of services than theft of property, even when the monetary amounts involved are similar.
FWIW, wage theft isn't only a corporate crime. If I promise to pay someone to mow my lawn, and he does it, and I don't pay him (perhaps threatening to call the police because I suspect he's an immigrant without work papers), then that's also wage theft, even though I am not a corporation.
Directly addressing a claim made in the post I replied to (police manipulation/bias of statistics) is not "moving past" anything.
You're welcome to continue onto ever more abstract or systemic claims of racism and bias, but please don't begrudge me pointing out when some of the stepping stones crumble along the way.
You wrote "One could compare police statistics with victim surveys".
On could also compare other statistics, and show that police are over-funded compared to other sorts of enforcement agencies.
The very act of picking which statistics to use is itself biased.
Simply pointing to NCVS is not going to be convincing. Which numbers should we look at? What correlations should we draw? How should we understand the biases in the interpretation? What alternative explanations are there for whatever it is you haven't actually said?
Without pointers to what what your actual point is, I figured it was just as appropriate to point out how your foundation is itself crumbled.
> Your employer requires unpaid overtime adding up to $1,000? A slap on the wrist at best.
Because the two are not at all the same.
I would imagine the reason is that everything should already be on record, and you'd be expected to take said employer to court. That said, if employer tried to explicitly commit fraud e.g. forge documents, illegal employment, I'd expect someone to see jail time.
Theft, on the other hand, is inherently off-the-record and fraudulent.
Also, if said employer forced you to work I'd expect to see punishment vs asking (possibly illegally) for you to work overtime - in the case of theft no-one gets the right to refuse.
> But again, why is it under civil law, not criminal?
NAL but I think its something to do with breaking/violating contracts versus the law. It makes sense to me. You seem to be focusing on the sums involved rather than the context of the theft.
> it's almost as if the laws were structured against poor people in favor of business
legal action is expected (in the US) to be funded by the participants, i.e. they put in a stake. This means those with less money will always have fewer options. A small business can also suffer this way.
The flip side is those with wealth have more to lose, and big pockets often attract lawsuits.
What we perhaps need is better union - no-win-no-fee lawyers to help combat wage theft, but I suspect the cost of layers now is so high that lower salaries just aren't worth the fight - 2634 USD pa might not cover a lot, so you'd need to pool resources and make it all v efficient. I'd be interested in what barriers there are to this.
> lead poisoning of the water of Flint, MI and its coverups a crime?
I think it should be, absolutely. The whole think with Depont dumping shit in rivers is also terrible. I wish the government were more pro-active in punishing these actions, and I'm quite frankly surprised how little action there is - a sign of corruption at a higher level?
Why should theft of $1,200 cash be a criminal act, while theft of $1,200 worth of services is not?
I don't see how this isn't fraudulent. There's no right to refuse after you've already done the work. And the employee must have originally arranged the work off-the-record because you don't tell the government you had an employee you paid $0.
The Wikipedia article points to other types of wage theft, like employee misclassification, which seems very much like either forging documents or illegal employment.
> I'd expect someone to see jail time
And if they don't, what do you expect to happen?
Because wage theft is rarely punished at all, much less resulting in jail time.
> legal action is expected (in the US) to be funded by the participants
In civil law, yes. Not criminal law.
Why is wage theft not part of criminal law (excepting a few jurisdictions), even for those cases where the employer is doing things off-the-record, fraudulently, and the employee has no right to refuse?
Even within civil law, why is the civil liability to employer so low? There's less need to pool resources if wage theft had treble damages.
> There's no right to refuse after you've already done the work
You implicitly agree to take on a debt when you don't ask for payment upfront, but either way you still should have a contract of some sort. Just because you call it theft doesn't make it so - failure to deliver on a promise (contract) doesn't retroactively become theft.
> the employee must have originally arranged the work off-the-record
Illegally?.. You don't get the same protection of law if you conspire to stiff the taxman.
> And if they don't, what do you expect to happen? Because wage theft..
My comment wrt expectation was about fraud, not "wage theft".
> even for those cases where the employer is doing things off-the-record, fraudulently, and the employee has no right to refuse?
off-the-record and fraudulent activity should be punished, but I see no evidence it is being ignored. If employees are also complicit, maybe that's the reason these cases are not heard.
> why is the civil liability to employer so low?
presumably b/c, without fraud, there should be all the evidence/materials to prove wrong doing in the normal manner (i.e. in court). I agree, though, that those who do it blatantly should be additionally punished if it seems they are banking on poor organisation/resources of their employees.
Shrug. Okay, let's take your points as true, and agree that wage theft shouldn't be criminalized more than it already it.
Why are the enforcement agencies responsible for preventing wage theft - including "the taxman" - so underfunded as compared to the police, even when we're talking about comparable economic effects in the billions of dollars?
When talking about correlations between race and being a "victim", why should we only (or primarily) consider criminal statistics?
Is there a national equivalent of the National Crime Victimization Survey which covers wage theft, workplace harassment, and other illegal activities which aren't part of criminal law?
> enforcement agencies responsible for preventing wage theft - including "the taxman"
The taxman isn't formally concerned with wage theft, they are concerned with (tax) fraud. I'm not sure what other enforcement agencies there would be - the Department of Labour?
> When talking about correlations between race and being a "victim", why should we only (or primarily) consider criminal statistics?
We shouldn't, but that's a generalisation of the original question: why is wage theft not treated like a criminal offence.
Also, correlations with race doesn't imply causation: If race correlates with X then anything that correlates with X will also correlate with race. Race correlates with wealth, so anything that correlates with wealth can be spuriously correlated to race. If you normalise for wealth and the racial correlation disappears (I do not know if this is the case) then you have a stronger case for a (primary) cause.
> which covers wage theft, workplace harassment
presumably court cases and lawsuit in non-criminal cases. and other non-legal things such as polls and complaints. But I'm not sure why you expand this to workplace harassment etc - legal resources should be better provided at the lower end, but the courts are the proper place for these civil issues, not criminalising (recategorising) everything for the sake of fixing a funding problem.
> Police exist to make sure that white neighborhoods don't start to feel like black neighborhoods, and that black neighborhoods don't start to feel like white neighborhoods.
All people ideally should live in places free of deleterious crime.
If I live in Walnut Creek I don’t care what happens on international boulevard in Oakland. If they pull all police it does not affect me much. It will affect the locals. Just as pulling police in WC would be a negative for me if I lived in Walnut Creek.
Even poor people do not want to live in crime zones but some people believe they be better are off living with crime because statistical policing is worse than no policing. I would disagree.
>How safe do you feel going from e.g pub/cinema/blabla to your home at 01:00?
This is an extremely low bar to clear. At least in these parts of the world street mugging is very uncommon. Yet, it has little to do with police work or presence.
>One theory is that the function of the police is to maintain order, by which is meant the status quo. Police exist to make sure that white neighborhoods don't start to feel like black neighborhoods, and that black neighborhoods don't start to feel like white neighborhoods.
That gettos of socioeconomicly disparaged people lead to an increased crime rate, and over generations lead to a subculture that perpetuates the cycle?
Or that specifically making things illegal because they are popular in a subculture can over decades drive those subcultures to integrate an inclination to crime in general into the subculture?
We can't effect change if we aren't willing to talk about the causes for the problem, or even acknowledge the existence of a problem.
That according to the FBI, black people commit 5-10x the violent felonies of white people, per capita.
They’re a uniquely violent demographic and it’s unsurprising that their arrest statistics don’t match other demographics.
The statistical differences are a result of that underlying difference in rate — rather than anything about the police. No change in police policy except ignoring violent felonies committed by blacks can fix the underlying per capita imbalance.
And no — that’s not a race thing, as shown by recent African migrants and other immigrants. It’s a cyclic poverty and crime thing… but that doesn’t change that there’s a correlation between violent felonies and race.
A correlation that gets carried forward into arrest statistics.
Not sure I follow the logic here. The FBI statistics you’re quoting pertain to arrests, correct? That requires police involvement. In fact, the FBI gathers its data from police departments themselves. So if there is a concentration of police activity aimed at specific communities those numbers are naturally going to be higher.
To my knowledge there’s no dataset on who actually does crimes regardless of police involvement (eg: including noninvestigated crimes)
So socioeconomic factors suddenly don't influence crime rate? Broken homes? Missing fathers? Drug epidemics? Rotten crabs in a bucket culture which disproportionately glorifies violence, drug use, misogyny, homophobia, none of these things influence crime rate? We don't even need to touch the subject of genetic predisposition to lower intelligence and/or aggression, which are scientifically documented facts.
Let me put it this way: would you willingly move to the ghetto, since as you imply these are friendly people just like you and me who are merely victims of disproportionate scrutiny by police?
Modern antiracism is a competition in mental gynmastics, built entirely upon denial of statistics and science. If you are going to acknowledge differences in culture then logical consistency requires acknowledging that certain cultures are more violent and criminal on average than others. That's the nature of our reality and to deny this fact is naive.
Okay, would you out yourself having these views? Surely if you’re so righteous and noble you’d have no problem writing a blog post on LinkedIn. You know it’s bogus, give me a break. 400 years of slavery, hate, segregation, and economic discrimination is what has led to these “ghettos” with over policing and high crime. The cause is multi-generational poverty. You want to solve the problem? Then go support reparations in the form of extra funding for everything in the “ghetto.”
Right. To me you come across as a coward unwilling to be racist in the open. What is intellectual about what you said exactly? You’re ignoring history and the underlying reasons for things to support your cowardly worldview. And please, how did “we” all agree that it’s a “nonsensical assertion” that crime rates only appear to be higher because of overpolicing”? Are you saying there is overpolicing but that it doesn’t artificially raise crime rates? Are you saying there’s no under policing in higher socioeconomic neighborhoods? Are you saying every crime by a white person is policed and accounted for? And every crime by a Black person is policed and accounted for? How do you know all this? You must have a great dataset.
You are projecting a lot onto me because you've been conditioned to have a visceral, fundamentally irrational, response to anything remotely fitting your definition of racism. There's nothing cowardly about speaking out against this sort of wokeness carefully enough to avoid being banned. I've said exactly enough to make my point.
200k+ years of divergent evolution, adaptation to drastically different environments, including geographically isolated interbreeding with other non-human homonids, lead to the same genetic differences that allow for accurate and precise geneologic inference from genetic samples, including the unique genetic makeup of african americans relative to other subsaharan african populations.
I'm not denying that history plays a role in the african american's plight. But you are completely dismissing the unpleasant implications of scientifically documented reality, blindly conflating the immoral nature of racial discrimination with the blatantly pseudo-scientific idea that genetic makeup does not influence outcomes on social scales, or worse, buying into the completely nonsensical idea that race doesn't exist. That's some 60 years of "one race human race" propaganda that you have heard for your entire life, so I don't entirely blame you for your naivety.
But evolution did not magically stop above the shoulders. The massive physiological differences - skeletal structure, musculature, heart/lung size, blood differences, body proportion, facial structure - are obvious. But although blindly virtuous individuals like yourself make it social suicide to discuss openly, these same differences are also quite convenient explanations for the variations in average achievement (and criminality) among various genetically distinct demographics. In fact we are aware of hundreds of specific genes, and their relative abundances, which are strongly correlated/anticorrelated with intelligence. Moreover we know of dozens of specific genes which directly and indirectly influence behavior, including the so called warrior gene which has been indisputably shown to completely change the metabolism of monomanines which directly influence behavior, including aggression.
Whether you believe that something is racist has literally zero bearing on whether or not it is a scientific fact. And architecting a society while blindly denying such demonstrated truths can only lead to suboptimal outcomes for all of stakeholders. Don't worry, none of this is an excuse to discriminate against individuals, because we are talking about statistical distributions.
But failing to acknowledge that such genetic differences have at least some degree of influence over disparate outcomes at scale in a perfect meritocracy is pure anti-intellectualism, and I am no coward for standing up to the woke mob.
An opinion can be founded on incorrect conclusions generated from incomplete data.
Poverty + racism + the powers that be identifying black people as "super predators" and touting that they are more likely to arrest and more harshly punish black people for crimes != black people are criminal.
The system nurtures poorer black people to be more criminal than white people. It's not the nature of any group of people to be criminal or as a rule to intentionally flout societal norms.
There is no genetic component of that scenario.
Therefore, it is not that black people are fundamentally bad and unfixable. Any failings that you can find inexorably lead back to the flaws of the system itself.
If it is that the system itself is flawed and moldy and in desperate need of repair, and the people who refuse to so much as ponder whether there could be an explanation other than "black people are bad", well, it is safe to say that those people are in thrall to the powers that be, servants to the status quo; they are people who do no directly racist thing and yet, as if by a dark satanic miracle, are racist due to their own willful ignorance.
If you want to make the case that's loosely "bad stuff happening to you during childhood and adolescence will make you more prone to criminal behavior" (a completely reasonable one btw) there are better ways to go about testing that hypothesis than working backwards from FBI crime statistics.
You're correct, and it's very concerning that people flaunt arrest statistics without considering that important element: arrests don't indicate higher rates of crime, they indicate higher rates of enforcement.
What's more sad is that this is clearly fueling racism of the worst kind - I call it pseudo-intellectual racism. It's not the kind born of ignorance and cultural differences. It's racism that was reached through broken reasoning, resulting in one who believes their racism is justified, and thus, isn't racism.
> The FBI statistics you’re quoting pertain to arrests, correct?
There aren’t enough murder victims for that gap in rate to be meaningfully wrong.
Blacks are 13% of the population while accounting for around 50% of arrests for violent felonies — with whites account for most of the remainder. So your comment is suggesting that the murder rate is something like 3x as high as reported — purely out of racism.
Do you have any evidence for that extraordinary claim — other than you don’t like the fact race is unfortunately correlated with crime?
I think the minimal explanation here is the unfortunate truth: some cultures are self-destructive and a legacy of racial abuse has left part of the US in a poor culture even though the racism impacting them has been removed.
Blacks are also about 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. If that's your only source of information, you would believe it was because blacks buy more marijuana, but that's not true. White and black use of marijuana is basically the same. This is why we shouldn't take felony statistics at face value for a demographic being "uniquely violent."
It's very easy to claim that you are not racist and that your views are based on statistics when the statistics themselves only show what they show because of the effects of decades of directed, focused and intentional racism.
> Maybe the problem isn't the way the police are operating.
The problems are multi-faceted:
- some crimes, especially relating to drugs, were specifically invented (or their sentencing made harsher) to target people of color. Just remember the infamous quote of Nixon's top advisor: "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
- poverty, drug abuse and crime form a vicious circle. Over decades, that was mostly restricted to people of color, but the opioid crisis showed that the very same relationship also holds up in White, former solidly middle class people.
- related: prison sentences, even short stints in jail, for bullshit charges can and will have disastrous consequences like loss of employment and housing, which combined with the complete lack of a social security network leaves many people with only crime as alternative to make ends meet.
- "predictive policing", similar to AI/ML technology, feeds on existing biases in the datasets. When the "classic way" shows a high rate of crime in a PoC and gang dominated neighborhood, any form of "prediction" will direct more police presence there than to White, "rich" neighborhoods.
- related: where there is more police, the police will also find more crime. To take the drugs example: two people exchanging cash for crack on the street or an old, run-down car are visible, easy targets for cops. A "cocaine taxi" delivering stuff in an upper-class 'hood, with a brand new 7 series BMW? Won't ever get stopped for a random traffic control, despite the crime being the exact same.
Crime can't be combatted solely by using police repression. Anyone who seriously wants to tackle it has to go deep to the roots: a lack of societally positive perspective for way too many people of color thanks to structural discrimination, toxin exposure in "bad 'hoods" (lead paint, industrial effluents, traffic-related stuff like particulate matter dust), quality of education in public schools, a lack of clean and safe drugs forcing people to street vendors, un(der)educated police officers, ... the list is endless, and to fight the problems requires immense amounts of money and political clout.
> When the "classic way" shows a high rate of crime in a PoC and gang dominated neighborhood, any form of "prediction" will direct more police presence there than to White, "rich" neighborhoods.
You're proposing to pull the police from the bad or black areas and have them police rich or white neighborhoods?
This smells like the white savior complex, no offense. A safe person from behind the keyboard, wants police removed from bad black areas...even though the people in those areas want more police
Because people in those neighborhoods realize that crime going unchecked with exacerbate the poverty cycle.
A lot of people break down the problems into a series of axioms or beliefs instead of systems of inputs and outputs. So while policing isn’t enough to solve the underlying problem, removing policing makes the underlying problems worse.
This is a very sensitive topic and the article is coming from a tabloid, not bringing any trust and objectiveness to the table. Having said that, the article does not convince me the model and the data are the real problem and cannot be solved, but current events are strongly suggesting a case of "we don't like what the data shows".
There are mentions of very bad policing practices (to call it politely), but there is no call for action in that direction. Why? The only 2 possible actions in regards to police are the extremes, "abolish the police" and "leave them do anything they want, no matter how bad it is"? Why there is no call to put policing back in the service of citizens, not as city paid thugs as they are in some cases?
I’m not sure the Graun is a tabloid beyond the current dimensions of its print edition- it’s certainly left leaning but generally regarded as a well respected newspaper. In terms of a call to action, that would better be on the opinion pages, or as a wider discussion here and elsewhere.
I'm all for cutting back on police budgets. Many police departments and justice systems seem to have turned into a self serving machine where self preservation and growth is its primary objective. I think defund was originally along those lines (cut back) but got propagandized into "abolish" by said self servicing agencies. The police budget in my medium sized city is $450 million a year.
I think ending qualified immunity would go a long way in keeping police power in check; they seem to have gone rogue in many municipalities today over the last 30 years or so. They seem more like an occupying army than a police force; something you should steer clear of because you can't predict what they will do, and they suffer few repercussions for their bad actions.
I get the garbage-in-garbage-out data side of things, but what I don't understand is how it seems to take issue with the idea that certain areas have higher crime rates. For example, how the new system looks like the old system because of the point it makes that some "laser zones" are now "neighborhood engagement zones".
This is sort of naively how I'd expect policing to work. I live in a small town between Chicago and Gary, IN, and I know where is safe and where is less so. I'm genuinely curious if "best practices" for the police are not to focus where crimes usually occur?
For example, in my town on Halloween, a 13 year old out trick or treating with his grandma was shot and killed. When I read where I sadly wasn't surprised. Like, should or shouldn't the police have been generally patrolling that area that night?
If the police patrol the bad areas, it's racial profiling. If they patrol the good areas, it's favouring the rich. The only winning move is not to patrol at all.
I’d hope police chiefs have thicker skin enough to make the right choice despite the (agenda pushing) flak they might receive. At the end of the day, it’s hurt feelings vs hurt people. The mission must come first!
That said, this is a position that requires a willingness to expose oneself to the pain and suffering of condemnation, in which the average person’s conviction would very quickly waver and capitulate to whichever wind the “public” opinion (read: corporate media mogul’s opinion) might blow. Haaarrddd stuff to expect.
But they don't get "flak". They get a community of people misrepresenting the facts making it look like they're racist. And that turns into a national news story. And that turns into them being told to resign because the people above them don't want the political heat.
I get that there are police officers that are, indeed, racially biased. But calling what the ones doing the right thing "flak" and dismissing it does a disservice to the good ones. It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
You can ignore the racial angle and still come away with the criticism that the culture among most police departments in American is VERY antagonistic towards the populations they serve. I could bang on about my personal experience but it's not super relevant here.
Just look at any major police scandal in the past decade. There's almost always an attempt at a cover up, and always a ton of officers that knew about it and did nothing. No matter what the crime or infraction is, police protect their own and circle up in the face of even the most benign criticism. There's a great book called I Got a Monster [1] that details Baltimore's infamous gun task force, and it's shocking how many people knew what they were up to for years. People who look the other way aren't good apples. For a bit of history, Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop [2] does a great job detailing the growth of us vs. them thinking among police nationally.
> It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
Police are almost NEVER fired. The number one goal of police unions is to prevent any firing for any reason ever, and they are very successful at that.
But police chiefs and above are forced to "resign" much more commonly. And it happens when the optics are bad on something that was the right thing to do (like policing higher crime areas more, when those areas have a higher rate of minorities).
I don't really se a lot of evidence for that, and I don't see how it relates to peoples' general displeasure with policing.
I would also note that the kind of policing like stop and frisk that people hate, is not the kind of policing that actually prevents crime. THere's a giant body of research on this. Across America police departments, regardless of how "focused" they are on high crime areas seem to have abysmal closure rates for murders, assaults, rapes, and property crimes. Police in the US are far too focused on dumb shit like clearing corners, and policing nuisance crime.
Moreover, who cares if a police chief, a political appointee, resigns? It means almost nothing for day to day policing which is governed by lower level union members and informed by trainings selected by the police unions.
> Having thick skin doesn't help when you're out of a job and can't pay your bills; because you did the right thing.
I didn't say anything about thick skin. The truth is that police are virtually never fired, and when they are they usually get rehired by other departments. I'd be surprised if you could find a police officer being fired for "doing the right thing" anywhere in America, unless it was whistle blowing.
As for police chiefs, who cares? They are political appointees, who are probably fired or forced to resign at similar rates to heads of other departments. I still doubt you can find a single police chief who was fired for "doing the right thing." Where in America has there ever been a police chief who was trying to put resources into solving violent crimes and was subsequently let go for it? Sure, some have been let go for cargo culting CompStat and failing, but that's a shitty idea anyway.
I think patrolling is ok. The problem starts when they start stopping people to look for drugs especially. I still remember when marijuana was illegal in LA. You could walk around in rich areas, smell it everywhere, but the cops wouldn't constantly stop people and raid houses like they did in poor areas.
So it makes sense to me that there is a perception that in poor areas police patrolling is done to catch the inhabitants whereas in rich areas it's done to protect the inhabitants.
the problem with this logic is that "crime rate" depends on what cops see, and whether they already people for it. since cops are much more likely to give warnings instead of tickets to white people, cringe rate statistics aren't very trustworthy.
Cops don’t give warnings for serious crimes, so those stats are far more trustworthy. Just look where murders happen to know the actual crime rate of an area.
No, but they still have to hear or see those serious crimes to pursue them.
No matter how you frame it, where the cops put their boots will necessarily increase crime reporting much like increasing a good's price necessitates a drop in demand.
No for murder they don’t need to be there. Neither armed robbery, rape, shootings, etc. There are a whole class of crimes we have reasonably good statistics on. Not perfect but good enough to know the trend and magnitude.
That doesn’t even make sense. If police aren’t trustworthy, why would someone report a crime. Suppose I want to report a crime in my house, that would involve inviting police inside. If I know them to be corrupt (maybe they go snooping or drop some drugs or steal from me), there’s no way I’d put myself in that situation, so I wouldn’t report the crime.
How do you know that? And what is a “serious” crime here. Anecdotally, it seems like every white lawyer Ive gotten to know has had dui, hard drugs, and more resulting in warnings rather than arrests.
The "crime rate" or "index" counts the number of Uniform Crime Report Part I "index crimes". These "serious" crimes are the following: aggravated assault, forcible rape, murder, and robbery (violent), and arson, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft (property).
Thank you for the citation. But your citation (on purpose or not) basically says the opposite of the parent comment. It seems even “serious” crime stats are manipulated by police: “ A common thread running through many of the incidents of police officials' alteration of crime statistics is that police commanders responded to pressure from politicians, the media, and the public to lower crime rates by downgrading felonies by intentionally mislabeling felonies, such as aggravated assault and burglary, as misdemeanors. Such a practice deflates rates of serious crimes and inflates rates of nonserious crimes.”
Outsiders and opportunists like to believe people in high crime areas want crime.
They hate crime as much as anyone else. There is a love hate relationship when some of your relations engage in low level crime and get caught in the fight against crime for the 20th time. “Why did they have to come for Gary again, he never hurt anybody”. But Gary didn’t want to go back in for robbery, so he ran and got shot. But when mrs Jensen has her house broken into she’s upset this happened to her, not realizing her son Gary while not “dangerous” is part of the atmosphere of crime that allows her house to get broken into.
One of the ways to combat that is to do what Giuliani did in New York and attack all crime including quality of life and other low level in addition to organized crime and gangs.
The other way is to do it the Soviet way and have neighbor rat on neighbor and ship the baddies off to the gulags (often they did worse than that).
What doesn’t seem to work is being nice to crime and suggest crime to go away. It needs persistent pushback whether in the US, Albania, China, Belize, etc.
One thing which would help is to have better funnels away from crime to divert people at high risk of joining crime into regular sustainable jobs. But this takes culture. If all your friends are making "good" money stealing catalytic converters and they constantly nag you to join them, it's hard to not get involved.
New York also has been getting increasingly richer. Mrs. Jensen's kids almost certainly don't have a deep-seated desire to commit robbery, they want the material results of having committed a robbery. If you want to stop robbery, getting better at catching Gary only makes him faster at running; you need to prevent Gary from deciding that joining his friends in a robbery is the most rational option.
There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid.
(None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)
The problem I have with targeting "quality of life" crime is often synonymous with extracting revenue and catering to the morals of the crowd that has the spare fucks to give about that sort of thing.
The cops where I live are very reasonable. They don't have the spare resources to waste their time handing out tickets for drinking on your porch or investigating other the victimless stuff. That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city.
That attitude depends on your station in life and gender (not many women will wish for that). Regardless of country or race, most people, if they had the means would move to less chaotic neighborhoods. It's not like quiet neighborhoods and suburbs don't exist in Nairobi or Sao Paolo or Moscow, etc., where people seek a quieter life.
Getting there is a matter of slow transformation. Even in Beijing or Tokyo, life wasn't always quiet and peaceful. It happened gradually as society evolved to a point where minor crime was more or less eliminated.
I'm sure there is always a small group of people who wish for wild-west frontier like chaos, it has some appeal, but after a while the majority of people just want peace and quiet and to be left alone.
> That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city.
Even there, it's not consistent. The cops just know better than to try to enforce the stupidest laws against people who might actually have political power.
Does patrolling the area prevent 13-year-olds from being shot and killed?
This sounds like a silly question, because it's so ingrained in how we think about policing and crime, but I think it's a question we have to reassess when crime is low. If an area is entirely lawless - in such a state of societal collapse that everyone is allying with a local gang for their protection - then having police patrol the area is likely useful in the same way as sending UN peacekeepers to areas controlled by warring armies or sending knights to clear out dangerous medieval roads. But most places in the world these days have functioning governments.
> One of the trick-or-treaters told police that he exchanged words with a man about 30 to 45 minutes before the shooting, which happened around 7:30 p.m. The man threatened to get a gun and shoot them, according to court documents.
> The group later saw a car with five or six people inside who appeared to be staring at them. The man who had exchanged words with one of the youths got out of the car with some of the other occupants. Another man took a “shooting stance” and shots were fired at the trick-or-treaters, court records said.
> A police officer captured Crews after the father of one of the youths chased him in the neighborhood, according to court records.
It's pretty clear that, even if this is a more dangerous area than some posh suburb of Chicago, it's still relatively safe, since not only were there kids out trick-or-treating by themselves, they felt comfortable getting in a verbal argument with someone who threatened to shoot them and they stuck around the area for 30-45 minutes. You don't do that in an area where shootings are particularly commonplace.
So, suppose that the police were patrolling the area. What would have been different? The man was caught - did he genuinely expect not to be caught, and would increasing police presence have dissuaded him? He also, apparently, got out of the car and started shooting - would there have been enough time for a police officer to react and save the child's life?
Meanwhile, the article talks about how "predictive policing" focuses on crimes that are not murder:
> Searching for a robbery suspect described only as a Black man between the ages of 16 and 18, officers stopped 161 people and arrested 10 at the intersection where the store was located in a span of two weeks. [...]
> Some encounters turned deadly. In 2016, LAPD shot and killed 31-year-old Keith Bursey Jr at the intersection, after the car Bursey was a passenger in was stopped by gang enforcement police investigating “an odor of marijuana”.
If a police patrol in Indiana had stopped and searched every car on Halloween with "an odor of marijuana," would they have found the car with the armed man and saved this teenager's life? If they had done a dragnet search for a teenager who stole some clothing, would they have made the area safer?
The problem (and I'm not saying I have an easy solution!) is that overpolicing doesn't particularly contribute to lowering crime rates, past a certain point. If you're trying to prevent a genocide in occupied Srebrenica, by all means, send in armed patrols and authorize them to use their arms. If you're trying to prevent some ten murders a year, all of which have unrelated causes, though? It's very much the "Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done" sort of reasoning.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that overpolicing can make the area even more dangerous by fostering a distrust of police - if you were a teenager in a bad ...
> it's still relatively safe, since not only were there kids out trick-or-treating by themselves, they felt comfortable getting in a verbal argument with someone who threatened to shoot them and they stuck around the area for 30-45 minutes. You don't do that in an area where shootings are particularly commonplace.
I think you might be underestimating how common this is in areas like where the shooting took place. Kids talking shit, kids being out by themselves, people shooting, threatening to shoot each other...
People who think like that generally never lived embedded in a high crime neighborhood or had to work in or traverse though on foot. I remember a buddy who had a friend in a different part of the city and wanted to go visit. She's like I'll send someone to the station to "escort" you guys. Without an "escort" people would have known we were not from the neighborhood and we could be in danger of assault. There is always a tension and things could break out at any moment (but not every moment) but life, like in war zones, has to go on, kids have to go to school and people have to work despite the dangers.
Using “crime” as a catch all term is a fundamental error in this analysis.
There’s no reasonable discussion of this issue that doesn’t start with assessing the goals, outcomes, and tactics, of America’s multi-generational War on (some) Drugs (when used by certain people).
The vast majority of policing and deciding which neighborhoods to patrol has literally nothing to do with stopping property crime and assaults. If it did this conversation would look totally different.
Worth noting that during the British election season in 2019, The Guardian was all too happy to report that Tory-imposed austerity had defunded the police and reduced patrols, exposing the working-class to criminal predation, and that Labour would give the police all the resources they need to tackle crime. But in an American context, we learn that putting too many cops on the beat is actually bad.
I think threads/posts like this often miss an obvious issue, perhaps because it is so hard to answer: why do certain countries need such policing in the first place?
There are many places (nations) where there are few shooting without police enforcement. Some of those places even have pretty liberal gun-ownership laws.
I think the answer is that those same places have a better feel to them: the people interact as if society is co-operative, united; rather than competitive and lead by virtuous independents.
Too much of the American philosophy is a harsh, cut-throat idea of competition at a individual level (I think at a group level it's not so bad, if individuals are still supported). Lack of basic, affordable healthcare options and an insurance mechanism/collusion that unnecessarily penalises anyone without (but few/no low-level plans available); "at-will" employment (with little oversight) as a norm that benefits employers way more than employees, legal norms highly biased towards the wealthy/connected.
Add in a history of slavery that created a large, black underclass; a "melting-pot" immigration philosophy that favours cultural/racial diversity over social cohesion, not to mention the historical in-fighting over resources, and you have little/none of that social comrade-ship at a national level.
Incidentally, I think something that could sooth the social problems a little is a common standard of "politeness" - which has little to do with respect, or approval. It's about your own behaviour, and a social contract that has to be followed, without regard to whether others do also. It's entirely possible to be polite and aggressive (passive-aggressive?) or show clear disapproval/distain without being impolite. It's rather a guideline for what is permitted (maybe wrt third-parties) in showing distain. I think this maintains the social-regulation impact of behaviour without the aspect of humiliation that becomes resentment and/or violence.
92 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadPredictive policing meant that more black people were arrested than white people. A new system, DICFP, was introduced.
DICFP means that more black people were arrested than white people.
Maybe the problem isn't the way the police are operating.
How do you determine if the police are being successful? If there are more arrests, are they more successful? Perhaps you ask about crime statistics - but those statistics are recorded by the police. I think we all have anecdotal stories of police refusing to take police reports or saying that something is a civil matter, or simply witnessing violations of minor laws (jaywalking, littering, etc.) and doing nothing. Not only does this mean that police can very easily control crime statistics, it means that if your actual goal is preventing some specific crimes, it's not guaranteed that the police are actually working on it.
One theory is that the function of the police is to maintain order, by which is meant the status quo. Police exist to make sure that white neighborhoods don't start to feel like black neighborhoods, and that black neighborhoods don't start to feel like white neighborhoods. In that model, the two data-driven approaches (predictive policing and DICFP) fall into the same trap that any hacker on HN who has run into office politics is familiar with: the data isn't being used to decide what to do, it's being used to defend an existing decision by powerful people and argue that the decision is right. Should we keep text-based content or pivot to video? Facebook's PMs, who keep the official record of whether people watch videos, have data claiming we should pivot to video. Should we keep patrolling the same neighborhoods we've always patrolled? The police, who keep the official record of crimes, have data saying that crime is bad there.
One could compare police statistics with victim surveys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Crime_Victimization_S...) to check how close they match. Or look at homicide statistics, that are not so easy to control.
But then one could no longer dismiss all inconvenient data with a simple "the police are racist". So one keeps one's head in the sand and sticks to that line.
So I think that just from a math point of view(no race/social stuff interpretation) , you can be in a situation where the starting data combined with bad algorithm will keep you stuck in a local minimum. Probably math people can model this issue with abstract terms not to offend any color of politics you prefer but you have the issue of bad implementation and as always garbage in is garbage out, so you might need an algorithm that starts with zero input and uses random data and converges slowly , but you still need a way to make sure you keep the algorithm evolving with changes over large time (maybe reset it and make it start over after a few years)
For example, why isn't wage theft included in the NCVS?
Surface-level answer: because in most jurisdictions, it's not a criminal offense. Steal $100 from your employer? Go to jail. Your employer requires unpaid overtime adding up to $1,000? A slap on the wrist at best.
Yet employees are victims to billions of dollars of wage theft every year! "Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed workers experienced at least one pay-related violation in the week prior to the survey. On average the workers in the three cities lost a total of $2,634 annually due to workplace violations, out of an average income of $17,616, which translates into wage theft of fifteen percent of income." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft . Does the NCVS list that over half of employees are victims of wage theft?
Why, it's almost as if the laws were structured against poor people in favor of business. Hmm, and ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the poor population.
What about the illegal collusion between Silicon Valley companies to suppress worker wages? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... . Were all 64,000 employees counted as victims in the NCVS? Again, no, because that was a civil suit, not a crime that the police should be involved in.
But again, why is it under civil law, not criminal? (There's no hint that this wage theft is due to racism.)
Or, were the events leading to the lead poisoning of the water of Flint, MI and its coverups a crime? If so, why isn't the population of Flint included as victims? If not, why not?
Or, in discussions related to the 'school-prison nexus', when disproportionate disciplinary actions are taken against students of color, are those students counted as victims? Why or why not?
You are correct. All this inconvenient data indeed makes people dismiss the 'simple "the police are racist"' and replace it with "the system is both racist and biased in favor of the rich".
You raise good points, and use them to deftly move past all the claims of racism that homicide statistics and victim surveys largely (but not entirely) refute.
1. Directly, wage theft affects people's ability to get out of poverty and build wealth. Wage theft is a problem that disproportionately affects lower-income people (because they're more likely to rely on wages, instead of salaries or investments) and is disproportionately worse for lower-wealth people (because they can't as easily absorb a loss of $1,000 by covering it out of savings). We know, from those very same victim surveys, that poverty correlates with crime. In fact https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/household-poverty-a... points out that poverty correlates with being a victim of crime.
2. Less directly, but more interestingly from a philosophical standpoint, wage theft is a great example of a crime where how you classify it impacts statistics. Victim surveys tend to look at robberies. Wage theft isn't a "robbery," but if you lose $1,000 from your employer, that's much worse for you than being mugged at knife-point and losing $100 from your wallet. And if you look at homicides: Los Angeles has 200-something homicides per year. It also has 40-something police-caused deaths per year, which are generally not called "homicides." It also has 200-something deaths from car accidents a year, which are also generally not called "homicides." You're equally dead through any of these means, but crime surveys create a specific definition of "violent crime" that only looks at certain forms of violence.
Is your metric only homicide statistics?
geofft commented "police refusing to take police reports or saying that something is a civil matter". My examples were meant to reinforce that issue, where crime statistics place far less weight on theft of services than theft of property, even when the monetary amounts involved are similar.
FWIW, wage theft isn't only a corporate crime. If I promise to pay someone to mow my lawn, and he does it, and I don't pay him (perhaps threatening to call the police because I suspect he's an immigrant without work papers), then that's also wage theft, even though I am not a corporation.
You're welcome to continue onto ever more abstract or systemic claims of racism and bias, but please don't begrudge me pointing out when some of the stepping stones crumble along the way.
On could also compare other statistics, and show that police are over-funded compared to other sorts of enforcement agencies.
The very act of picking which statistics to use is itself biased.
Simply pointing to NCVS is not going to be convincing. Which numbers should we look at? What correlations should we draw? How should we understand the biases in the interpretation? What alternative explanations are there for whatever it is you haven't actually said?
Without pointers to what what your actual point is, I figured it was just as appropriate to point out how your foundation is itself crumbled.
Because the two are not at all the same.
I would imagine the reason is that everything should already be on record, and you'd be expected to take said employer to court. That said, if employer tried to explicitly commit fraud e.g. forge documents, illegal employment, I'd expect someone to see jail time.
Theft, on the other hand, is inherently off-the-record and fraudulent.
Also, if said employer forced you to work I'd expect to see punishment vs asking (possibly illegally) for you to work overtime - in the case of theft no-one gets the right to refuse.
> But again, why is it under civil law, not criminal?
NAL but I think its something to do with breaking/violating contracts versus the law. It makes sense to me. You seem to be focusing on the sums involved rather than the context of the theft.
> it's almost as if the laws were structured against poor people in favor of business
legal action is expected (in the US) to be funded by the participants, i.e. they put in a stake. This means those with less money will always have fewer options. A small business can also suffer this way.
The flip side is those with wealth have more to lose, and big pockets often attract lawsuits.
What we perhaps need is better union - no-win-no-fee lawyers to help combat wage theft, but I suspect the cost of layers now is so high that lower salaries just aren't worth the fight - 2634 USD pa might not cover a lot, so you'd need to pool resources and make it all v efficient. I'd be interested in what barriers there are to this.
> lead poisoning of the water of Flint, MI and its coverups a crime?
I think it should be, absolutely. The whole think with Depont dumping shit in rivers is also terrible. I wish the government were more pro-active in punishing these actions, and I'm quite frankly surprised how little action there is - a sign of corruption at a higher level?
Which, as you seem to concur, makes it hard for low-wage workers to fight against wage theft.
> Theft, on the other hand, is inherently off-the-record and fraudulent.
The Wikipedia entry for wage theft links to https://www.npr.org/2013/04/10/176677299/construction-boomin... with an example of an employer not paying $1,200 in wages until the employee went to the Texas Workforce Commission.
Why should theft of $1,200 cash be a criminal act, while theft of $1,200 worth of services is not?
I don't see how this isn't fraudulent. There's no right to refuse after you've already done the work. And the employee must have originally arranged the work off-the-record because you don't tell the government you had an employee you paid $0.
The Wikipedia article points to other types of wage theft, like employee misclassification, which seems very much like either forging documents or illegal employment.
> I'd expect someone to see jail time
And if they don't, what do you expect to happen?
Because wage theft is rarely punished at all, much less resulting in jail time.
> legal action is expected (in the US) to be funded by the participants
In civil law, yes. Not criminal law.
Why is wage theft not part of criminal law (excepting a few jurisdictions), even for those cases where the employer is doing things off-the-record, fraudulently, and the employee has no right to refuse?
Even within civil law, why is the civil liability to employer so low? There's less need to pool resources if wage theft had treble damages.
You implicitly agree to take on a debt when you don't ask for payment upfront, but either way you still should have a contract of some sort. Just because you call it theft doesn't make it so - failure to deliver on a promise (contract) doesn't retroactively become theft.
> the employee must have originally arranged the work off-the-record
Illegally?.. You don't get the same protection of law if you conspire to stiff the taxman.
> And if they don't, what do you expect to happen? Because wage theft..
My comment wrt expectation was about fraud, not "wage theft".
> even for those cases where the employer is doing things off-the-record, fraudulently, and the employee has no right to refuse?
off-the-record and fraudulent activity should be punished, but I see no evidence it is being ignored. If employees are also complicit, maybe that's the reason these cases are not heard.
> why is the civil liability to employer so low?
presumably b/c, without fraud, there should be all the evidence/materials to prove wrong doing in the normal manner (i.e. in court). I agree, though, that those who do it blatantly should be additionally punished if it seems they are banking on poor organisation/resources of their employees.
Why are the enforcement agencies responsible for preventing wage theft - including "the taxman" - so underfunded as compared to the police, even when we're talking about comparable economic effects in the billions of dollars?
When talking about correlations between race and being a "victim", why should we only (or primarily) consider criminal statistics?
Is there a national equivalent of the National Crime Victimization Survey which covers wage theft, workplace harassment, and other illegal activities which aren't part of criminal law?
I dunno. Me code.
The taxman isn't formally concerned with wage theft, they are concerned with (tax) fraud. I'm not sure what other enforcement agencies there would be - the Department of Labour?
> When talking about correlations between race and being a "victim", why should we only (or primarily) consider criminal statistics?
We shouldn't, but that's a generalisation of the original question: why is wage theft not treated like a criminal offence.
Also, correlations with race doesn't imply causation: If race correlates with X then anything that correlates with X will also correlate with race. Race correlates with wealth, so anything that correlates with wealth can be spuriously correlated to race. If you normalise for wealth and the racial correlation disappears (I do not know if this is the case) then you have a stronger case for a (primary) cause.
> which covers wage theft, workplace harassment
presumably court cases and lawsuit in non-criminal cases. and other non-legal things such as polls and complaints. But I'm not sure why you expand this to workplace harassment etc - legal resources should be better provided at the lower end, but the courts are the proper place for these civil issues, not criminalising (recategorising) everything for the sake of fixing a funding problem.
Ermmm.. what?
If I live in Walnut Creek I don’t care what happens on international boulevard in Oakland. If they pull all police it does not affect me much. It will affect the locals. Just as pulling police in WC would be a negative for me if I lived in Walnut Creek.
Even poor people do not want to live in crime zones but some people believe they be better are off living with crime because statistical policing is worse than no policing. I would disagree.
I imagine Walnut Creek is a lot like Marin County these days.
My county has very little crime. We basically have east San Rafael, and Marin City.
It seems like too many roving cops have made those two areas worse. Maybe instead of roaming around they just show up quick when called?
As to the other 90% of my county, I can't even call them cops anymore.
They are Revenue Collectors period. They drive around, hide behind hedges, and look for traffic violations, and most are minor.
One of the things:
How safe do you feel going from e.g pub/cinema/blabla to your home at 01:00?
It's not perfect proxy, of course.
This is an extremely low bar to clear. At least in these parts of the world street mugging is very uncommon. Yet, it has little to do with police work or presence.
You should get an athletics medal for that leap.
What is the problem then? :)
Or that specifically making things illegal because they are popular in a subculture can over decades drive those subcultures to integrate an inclination to crime in general into the subculture?
We can't effect change if we aren't willing to talk about the causes for the problem, or even acknowledge the existence of a problem.
They’re a uniquely violent demographic and it’s unsurprising that their arrest statistics don’t match other demographics.
The statistical differences are a result of that underlying difference in rate — rather than anything about the police. No change in police policy except ignoring violent felonies committed by blacks can fix the underlying per capita imbalance.
And no — that’s not a race thing, as shown by recent African migrants and other immigrants. It’s a cyclic poverty and crime thing… but that doesn’t change that there’s a correlation between violent felonies and race.
A correlation that gets carried forward into arrest statistics.
To my knowledge there’s no dataset on who actually does crimes regardless of police involvement (eg: including noninvestigated crimes)
Let me put it this way: would you willingly move to the ghetto, since as you imply these are friendly people just like you and me who are merely victims of disproportionate scrutiny by police?
Modern antiracism is a competition in mental gynmastics, built entirely upon denial of statistics and science. If you are going to acknowledge differences in culture then logical consistency requires acknowledging that certain cultures are more violent and criminal on average than others. That's the nature of our reality and to deny this fact is naive.
That's slimy, anti-intellectual reasoning. The fact that an opinion is unpopular with the mob does not imply that it is wrong.
In any case at least we've moved past the nonsensical assertion that crime rates only appear to be higher because of overpolicing.
200k+ years of divergent evolution, adaptation to drastically different environments, including geographically isolated interbreeding with other non-human homonids, lead to the same genetic differences that allow for accurate and precise geneologic inference from genetic samples, including the unique genetic makeup of african americans relative to other subsaharan african populations.
I'm not denying that history plays a role in the african american's plight. But you are completely dismissing the unpleasant implications of scientifically documented reality, blindly conflating the immoral nature of racial discrimination with the blatantly pseudo-scientific idea that genetic makeup does not influence outcomes on social scales, or worse, buying into the completely nonsensical idea that race doesn't exist. That's some 60 years of "one race human race" propaganda that you have heard for your entire life, so I don't entirely blame you for your naivety.
But evolution did not magically stop above the shoulders. The massive physiological differences - skeletal structure, musculature, heart/lung size, blood differences, body proportion, facial structure - are obvious. But although blindly virtuous individuals like yourself make it social suicide to discuss openly, these same differences are also quite convenient explanations for the variations in average achievement (and criminality) among various genetically distinct demographics. In fact we are aware of hundreds of specific genes, and their relative abundances, which are strongly correlated/anticorrelated with intelligence. Moreover we know of dozens of specific genes which directly and indirectly influence behavior, including the so called warrior gene which has been indisputably shown to completely change the metabolism of monomanines which directly influence behavior, including aggression.
Whether you believe that something is racist has literally zero bearing on whether or not it is a scientific fact. And architecting a society while blindly denying such demonstrated truths can only lead to suboptimal outcomes for all of stakeholders. Don't worry, none of this is an excuse to discriminate against individuals, because we are talking about statistical distributions.
But failing to acknowledge that such genetic differences have at least some degree of influence over disparate outcomes at scale in a perfect meritocracy is pure anti-intellectualism, and I am no coward for standing up to the woke mob.
Poverty + racism + the powers that be identifying black people as "super predators" and touting that they are more likely to arrest and more harshly punish black people for crimes != black people are criminal.
The system nurtures poorer black people to be more criminal than white people. It's not the nature of any group of people to be criminal or as a rule to intentionally flout societal norms.
There is no genetic component of that scenario.
Therefore, it is not that black people are fundamentally bad and unfixable. Any failings that you can find inexorably lead back to the flaws of the system itself.
If it is that the system itself is flawed and moldy and in desperate need of repair, and the people who refuse to so much as ponder whether there could be an explanation other than "black people are bad", well, it is safe to say that those people are in thrall to the powers that be, servants to the status quo; they are people who do no directly racist thing and yet, as if by a dark satanic miracle, are racist due to their own willful ignorance.
> genetic predisposition to lower intelligence and/or aggression
> certain cultures are more violent and criminal
Anti-racism is a competition against your mentality. Why put in so much effort to make things harder for others?
What's more sad is that this is clearly fueling racism of the worst kind - I call it pseudo-intellectual racism. It's not the kind born of ignorance and cultural differences. It's racism that was reached through broken reasoning, resulting in one who believes their racism is justified, and thus, isn't racism.
There aren’t enough murder victims for that gap in rate to be meaningfully wrong.
Blacks are 13% of the population while accounting for around 50% of arrests for violent felonies — with whites account for most of the remainder. So your comment is suggesting that the murder rate is something like 3x as high as reported — purely out of racism.
Do you have any evidence for that extraordinary claim — other than you don’t like the fact race is unfortunately correlated with crime?
I think the minimal explanation here is the unfortunate truth: some cultures are self-destructive and a legacy of racial abuse has left part of the US in a poor culture even though the racism impacting them has been removed.
As Kanye would say — the slavery is in your mind.
There’s 21,000 murders a year, and we’d need to add 40,000+ to fix the ratio — with only 2,000 unfound missing persons a year.
Your post “sounds smart” while proposing ridiculous things — like we’re somehow missing 40,000 murder victims a year.
Okay — where are the missing murder victims?
The problems are multi-faceted:
- some crimes, especially relating to drugs, were specifically invented (or their sentencing made harsher) to target people of color. Just remember the infamous quote of Nixon's top advisor: "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
- poverty, drug abuse and crime form a vicious circle. Over decades, that was mostly restricted to people of color, but the opioid crisis showed that the very same relationship also holds up in White, former solidly middle class people.
- related: prison sentences, even short stints in jail, for bullshit charges can and will have disastrous consequences like loss of employment and housing, which combined with the complete lack of a social security network leaves many people with only crime as alternative to make ends meet.
- "predictive policing", similar to AI/ML technology, feeds on existing biases in the datasets. When the "classic way" shows a high rate of crime in a PoC and gang dominated neighborhood, any form of "prediction" will direct more police presence there than to White, "rich" neighborhoods.
- related: where there is more police, the police will also find more crime. To take the drugs example: two people exchanging cash for crack on the street or an old, run-down car are visible, easy targets for cops. A "cocaine taxi" delivering stuff in an upper-class 'hood, with a brand new 7 series BMW? Won't ever get stopped for a random traffic control, despite the crime being the exact same.
Crime can't be combatted solely by using police repression. Anyone who seriously wants to tackle it has to go deep to the roots: a lack of societally positive perspective for way too many people of color thanks to structural discrimination, toxin exposure in "bad 'hoods" (lead paint, industrial effluents, traffic-related stuff like particulate matter dust), quality of education in public schools, a lack of clean and safe drugs forcing people to street vendors, un(der)educated police officers, ... the list is endless, and to fight the problems requires immense amounts of money and political clout.
You're proposing to pull the police from the bad or black areas and have them police rich or white neighborhoods?
This smells like the white savior complex, no offense. A safe person from behind the keyboard, wants police removed from bad black areas...even though the people in those areas want more police
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
A lot of people break down the problems into a series of axioms or beliefs instead of systems of inputs and outputs. So while policing isn’t enough to solve the underlying problem, removing policing makes the underlying problems worse.
Worth noting this is disputed.
Doesn't make the point itself invalid though - just look at punishment disparities between crack cocaine and ordinary cocaine (https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-fed...).
There are mentions of very bad policing practices (to call it politely), but there is no call for action in that direction. Why? The only 2 possible actions in regards to police are the extremes, "abolish the police" and "leave them do anything they want, no matter how bad it is"? Why there is no call to put policing back in the service of citizens, not as city paid thugs as they are in some cases?
2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/13/guardian-and-o...
I think ending qualified immunity would go a long way in keeping police power in check; they seem to have gone rogue in many municipalities today over the last 30 years or so. They seem more like an occupying army than a police force; something you should steer clear of because you can't predict what they will do, and they suffer few repercussions for their bad actions.
This is sort of naively how I'd expect policing to work. I live in a small town between Chicago and Gary, IN, and I know where is safe and where is less so. I'm genuinely curious if "best practices" for the police are not to focus where crimes usually occur?
For example, in my town on Halloween, a 13 year old out trick or treating with his grandma was shot and killed. When I read where I sadly wasn't surprised. Like, should or shouldn't the police have been generally patrolling that area that night?
That said, this is a position that requires a willingness to expose oneself to the pain and suffering of condemnation, in which the average person’s conviction would very quickly waver and capitulate to whichever wind the “public” opinion (read: corporate media mogul’s opinion) might blow. Haaarrddd stuff to expect.
But they don't get "flak". They get a community of people misrepresenting the facts making it look like they're racist. And that turns into a national news story. And that turns into them being told to resign because the people above them don't want the political heat.
I get that there are police officers that are, indeed, racially biased. But calling what the ones doing the right thing "flak" and dismissing it does a disservice to the good ones. It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
Just look at any major police scandal in the past decade. There's almost always an attempt at a cover up, and always a ton of officers that knew about it and did nothing. No matter what the crime or infraction is, police protect their own and circle up in the face of even the most benign criticism. There's a great book called I Got a Monster [1] that details Baltimore's infamous gun task force, and it's shocking how many people knew what they were up to for years. People who look the other way aren't good apples. For a bit of history, Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop [2] does a great job detailing the growth of us vs. them thinking among police nationally.
> It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
Police are almost NEVER fired. The number one goal of police unions is to prevent any firing for any reason ever, and they are very successful at that.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Got-Monster-Americas-Corrupt-Police/d...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...
But police chiefs and above are forced to "resign" much more commonly. And it happens when the optics are bad on something that was the right thing to do (like policing higher crime areas more, when those areas have a higher rate of minorities).
I would also note that the kind of policing like stop and frisk that people hate, is not the kind of policing that actually prevents crime. THere's a giant body of research on this. Across America police departments, regardless of how "focused" they are on high crime areas seem to have abysmal closure rates for murders, assaults, rapes, and property crimes. Police in the US are far too focused on dumb shit like clearing corners, and policing nuisance crime.
Moreover, who cares if a police chief, a political appointee, resigns? It means almost nothing for day to day policing which is governed by lower level union members and informed by trainings selected by the police unions.
It doesn't. It relates to the post I was replying to, which said that
> I’d hope police chiefs have thicker skin enough to make the right choice despite the (agenda pushing) flak they might receive.
Having thick skin doesn't help when you're out of a job and can't pay your bills; because you did the right thing.
I didn't say anything about thick skin. The truth is that police are virtually never fired, and when they are they usually get rehired by other departments. I'd be surprised if you could find a police officer being fired for "doing the right thing" anywhere in America, unless it was whistle blowing.
As for police chiefs, who cares? They are political appointees, who are probably fired or forced to resign at similar rates to heads of other departments. I still doubt you can find a single police chief who was fired for "doing the right thing." Where in America has there ever been a police chief who was trying to put resources into solving violent crimes and was subsequently let go for it? Sure, some have been let go for cargo culting CompStat and failing, but that's a shitty idea anyway.
So it makes sense to me that there is a perception that in poor areas police patrolling is done to catch the inhabitants whereas in rich areas it's done to protect the inhabitants.
No matter how you frame it, where the cops put their boots will necessarily increase crime reporting much like increasing a good's price necessitates a drop in demand.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/criminal-justice/cr...
They hate crime as much as anyone else. There is a love hate relationship when some of your relations engage in low level crime and get caught in the fight against crime for the 20th time. “Why did they have to come for Gary again, he never hurt anybody”. But Gary didn’t want to go back in for robbery, so he ran and got shot. But when mrs Jensen has her house broken into she’s upset this happened to her, not realizing her son Gary while not “dangerous” is part of the atmosphere of crime that allows her house to get broken into.
One of the ways to combat that is to do what Giuliani did in New York and attack all crime including quality of life and other low level in addition to organized crime and gangs.
The other way is to do it the Soviet way and have neighbor rat on neighbor and ship the baddies off to the gulags (often they did worse than that).
What doesn’t seem to work is being nice to crime and suggest crime to go away. It needs persistent pushback whether in the US, Albania, China, Belize, etc.
One thing which would help is to have better funnels away from crime to divert people at high risk of joining crime into regular sustainable jobs. But this takes culture. If all your friends are making "good" money stealing catalytic converters and they constantly nag you to join them, it's hard to not get involved.
There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid.
During Giuliani's tenure, unemployment in Manhattan dropped from almost 10% to 5%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN The median income rose from $54K to $93K, which even adjusting for inflation is a >40% increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 The number of people below the poverty line dropped from 340K to 270K even as population grew slightly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061
(None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)
The cops where I live are very reasonable. They don't have the spare resources to waste their time handing out tickets for drinking on your porch or investigating other the victimless stuff. That said, the letter of the law is absolutely not consistent with the way people live in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods of my city.
Getting there is a matter of slow transformation. Even in Beijing or Tokyo, life wasn't always quiet and peaceful. It happened gradually as society evolved to a point where minor crime was more or less eliminated.
I'm sure there is always a small group of people who wish for wild-west frontier like chaos, it has some appeal, but after a while the majority of people just want peace and quiet and to be left alone.
Even there, it's not consistent. The cops just know better than to try to enforce the stupidest laws against people who might actually have political power.
This sounds like a silly question, because it's so ingrained in how we think about policing and crime, but I think it's a question we have to reassess when crime is low. If an area is entirely lawless - in such a state of societal collapse that everyone is allying with a local gang for their protection - then having police patrol the area is likely useful in the same way as sending UN peacekeepers to areas controlled by warring armies or sending knights to clear out dangerous medieval roads. But most places in the world these days have functioning governments.
A news report about the shooting (https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2021-11-03/indiana-m...) says:
> One of the trick-or-treaters told police that he exchanged words with a man about 30 to 45 minutes before the shooting, which happened around 7:30 p.m. The man threatened to get a gun and shoot them, according to court documents.
> The group later saw a car with five or six people inside who appeared to be staring at them. The man who had exchanged words with one of the youths got out of the car with some of the other occupants. Another man took a “shooting stance” and shots were fired at the trick-or-treaters, court records said.
> A police officer captured Crews after the father of one of the youths chased him in the neighborhood, according to court records.
It's pretty clear that, even if this is a more dangerous area than some posh suburb of Chicago, it's still relatively safe, since not only were there kids out trick-or-treating by themselves, they felt comfortable getting in a verbal argument with someone who threatened to shoot them and they stuck around the area for 30-45 minutes. You don't do that in an area where shootings are particularly commonplace.
So, suppose that the police were patrolling the area. What would have been different? The man was caught - did he genuinely expect not to be caught, and would increasing police presence have dissuaded him? He also, apparently, got out of the car and started shooting - would there have been enough time for a police officer to react and save the child's life?
Meanwhile, the article talks about how "predictive policing" focuses on crimes that are not murder:
> Searching for a robbery suspect described only as a Black man between the ages of 16 and 18, officers stopped 161 people and arrested 10 at the intersection where the store was located in a span of two weeks. [...]
> Some encounters turned deadly. In 2016, LAPD shot and killed 31-year-old Keith Bursey Jr at the intersection, after the car Bursey was a passenger in was stopped by gang enforcement police investigating “an odor of marijuana”.
If a police patrol in Indiana had stopped and searched every car on Halloween with "an odor of marijuana," would they have found the car with the armed man and saved this teenager's life? If they had done a dragnet search for a teenager who stole some clothing, would they have made the area safer?
The problem (and I'm not saying I have an easy solution!) is that overpolicing doesn't particularly contribute to lowering crime rates, past a certain point. If you're trying to prevent a genocide in occupied Srebrenica, by all means, send in armed patrols and authorize them to use their arms. If you're trying to prevent some ten murders a year, all of which have unrelated causes, though? It's very much the "Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done" sort of reasoning.
And that doesn't even get into the fact that overpolicing can make the area even more dangerous by fostering a distrust of police - if you were a teenager in a bad ...
I think you might be underestimating how common this is in areas like where the shooting took place. Kids talking shit, kids being out by themselves, people shooting, threatening to shoot each other...
There’s no reasonable discussion of this issue that doesn’t start with assessing the goals, outcomes, and tactics, of America’s multi-generational War on (some) Drugs (when used by certain people).
The vast majority of policing and deciding which neighborhoods to patrol has literally nothing to do with stopping property crime and assaults. If it did this conversation would look totally different.
There are many places (nations) where there are few shooting without police enforcement. Some of those places even have pretty liberal gun-ownership laws.
I think the answer is that those same places have a better feel to them: the people interact as if society is co-operative, united; rather than competitive and lead by virtuous independents.
Too much of the American philosophy is a harsh, cut-throat idea of competition at a individual level (I think at a group level it's not so bad, if individuals are still supported). Lack of basic, affordable healthcare options and an insurance mechanism/collusion that unnecessarily penalises anyone without (but few/no low-level plans available); "at-will" employment (with little oversight) as a norm that benefits employers way more than employees, legal norms highly biased towards the wealthy/connected.
Add in a history of slavery that created a large, black underclass; a "melting-pot" immigration philosophy that favours cultural/racial diversity over social cohesion, not to mention the historical in-fighting over resources, and you have little/none of that social comrade-ship at a national level.
Incidentally, I think something that could sooth the social problems a little is a common standard of "politeness" - which has little to do with respect, or approval. It's about your own behaviour, and a social contract that has to be followed, without regard to whether others do also. It's entirely possible to be polite and aggressive (passive-aggressive?) or show clear disapproval/distain without being impolite. It's rather a guideline for what is permitted (maybe wrt third-parties) in showing distain. I think this maintains the social-regulation impact of behaviour without the aspect of humiliation that becomes resentment and/or violence.