If you're rich and/or highly mobile, you retreat to avoid this as much as you can. For everyone else, you try to maintain order where you are.
Let's say (not so hypothetically) that I'm tired of the drug dealer across the street, between the trash in the street, the bags of used needles, the random scrapes of my car by beaters flying through, and on and on. I could, have, and do report this all to the police, but they will always deescalate things to minimize workload, or in some other way that is clearly not focused on maintaining law and order. I thought it was compelling the time that one of their clients showed up on my porch, beating on the door yelling with a hole in his face from a gunshot wound, but the police didn't do anything with that, either (other than, for once, actually showing up.)
So I'm very sure that my most effective means of improving the situation is to put cameras on their affairs from my house and get all the other adjacent neighbors to do likewise. The dealers have felt the heat, and now their clients are normally more respectful and quiet, presumably at the prompting of the dealers.
If they want anonymity when being disruptive or acting illegally, they should go find somewhere where they can blend in.
The majority of consumers will never be tech-savvy. So a bunch of security cameras really means a bunch of security cameras whose software is 100% controlled by some central authority. I'd feel safer if it was controlled by the actual home-owner.
With the GDPR in the EU, the chilling effects of complying with the regulation affect the homeowners, as opposed to a large company or government department.
This! Even as someone who is pretty tech savvy accomplishing this is hard enough that it's been a deterrent. You can get cheap setups that keep very limited data recorded locally, or easier at some central cloud provider. Local storage with cloud backup to S3 or similar that you control becomes so much more complicated and expensive.
I think local storage is generally fine. Depending on the format and frame rate, 2TB is reasonably cheap and can hold about a month of video from several cameras.
Perhaps, not unlike the NRA originating from a perceived need to educate the citizenry widely on how to use firearms, a "National Observers Organization" is called for to help citizens self-organize, promulgate knowledge, and spread good security practices?
I'm going to leave the naming up to someone else; "NOO" doesn't seem a great acronym for a popular organization.
There are plenty of ways to do this without data going to the cloud. Plenty of non-cloud connected cameras- though many are more commercially oriented- and software that's reasonably priced like BlueIris. Everything is recorded in H264 so storage isn't crazy if you don't keep all of it forever. Many cameras also end up at (or can be set to) 10-15 FPS, which also cuts down storage requirements.
BlueIris is actually pretty nice. I got a bunch of cameras from ebay and such- some wireless, some wired and POE powered- and just use BlueIris to manage them locally. Ended up with more cameras that I really needed, so I also have one permanently pointed at a bird feeder for fun...
Whatever the non cloud solutions are, they obviously are nowhere as cheap and easy as the cloud solutions based on the success of the cloud solutions.
A solution that someone can pickup at Costco and setup via scanning some QR code in 10 minutes is always going to win versus spending an hour or many hours delving into networking and figuring out what equipment you need and troubleshooting.
Nobody wants to deal with DDNS or port forwarding or other issues when trying to remotely access the video either.
Privacy at the very top is extraordinarily expensive. It's extraordinarily inexpensive at the very bottom.
It's dramatically easier to disappear in terms of privacy if you're poor than if you're in the middle class.
You're not going to show up in stores as often (less surveillence footage, less facial recognition). You're not as likely to own or use a smartphone, which means no device in your pocket tracking you everywhere. You're far less likely to utilize Uber type services, Instacart, et al. You're far less likely to own a credit card, and more likely to use cash; which means a far smaller purchase history/footprint to profile you with. You're far less likely to often use the Internet, which means a smaller online footprint; that also goes for social media. You're less likely to own various smart devices that will spy on you. You're far less likely to own real-estate or businesses, which often show up on public records at some point. You're less likely to have various entertainment subscriptions (Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, cable, and so on), which again reduces your footprint vs most everybody else. Your job requirements are typically far lower and far less connected, leaving a smaller footprint (no zoom meetings, no zillions of digital profiles, no linkedin, no networking, no slack, no conferences, and on and on).
If you don't have purchasing power, the privacy invading fiends in the commercial sphere mostly don't care if you exist or not. They are not motivated to go out of their way to track you. You don't count, you don't show up in their numbers. Think of the numerous services (Kroger or Walgreens cards; Peloton; eBay, Etsy, PayPal, Coinbase, brokerage accounts; Apple services; and 400 others) the middle class and above sign on to, and how they get tracked by them regularly.
Politically you also matter a lot less, because you're far less likely to vote if you're poor vs middle class and above. So you're tracked, profiled and contacted far less often by the political machine. And you have no money to give them, so they care that much less about keeping tabs on you.
IMO commerce with Apple has upped the game on privacy for everyone. Apple has email aliases so that ordinary people can hide their email. Apple has private relay so that ordinary people can experience TOR lite. Apple has Apple Pay so that stores hardly know anything about you. With Sign up with Apple you can create accounts which hand over very little information.
This does not mean that Apple is free of contradiction, such as with their unpopular announcement to scan your pictures for child porn. But in the sum Apple has been making privacy easier for everyone, and not just for technical folks.
> If you're rich and/or highly mobile, you retreat to avoid this as much as you can.
That is certainly an option but it is not one I think many rich people have taken, at least not for the purpose of avoiding surveillance. Most rich (i.e. top 1% or top 5%) people just don't care that much if they appear in passing on someone else's porch camera. They believe (I think correctly) that the odds of that causing them any material harm are close to nil. There are a small handful of people who value privacy from mass nonspecific surveillance for its own sake, but it's an attitude that is not that common in the US, at least as far as we can tell from revealed preferences.
(Ed: I now see by "this" you're referring to bad behavior surveilled, not surveillance. In that case, I would tend to agree with you.)
> So I'm very sure that my most effective means of improving the situation is to put cameras on their affairs from my house and get all the other adjacent neighbors to do likewise. The dealers have felt the heat, and now their clients are normally more respectful and quiet, presumably at the prompting of the dealers.
Do you really believe this is going to be effective? In your scenario where the police are unresponsive to reports, what makes you think that they're suddenly going to care if you send them a bunch of surveillance video of illicit activity?
The drug dealers know when they're operating in safe territory. In places like San Francisco, people openly deal and use drugs on the street because they know that they are likely to get away with it.
I bet if you posed as a journalist, some of these people would even let you photograph their activities, all while flashing big smiles.
Bodycams are frankly an attempt to answer "who watches the watchmen", porch cameras are not. They both involve cameras but I don't see the connection aside from that, and would dispute one thing being the inverse of the other.
> Bodycams are frankly an attempt to answer "who watches the watchmen", porch cameras are not.
That's missing the point, and possibly willfully missing the point?
The point is.... people are being watched. Both criminals and police change their behavior when they know they're being monitored, or under surveillance.
> They both involve cameras but I don't see the connection aside from that, and would dispute one thing being the inverse of the other.
Again, I can only guess willful ignorance it to blame. criminals take steps to avoid cameras, or cover their faces. Police are less likely to abuse their authority when the body cam is activated. Do you see the connection, in both scenarios the subject changes behavior.
What decline in police funding? There may be a decline in city budgets generally but police are not proportionally affected: "law enforcement spending as a share of general expenditures rose slightly to 13.7% from 13.6%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg CityLab"
According to that article it sounds like yes, the average went up slightly, but that covers up the real story: some places have decreased funding and some have increased funding.
I mean ignoring everything you said right up to the end statement, that's always been the case since the police are under no obligation to protect you.
At Qbix, we have a technology we can use to build pretty much anything for communities. So we set about to build NeighborCloud, a service that will take RTMP / RTSP camera feeds from regular security cameras, encrypt them on the fly and feed them into a control center that is owned and run by the neighborhood on their local computers (not a globally centralized service).
We had been approached by a client (a friend of mine) who wanted to make a security center for neighborhoods, that we could sell. And for a long time, I had the idea that video encrypted as close to the camera as possible could be very useful in solving crimes where otherwise you'd only have personal testimony (e.g. cases of alleged rape etc). But the keys would have to be produced only through a valid subpoena and court putting together their BLS signatures to group-sign something etc. Each minute and each camera would be encrypted with its own key.
I wanted full accountability and transparency: whoever is accessing the video would have to access limited amounts, and there would be a log of the reasons why.
We called up IBM and they had some interesting AI stuff that would work at the edges to detect potentially dangerous activity (knives, mobs etc.) and flag it for the operators of the system. Such a flag would be a valid reason to decrypt a few cameras for a few timeslots. The people with access would decrypt only what was needed, and the investigation itself would be logged -- why was this or that minute or camera decrypted. To decrypt too much would require greater authorization.
What I wanted to avoid is a panopticon where all the feeds are piped to some center. Sadly, the current social media companies have created such a panopticon with our willing participation, and we don't understand that better, far more accountable and auditable systems can exist, where we don't have to rely on centralized actors.
If you're curious, we can do a lot more than security cameras, this is just one possible application. Here we use it to earn credits for watching podcasts, live or recorded:
PS: What I described here would be a potential solution to Apple's Client Side Scanning. What they're missing is accountability and transparency on the side of the people decrypting the footage: essentially a system of warrants, logs, same as doctors use to explain why they ordered this or that test. And furthermore they are missing the decentralization element: you just have to "trust Apple" because they won't give you their backend software. We do. That's why open source is superior. So you can run it yourself, and there is no concept of trusting a large centralized corporation. It's just software that runs on hardware you bought and own. No one is extracting rents, gathering your data, except your own community and by whatever agreement that is set up locally etc.
Ha! As I was reading the article I thought "I should set up a service for my neighborhood so we can all securely share our camera feeds with one another." Clearly not an original idea.
I personally kind of hate that idea because of HOAs at least with the government I have constitutional guarantees. I can't imagine the HOA having that kind of visibility, and using it.
You need to think of why smaller communities can’t have the tools to have their own governance and constitution, derived from standard factories with possibly just some parameters changed (like the YC SAFE but as a smart contract). These rules would be also part of their constitution, just as the requirement for a warrant limited in scope to search places and effects is part of the US constitution. We need to log who decrypted things and why, minute by minute, camera by camera. And there have to be clear rules as to who is authorized do it.
Oh, and the roles and permissions should be stored on a community blockchain, not a centralized database:
Except police departments do have agreements with Amazon Ring and others. There is even a UI option for police to ask Ring customers to share their recordings.
The thing about a surveillance state is the idea is that someone is on the other end of the camera watching, i.e. the state. The overwhelming amount of video being generated is being recorded, but it's usually not being actively watched until after something happens. It's not quite a surveillance state as much as it is just evidence being gathered that might eventually be utilized after criminal activity has occurred. There's very little AI watching and analyzing what is happening on the surveillance.
I suppose we could call this the democratization of policing (and not so much a police state, though debatable depending on interrelationship and politization).
In some ways, but not all ways, it harkens back to a time when the smallness of towns and the percentage of people in towns meant that over 90% of people lived under “democratic” surveillance. One major difference is that today you cannot skip town to start a new life with a clean, if unknown slate. Your history will follow you and we’re not allowing for people to turn a leaf as easily as before. At the same time it means serious offenders will have a harder time getting away with violent crime.
I think this is more the distribution of surveillance capacity rather than policing itself -- the police have retained the monopoly on violence, and seem relatively content to push the burden of investigative work onto private citizens (with all of the petty erosion of privacy that results).
If the population at large didn’t commit crime (in a perfect world) we wouldn’t need policing. Given that’s just fantasy, policing is for now necessary. Distributed citizen policing devolved this back into the citizenry. Is that good, or is it bad? It has both. On the one hand everyone will have biases for and against things. On the other hand, those under threat have better recourse (against stalkers, casing a home, burglaries, etc.)
Without getting into whether we need policing in general, I don't think this adequately explains why we need either American-style policing or this kind of creeping devolvement of tax-funded responsibilities back to untrained private citizens and companies.
When I say "American-style," I mean a few characteristics that I understand to be mostly unique to American law enforcement:
* Devolvement to the lowest levels of municipal and/or county government, making standardization of training and practices across the entire country (much less individual states) virtually impossible. This is in contrast to countries like France, where the national police forces are an order of magnitude larger than municipal forces and command correspondingly greater authority.
* Use of force & weapons-carrying. It's my understanding that the vast majority of normal LEOs in Western Europe do not carry guns on them during their normal patrols, and that use-of-force incidents (including civilian deaths) are correspondingly lower in most of Europe[1].
* Prevalence of policing fraternities and unions. Again, it's my understanding that these are a somewhat unique feature of American police forces: other countries might have labor protections for LEOs, but do not have pseudo-official organizations that provide cover for officer abuses. The closest thing I'm aware of is the ECP[2], which seems to be more of a legislative group.
Qualified immunity and self regulation are big ones. I'm not sure if police in other countries can kill people for dubious reasons and the legal results is, "they acted within the policy and the law."
Also deferment of consequence. When a cop does something wrong, neither he, nor his union, nor the department, nor his pension fund, nor his budget face any financial consequences; that's a burden of the city, ultimately the tax payor, who ironically is the group being infringed upon.
Anecdotally I see people with machine guns in the streets and especially in transit hubs in Europe much more often than in the U.S. It is true that ~all U.S. cops on a beat carry guns, whereas in the U.K. that's not the case. I get the impression that pretty much all cops in France have guns too, though.
Yeah, I've noticed that when visiting Europe. It's not that different from the transit hubs here in NYC -- it's common to see Port Authority and other agencies with full rifles and machine guns. But I think that's somewhat recent; perhaps within the last decade, and certainly not common elsewhere in the US.
That being said, my understanding is that those armed forces are usually gendarmerie in Europe -- half police, half civilian military. The US doesn't have anything resembling that because of Posse Comitatus[1], so they're difficult to compare directly.
> Some US states also have militias that are wholly controlled by the state and not able to be called up by the federal goverment.
Since the unorganized, universal militia can be called up by the federal government, in any groupings or manner Congress chooses to adopt, that's not true.
Some states have organized militia or military reserve forces that aren't part of the federal military reserve system the way the National Guard is, though.
Nope - the state militias are exempted from service in the federal military, including via the draft:
> A defense force established under this section may be used within the jurisdiction concerned, as its chief executive (or commanding general in the case of the District of Columbia) considers necessary, but it may not be called, ordered, or drafted into the armed forces.
Military members aren’t allowed to join them for that reason.
The most aggressive looking police I've ever seen were in Frankfurt airport, looking for terrorists, a decade before 9/11. Openly carrying machine guns. Never saw that in a us airport until after 9/11. https://www.massport.com/massport/media/newsroom/logan-is-fi...
Don't take the above and think that i'm implying police in europe are more heavily armed on average.
While true that visibly well armed officers are patrolling some high security areas like airports or central squares, etc. in Europe, contrast this to every beat cop in the states being armed, and in most cases the squad car carries a rifle.
> The rise of distributed private security à la e.g. Citizen’s subscription service is a counrerfactual, albeit weak one, to this claim.
Private security forces have always existed! I don't think these provide a counterpoint, given that they lack any meaningful legal authority. At best, they're another example of police authorities devolving the grinding, boring enforcement work that they're ostensibly paid by citizens to do.
It still happens: someone did something terrible sometimes not so terrible, takes on another identity and lives an unremarkable life till DNA (not necessarily from a crime) catches up to them.
"I suppose we could call this the democratization of policing (and not so much a police state, though debatable depending on interrelationship and politization)."
Not even close in my opinion. All the authority, discretion, power, and immunity is retained by the police. They're simply using citizen's hardware/info, possibly to the detriment of that same citizen (depends on how far they expand the use).
> At the same time it means serious offenders will have a harder time getting away with violent crime.
Isn’t the murder solve rate in Oakland, San Francisco, Chicago, etc well all below 50%. Either the murders are allowed or the methods are failing.
Imo the only real reason we even see murder rates falling are due to cell phones. People can call for help and survive more. That’s why we see so many people shot, but fewer murders than the 90s. Violence is up.
True but this is missing the point. No one is asking why so many people are stealing packages. The stealing is a symptom. How often would you get lucky on an Amazon package? How much could you re-sell a new pair of $100 women's boots size 7 for? $20? 85% of convicted burglaries are substance abuse related. We don't need a police state, we need free social programs to help people with substance abuse. Sadly, our country has lost all empathy. Screw the homeless, poor, disabled, and addicted. They just have to choose to make their lives better. Excuse me, I need to go buy more dogecoin with my stimulus.
This isn’t a small town thief trying to make enough to get a dime bag. These ops are run by organized syndicates. The people at the front can be druggies but not even half the time.
The people who deserve empathy definitely arent those who choose to do drugs and commit drugs to pay for it. Ill reserve empathy for people who were forced to take drugs and couldnt help their addiction.
What you call democratic surveillance or democratized policing people would just call it looking out for each other or have each others backs. Environments with high social trust often do that. Places where people know each other.
Yeah.... no. You'd think that giving the police video evidence of a theft would do something. It doesn't. On top of the fact that CCTV doesn't reduce crime rate really makes you question if we should be having this many cameras everywhere.
There's also the curiosity factor. I think 20% of my packages say they've been delivered one day before they actually are. It's always this unnerving waiting period to see if it will be delivered tomorrow or if it got stolen. Should I just make Amazon send another every time? Should I be prepared to pay twice sometimes as a sort of privileged tax? Should I curb my consumerism out of fear?
Really it should be the brick and mortar stores who capitalize on this. Start advertising in certain areas that have high package theft and cut into ecommerce market share.
Also the mobile application Citizen, which is fucking cancer. It alerts to any little thing that happens and trains you to be in a constant state of paranoia. You thought the local news was bad enough? Now you have that shit in your pocket. And they fucking now hire rent-a-cops. In a normal country, this shit would be shut down immediately. But given that our federal government has quasi-failed its populace, not surprised it's allowed to flourish.
> In a normal country, this shit would be shut down immediately. But given that our federal government has quasi-failed its populace, not surprised it's allowed to flourish.
Are you claiming a successful government would limit the ability of people to access public information?
I presume the rent-a-cop portion was more concerning. One of the security companies they're working with has a pitch line that says if someone is outside your building screaming, they can come make them stop.
It's one thing to offer defense services that follow you, but it's concerning to think that your neighbor or ex or stalker could soon call Nextdoor to send goons to your house.
I was getting something from my trunk the other winter. I parked on the street. I saw some light flashes but thought they were just some cars passing by or something.
Turns out it was the Tesla parked behind me that was automatically flashing lights at me. There was nobody in that car.
I wonder if it's even legal here to install a camera in a public place like that?
> I wonder if it's even legal here to install a camera in a public place like that?
Depends on where you are, if you're on private property, and how your nation defines 'reasonable expectation of privacy' if they define such a thing at all. In a lot of North America, as long as you're in public and the camera is in public, it is entirely legal.
"Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows. The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house. Ready! "
Of course! Why hadn't they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn't this game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn't be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!
"At the count of ten now! One! Two!"
He felt the city rise...
David Brin's "The Transparent Society" is an interesting read for a couple of reasons.
One is how many things have not come to pass... Given that it was printed in 1998, we've had over twenty years to see predictions not come to fruition.
But another is his prediction of this precisely: that in a world where cameras, data recording, and analysis is cheap and easy, the big question is who will control their use: governments, individuals, non-government groups, or some mixture of the three. The one thing we can basically guarantee won't happen is a return to the pre-surveillance days... Like the car, these technologies cause society to re-organize around them such that those who don't have access to them (or try the Luddite approach of refraining from using them) have less power and eventually become marginalized.
So the question becomes: "What is the best way forward," not "How do we get back?"
I'm really not sure where to begin on this mess of an article. I'm concerned about home security footage being easily available to authorities, but this throws the baby out with the bathwater by making a socioeconomic claim that only applies to a particular kind of urban neighborhood.
On its face, this article suggests a 'surveillance state,' brought about by people surveilling their own property. The assumption here is that porch cameras are merely a way to attempt to stick it to thieves/pranksters who are simply the collateral damage of capitalism. However, porch cameras also function as communication devices, personal safety devices and informational devices about non-suspect behavior relevant to a resident.
The underlying argument seems to be that the pursuit of 'safety' in the face of economic disparity and racial injustice is inherently discriminatory. Unfortunately, by hinging on porch cameras, it doesn't make much of a case.
Is it possible to want to work towards a kind of universal justice but also not want a homeless shelter next to a kindergarten or the home where you are raising young children? Is it selfish to want to extend that to the elderly, or to single mothers, to yourself? And yes, there are elderly people, single mothers and even children in shelters, but some shelters consist largely of people struggling with powerful addiction and/or mental illness. On the other hand, there may not be a categorically better placement of the shelter, and we might even suggest that proximity to such facilities is the cost of dense urban living.
To me, that's definitely worth writing and debating about, but this unfocused article built on controversial assumptions doesn't add much.
"On its face, this article suggests a 'surveillance state,' brought about by people surveilling their own property."
The main issue is that the cameras capture other people's properties too, or (less problematically) public spaces. If it truly were only the owner's property, then this wouldn't be an issue.
That is the main issue of the problem, but not the focus of the article. The focus of the article is "we shouldn't catch thieves on our property because they're homeless and probably black." I don't know how someone lacks the self awareness to internalize such a viewpoint but apparently these people are out there.
Based on this, I just decided to order a complete camera system for my house. As I age, I believe that the public should be 100% recorded. The public is common ground.
Morality is how you behave when no one is watching. Since I'm a nerd, I've assumed that someone is watching and recording all the time. Since at least the early 90s.
I guess I'm not very moral.
These porch cameras make me think of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for some reason. A well armed society is a polite society.
I now wonder how Zoomers, the generation born into the panopticon, may have adapted. Will they be more moral, more careful, more circumspect? Or less? Or some mix?
I'm encouraged by, and take as evidence, the rise of consent culture. Which is definitive moral progress.
Why is it so acceptable for packages to be stolen? Imagine in the old days you went to a mall, bought something, and on the walk to the car someone ran by and grabbed your shopping bag and ran. This happens 100x more often today and there are seemingly zero consequences for it.
We care less because for the most part everyone is much better off than we used to be. Material wealth is easier to acquire and with less physical effort.
I’m simply surprised that there hasn’t been minimal cooperation from package carriers to develop a one time key system for porch lockboxes. The boxes wouldn’t even need to be robust.
Package carrier walks up. Scans the package, taps the scanner to the box, drop the package in the box, and off we go.
I'm simply surprised that you don't realize UPS employees are a teamsters union who work under excruciating quotas. Fiddling with grandma's broken lock box is not an option.
The major shipping carriers offer a service where you can have them put packages inside a garage door or other place.
Even then I find about half of my packages still end up on the front porch despite me indicating otherwise using the carrier's service to indicate where to leave packages. I haven’t had a package stolen in very many years so I guess that’s a good thing.
Installing a drop box is significantly more complicated than putting a cheap, plastic garden box on your porch/lawn/etc. The only thing “smart” about the box is the electric lock. It wouldn’t need to be connected to any network.
It’s a low value crime of opportunity. Merely hiding packages visually would likely prevent most incidents.
Look at 50-100 gallon deck boxes. Even if you drove around with a truck, how many could you possibly fit in the back?
You don’t even know if they contain anything of value and most would probably be empty.
These thieves are just snatching a dozen (or two or three) small boxes at a time, opening them in an alley (or whatever) and dumping anything that isn’t of value.
Legally, one is a theft while the other is likely a robbery. Robbery is generally treated more seriously.
As for frequency, people are more likely to take something if they don't have to confront a person. There are also a lot more packages available to steal today since more people order online now.
I always wondered if this is US specific. In Europe, as far as I know, the package would simply be delivered by the neighbor, they return the next day, or you have to get it from the local convenience store or some centralized lock-box.
Package theft is a problem, but it’s not as rampant as you’d believe from reading internet comments. The number of packages delivered to houses in the US every day is staggeringly high, so even a small percentage of package thefts will manifest as a lot of anecdotes.
Package theft also varies heavily by location. I live in a medium sized city but I actually don’t know anyone who has had a package stolen off their porch. I’ve easily had over a thousand packages left at my (highly visible) porch all afternoon over the years without a single theft.
OTOH, if I lived in a few certain cities I wouldn’t want to leave any packages lying out for any period of time.
I also do not know of anyone who has experienced package theft in the US between a few cities on both coasts and suburbs in a variety of states. But they all live in upper middle class or richer neighborhoods or buildings, so there is probably a lot of selection bias.
While privacy is important it can't be expected into places in plain view like porches.
Yes usage of video data should be limited, etc.
In the end this is like the dashcam cameras that helped cut on the amount of fake insurance claims and "he said/she said" accidents where one of the parts is clearly at fault.
"“When you call the police on a Black or Brown person, there’s a good chance you are putting their life in danger. I don’t think that is a thing one should do lightly.”
Statistically this is False. It's driving a lot of current policy pushes and the people who repeat it most are the ones who pay the most lip service to fighting dis/mis-information, but it's not actually true.
I'm sorry what? I don't know how you come to that conclusion. Time and time again we see someone get called on a welfare check only to be shot to death. People are weaponizing the police because they are not trained to deescalate and their rules are engagement are basically comply or die.
> Time and time again we see someone get called on a welfare check only to be shot to death
You really need to pierce your bubble and ask what else happens that might not be shown to you. The news isn't real. Not really, anyway. Every single outlet has a bias and "lying by omission" to shape a narrative is common.
For example, did you know George Floyd is hardly the first person to have died under the knee of the police officer? At least 2 times before it, it was a minority officer killing a white man. You can watch it with your own eyes:
Another thing that's been so sad to watch recently is peoples' disbelief in how different the reality of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation is from how it is presented to them on the news, when they simply watch the actual trial. E.g.: https://twitter.com/sarahbeth345/status/1458593872557133825
That tweet you referenced is heavily cherry-picked: it talks about the results of violent-crime calls, and it doesn’t discuss location.
There are two issues with this:
1. Civilians are also murdered by police who are responding to non-violent offenses. A good example here would be the classic “shot during a routine traffic stop” situation. That won’t show up in the stat from your sources. Your source tries to say that by “controlling for violent crime, the racial disparity goes away” but that doesn’t make any sense.
That same study also concludes that once you account for and amortize things, you are still 3x more likely to die in an encounter with LEO if you are non white.
The NYTimes, which is a left-leaning institution to begin with, released an infamous paper on race-based police killings itself in 2015 by a black researcher and author, and found that "this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter." [0] People were angry that taking a look into the data did not say what they wanted to here.
And as another poster said [1], even if there were bias, that does not equate to likely, in absolute terms. The idea that you're essentially sending a black person to death, or rolling the dice on their life, by calling the cops on them for nonviolent crime, is ridiculous.
I looked at it and the study doesn't account for anything. For example, if a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.
This is basic, the study (at least on my glance) appears to not account for anything like this at all.
Also the source isn't everything but its political leanings are somewhat-important as this type of misdirection that I've just showed here is used all the time to craft narratives around statistics, so even when you're crafting leans in a certain direction and you still can't tell the story you'd like, it's a strong indicator that the data more distinctly show certain patterns.
The fact that a certain demographic might be more likely to respond to the LEO with violence doesn’t matter because this isn’t a discussion about causation and correlation, it’s just a discussion about the fact that non-white people are more likely to be subject to LEO violence.
You can’t use a stereotype to excuse LEO’s treating people like stereotypes. Especially when there’s a tremendous amount of evidence that shows that those stereotypes are externally enforced (systemic racism, for example). I don’t want to debate whether or not that is a thing, that’s a separate discussion, and it’s totally unrelated to the one we’re having here.
> If a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.
This is some insanely racist bullshit that you’ve just said so I don’t think that there’s going to be a productive end to this debate and this will be my final comment in the discussion. That’s as civil as I’m willing to be about it.
You understand that I am not saying that black skin is the cause of the way people respond in police interactions, right?
When I say "If a certain demographic were ... 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence", that is a post-fact observation, with the demographic being the specific collection of people pulled over.
Why would you interpret it the way you did? Holy shit. I feel like we're going into the "math is racist" territory.
> it’s just a discussion about the fact that non-white people are more likely to be subject to LEO violence
The study you linked to above? I think it is highly informational, but drawing specific conclusions from it should be done very, very cautiously. The page you linked to has a Methods section and a Statistical Analysis section. They are quite informative.
1. They are using the Fatal Encounters dataset - probably the best, most complete, least biased dataset (GOOD)
2. It turns out that police aren't actually killing very many people (VERY GOOD), so there isn't a lot of data.
3. They are doing their analysis at the MSA level as a simplification to account for the fact that people move around and don't just stay at their house or only in their city. They state that they are doing it and why they are doing it (GOOD).
4. They are using a statistical process that assumes that everything (race/ethnicity, deaths, etc) is normally distributed within the MSA. In real life, this is not remotely true, but they acknowledge this fact (GOOD?)
5. Their analysis finds that many of the higher racial disparities found within MSAs occur in MSAs with the lowest rates of police killings and/or a lot of places with high rates of geographic segregation. In other words, places with the least amount of data and places where #4 holds the least.
I don't think anyone is going to claim that this is a bad study, or wrong, or anything like that. It looks pretty solid to me. It's just that you are trying to draw some conclusions from it that it can't support.
I would also like to point out that "If you are in a police encounter (traffic stop, arrested for theft, etc), what is the likelihood of being killed by the police?" is not a question being answered by this study. "If you live in this metropolitan area, what is the likelihood of being killed by the police?" is what this study provides the answer to. That includes such things as people in nursing homes, toddlers in daycare, etc. Saying "You are 3x more likely to die in a traffic stop if you are black" is, sadly, probably very true - but it is not what this study is about nor what it proves:
> We use population denominators to align with, and allow comparisons to, previous demographic work in this area, and because using race-specific crime or arrest counts—themselves shaped by racial bias and segregation—yields estimates of a different and potentially biased contrast than the rather simple ones we answer here: in which metropolitan areas are people most likely to be killed by police, what is the difference in these rates by race, and how does this vary across MSAs?
Is Sendhil Mullainathan the "black researcher and author" you're talking about? I'm trying to get a sense of how much fact-checking you've put into this.
> For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed
This is a weird way to frame the issue. Are black people arrested for violent crime more often? I don't know, but if they are, that changes the conclusion. This seems like an obvious thing I'd want to find out if I were posting that Twitter thread.
> I am showing that when you control for violent crime rate, the disparity vanishes.
No, arrest rate and crime rate are not the same. That's the whole point of the discussion about bias in policing.
If you ask a more straightforward question, like "how often are people killed when they interact with police?", the statistics look different. Here's a study that says:
> On average, there were large racial/ethnic inequities in the rates at which White and Black people were killed during police contact. Across all MSAs, Black people were 3.23 times more likely to be killed compared to White people (95% CI: 2.95, 3.54, p<0.001).
Ok sure, but in turn your comment ignores/doesn't contain any data on the statistics of crimes committed by race or what behaviors that lead to escalation appear more among different races.
I'll post the full quote for anyone that doesn't have NYT access:
> The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin. And police bias may be responsible. But this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter.
Absolutely agreed: using the FBI data in that NYT article, there's no way to tell why Black people are killed more frequently. All it tells you is that deaths are disproportionate. Using other studies with further data, like the one I posted, gives us a clearer picture.
> Ok sure, but in turn your comment ignores/doesn't contain any data on the statistics of crimes committed by race or what behaviors that lead to escalation appear more among different races.
Correct, I am taking it as a given that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit crime or somehow provoke an officer to murder them during an arrest.
TBH I don't understand what you're saying. I'm having the same debate on 2 threads now so here's my quote to the other person who posted the same link:
"I looked at it and the study doesn't account for anything. For example, if a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.
This is basic, the study (at least on my glance) appears to not account for anything like this at all."
I agree with that. The study doesn't account for that because it doesn't make any sense, how could skin color make a person more likely to respond with violence? Can you explain the mechanism for how a racial demographic could be "more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence"?
I don't even know how to account for that, really. Is it your honest interpretation of what I'm saying that black pignment is the literal cause of violent responses? Geez...
I mean, I don't think this discussion will be fruitful now, but just in case:
This is like logic 101. We're not debating that race causes behavior - it does not. But that doesn't mean there isn't an overlap between demographic and behavior. For example, there is an overlap between being black and being lower-income in this country. There is a relationship between low-income/poverty and violence. Do you understand that?
Skin color is not the cause. I'm completely happy to ignore it. You could equally say "people who respond aggressively are 3x likely to be shot." It is you making the racial connection, not me.
Flamewar comments like this will get you banned on HN. Please review the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and please don't post like this in the future. This is obviously particularly important on provocative and divisive topics, where allowing your comments to degenerate in this way amounts to vandalism if not arson. That's seriously not cool.
Edit: there are two other problems:
(1) It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed, regardless of which ideology the account is battling for or against. Why? Because HN is supposed to be for curious conversation, and ideological battle is the antithesis of that. We ban accounts that are using HN primarily for this, so if you'd please stop doing that, we'd appreciate it.
(2) Given your arguments in this thread and your commenting history, I'm remembering that someone complained to us about your username being an ethnic slur (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22beaner). I emailed you about this on June 24 and you never replied. At a minimum, the username is trollish given these associations, and trollish usernames are not allowed on HN. I'm not going to ban your account for this right now because I think it's fair to give you a chance to course-correct your account to conform to the site guidelines. At the same time, I think you should be using a different username. If you want to pick a different username, we can rename it for you.
Can you replicate or scale yourself and moderate reddit too? Also, twitter. If possible, youtube. And if you're up for it, then instagram. It wouldn't also hurt to police (no pun) tiktok (: There's got be a way?
I'm following you, I agree with all this. I'd say the study I posted does somewhat account for this because it looked at many different geographic areas and therefore income levels, and found a higher proportion of Black deaths in all of them. But I agree it doesn't directly consider what you're asking.
I'm not sure if the data exists for this. You'd need to record a huge sampling of police interactions and somehow classify the behavior of the civilian independent of the police to see if they were "aggressive" or "escalated", which is quite difficult. And part of the issue is that many behaviors that police often claim are aggressive are obviously not, so who gets to define these words? Very tough.
Overall, I think I agree that given the data we've discussed in this thread, there's no way to prove whether or not disproportionate deaths are caused by police bias. I started this conversation to respond to a question in the Twitter thread you linked: "I'm going to keep tweeting this until someone can explain to me how this is possible if there is truly pervasive racial bias in policing". I maintain that it is absolutely possible, and seems likely given the data we have here, but definitely not proven.
The issue isn't skin color causing certain behavior, but whether skin color is correlated with certain behaviors. For example, it might be the case that black people are more likely to be poor, and poor people are more likely to respond aggressively to police authority.
Deaths are disproportionate because black Americans commit way, way more violent crime per capita than non-black Americans, your given is wrong.
I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often in the developed world. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people:
White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3
White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2
White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8
The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). Because we as a species are very good at estimating race and sex at a glance, the number for men is the one that's relevant to a police officer walking down the street. If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe.
This is a hard thing but it is a true thing. Most of the differences in how police treat Black vs. White people in the U.S. are driven by this phenomenon, not racism on the part of cops or "the system", though that is small but inevitable part of the feedback loop here. There is an argument to be made about a legacy of slavery or systemic racism, and maybe it's important to do that, but those arguments are completely irrelevant to the cop who's walking a beat in a bad neighborhood--White or Black. Whatever a particular police officer's commitments to colorblindness may be, there is no way for them to not use this information. If you were that police officer, walking a beat in a dangerous neighborhood, you would (like all people) involuntarily learn from the statistics in the world around you.
Real solutions to the real problems of murder and differential policing in the U.S. require people who are brave enough to look the problem right in the eye.
There's a lot of work to be done, please be part of the solution.
Please don't assume my reaction, I'm not outraged by anyone posting an internet comment.
I would be interested to see how the statistics look if you control for income or zip code. My assumption would be that in a given "bad neighborhood", there is no racial discrepancy in murderers, even if there is overall for the country. So I would not expect an officer walking a beat to be able to use race for any proactive purpose.
Obviously this is a big assumption that would take substantial work and data to prove, but that is what I meant by my "given". It's the same as saying that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit white collar crime - statistics show White people do it more often just because they have more opportunity.
I apologize, I pasted something I'd written before and didn't edit enough. There was no reason to assume you were outraged and it was clearly my mistake.
I agree that the data you outline would be useful to look at. I'm sure someone has done some analysis to arrive at an approximation. My guess is that it doesn't change much, though there will be neighborhoods where basically everyone you encounter is of the same race so race isn't informative (if the "cop walking the beat" example is the animating one).
If I'm understanding you correctly, the basic thought is that economic circumstances might explain the difference in murder rates. They do not (i.e., there is a lot of evidence to suggest it is not causal), though obviously there is correlation. There are many chronically poor (or poorer-than-average, since no one in the U.S. is actually poor) populations that do not show significantly elevated rates of violent crimes.
So your conclusion is that black people should be killed more often by police because black people are convicted more often when looking at percentages by race?
No I think you misunderstand. There's a data-generating process: people commit crimes. For a given set of people, the mix of crimes they commit will drive both convictions and killings. For instance, if the mix of crimes a particular group commits has more murder in it than for other groups, we would expect both more police-shootings of those people (because police can intervene with deadly force when lives are at stake) and more convictions for murder.
You're right that people who are shot by police don't get convicted of anything, of course.
Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. You break several of the site guidelines when you do so:
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> so sad to watch recently is peoples' disbelief in how different the reality of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation is from how it is presented to them on the news
I feel pretty positive about this actually. This will be the tipping point for many to finally question all the info they get from the corporate media.
For a long time I saw garbage reporting on subjects that I had the slightest familiarity but I still blindly believed their reporting on any other subject, until something clicked in my mind and now I can't unsee it. I'm sure many are experiencing this click due to the trial.
> This will be the tipping point for many to finally question all the info they get from the corporate media.
Only if they actually get to see the reality presented to them somewhere. I fear that most people still won't. If they've been in the bubble for years, there will be nothing indicating to them that they should venture outside of it this one time.
> You really need to pierce your bubble and ask what else happens that might not be shown to you.
Please omit such swipes from your comments here. They're a form of personal attack, which is against the site guidelines and is really bad for communication, especially on difficult topics.
Edit: your comments have degenerated into outright flamewar below. We ban accounts that do that. Please review the guidelines and please don't do any more of that.
The number of instances you've seen news reports or social media posts of people shot to death due to calling police is in no way indicative of the percentage of times it happens when someone does call the police.
If you query the data set it looks like 38 unarmed black men were shot by police in 2015.
To determine likelihood of a random “black porch pirate” being shot by police, we should look at the % of police encounters that end in unarmed shoots.
I found a random quota post [1] that says the number of police encounters in 2015 was around 53,469,300.
Back of a cocktail napkin numbers show that we’re talking about something in the neighborhood of .00006% of encounters end in an unarmed black person being shot by the police.
If there's a virus that hit a billion people, where 100 of them are people with blue hair, and there were 110 deaths, 90 of them being blue-haired people and 20 from the rest of the billion, if you had blue hair would you be extra worried?
sure it only kills 0.0..something..09% of people, but...
Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Of course the numbers are exaggerated, but it's to make a point.
If you want to do some maths, please give a percentage of black police encounters that end up with the black person being shot, and compare that with other races. The first number is probably very low as well, but my instinct is that the comparison will be shocking.
In any case, police in the US are woefully undertrained hotheads. In contrast, I saw a video today from Europe where a suicidal woman had a knife and officers around her. One of them pepper-sprayed her, it didn't work, and suddenly another hit her with a big fencepole that he pulled out of the ground. She was a threat to mostly herself, and luckily they didn't neutralize the threat by a bullet that could've been fatal.
+1. The police in the U.S. only kill about 1000 people a year, out of 330,000,000. That's 0.000303%. To put it in perspective, there are about 50,000 suicides, 35,000 car crash deaths, and 30,000 people die from just falling down.
I think this viewpoint, commonly cited, is wrong.
1000/330m vs 5/60m (England and Wales)
36x (adjusting for population) a really small number is still a really small number. While all else equal I'd like to see the number reduced, there is much lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.
In the UK this recently led to a £100,000 fine: "A judge has ruled that security cameras and a Ring doorbell installed in a house in Oxfordshire 'unjustifiably invaded' the privacy of a neighbour ... the devices ... broke data laws and contributed to harassment."[0]
>Judge Melissa Clarke found that audio data collected by cameras on a shed, in a driveway and on the Ring doorbell was processed unlawfully. She noted that at the time it was not possible to turn off the audio recording facility - that happened in an update in 2020.
I would have assumed all camera makers implemented a software toggle to disable audio recording. It seems like a basic function to avoid violating laws against recording audio when you are not party to the conversation. It is Amazon though, so I guess I should not be surprised.
>In the judgement it was found that the Ring doorbell captured images of the claimant's house and garden, while the shed camera covered almost the whole of her garden and her parking space.
...and...
>She said that she found the audio data that could capture conversations "even more problematic and detrimental than video data".
So it wasn't just a doorbell aimed at the street. It was the totality of the video and audio surveillance of an area that the neighbour could reasonably expect to be somewhat private.
“It’s my pretty firm belief,” says Gilliard, “that the police should not be called unless someone’s life is in danger.”
That can seem, to some, like a noble if naive thought. Yet Gilliard offers a retort. “The likelihood that it was a Brown or Black person who egged my car, based on where I live, is pretty high,” he says. “When you call the police on a Black or Brown person, there’s a good chance you are putting their life in danger. I don’t think that is a thing one should do lightly.”
The mental gymnastics of well-intentioned paternalism is humorous to see in practice. If it’s rational not to call the cops in this situation because the risk of negative externalities is far too great, then two conclusions are possible: (1) black/brown people are rational actors and they know the chance of getting caught/punished is very low, thus are incentivized to continue breaking the law, thus creating a vicious cycle where more law breaking begets more leniency, which begets more law breaking or (2) black/brown people are not rational, and need the benevolence of others to make sure they do not end up in jail.
Either way you slice it, it becomes clear that even well intentioned individuals are mostly acting out of self interest. It’s in the interests of Gilliard to not call the cops because losing a $50 package that will be reimbursed anyway is less important than projecting the image that he deeply cares about black and brown people.
Yes, if you try to think about the problem logically you're always going to come to one of those sobering conclusions--"we must treat someone differently because of the color of their skin and factors outside of their control". If I was a marginalized group I would be pissed off that you're patronizing me and you don't think I'm capable of meeting your standards. It's the complete opposite of what we've been fighting for for the last 50 years.
People in neighborhoods have always had anxiety about protecting their homes. This is nothing new. It's just that now you can hear their thoughts through lurking instead of talking to them in person.
On NextDoor, in my neighborhood, complaints of nighttime activity are normally accompanied by camera pictures. Lots of this. It seems to be the new normal.
I like how I agree with the author about pernicious creep of surveillance, but for opposite reasons, where if he provided the same arguments against it to something else, I would be dismissive of them.
It's as though the reason he's against the surveillance is because it strengthens neighbourhoods and the identity around them, presumably with his implied ideal being an atomized specimen of a group identity, who must amplify narrative to survive.
Surveillance turns people into helpless targets for predators when the consequences of being caught defending yourselves are greater than giving predators what they are after, which rewards them, and they come back. Eventually what surveillance mainly does is empower a tiny minority of truly terrible people who for them the cameras are never on, or they don't care, and these are the most malicious and nasty people around.
Cameras everywhere is great. It makes the streets safer. Next big thing is cameras in cars which will make the roads safer. Just the other day I listened to a podcast on a murder case and one of the key evidence was residential cameras that captured the vehicle of the killer at 3am.
Now for those Facebook/Nextdoor groups. I rally dislike them. Too many crazy people that report weird stuff (and racist too).
I don't know the numbers so cannot argue. But, even if they don't deter people (which I doubt), they sure help solving some serious crimes (I can provide plenty of examples). That means they help putting criminals behind bars - making the streets safer.
Cameras today can even be used as self defense. People are less likely to hit someone in public if they are being filmed. Look how phone cameras changed the way police do things for example. Why? because they know they are being filmed and cannot get away like they used to. I rest my case.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic there. Filming police brutality is like a national pass time. Cameras haven't changed anything. Having more examples of police beating the crap out of people is the only "change" I've seen.
I thought this article was going to be about actual private technology making our streets into surveillance states. Turns out it's just about how you shouldn't call the cops on brown people for stealing your stuff. What a load of horse shit.
190 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadLet's say (not so hypothetically) that I'm tired of the drug dealer across the street, between the trash in the street, the bags of used needles, the random scrapes of my car by beaters flying through, and on and on. I could, have, and do report this all to the police, but they will always deescalate things to minimize workload, or in some other way that is clearly not focused on maintaining law and order. I thought it was compelling the time that one of their clients showed up on my porch, beating on the door yelling with a hole in his face from a gunshot wound, but the police didn't do anything with that, either (other than, for once, actually showing up.)
So I'm very sure that my most effective means of improving the situation is to put cameras on their affairs from my house and get all the other adjacent neighbors to do likewise. The dealers have felt the heat, and now their clients are normally more respectful and quiet, presumably at the prompting of the dealers.
If they want anonymity when being disruptive or acting illegally, they should go find somewhere where they can blend in.
The majority of consumers will never be tech-savvy. So a bunch of security cameras really means a bunch of security cameras whose software is 100% controlled by some central authority. I'd feel safer if it was controlled by the actual home-owner.
Just look at fines, and it should become clear who the law was written for: https://danuker.go.ro/gdpranoia.html#fines
I'm going to leave the naming up to someone else; "NOO" doesn't seem a great acronym for a popular organization.
BlueIris is actually pretty nice. I got a bunch of cameras from ebay and such- some wireless, some wired and POE powered- and just use BlueIris to manage them locally. Ended up with more cameras that I really needed, so I also have one permanently pointed at a bird feeder for fun...
A solution that someone can pickup at Costco and setup via scanning some QR code in 10 minutes is always going to win versus spending an hour or many hours delving into networking and figuring out what equipment you need and troubleshooting.
Nobody wants to deal with DDNS or port forwarding or other issues when trying to remotely access the video either.
It's dramatically easier to disappear in terms of privacy if you're poor than if you're in the middle class.
You're not going to show up in stores as often (less surveillence footage, less facial recognition). You're not as likely to own or use a smartphone, which means no device in your pocket tracking you everywhere. You're far less likely to utilize Uber type services, Instacart, et al. You're far less likely to own a credit card, and more likely to use cash; which means a far smaller purchase history/footprint to profile you with. You're far less likely to often use the Internet, which means a smaller online footprint; that also goes for social media. You're less likely to own various smart devices that will spy on you. You're far less likely to own real-estate or businesses, which often show up on public records at some point. You're less likely to have various entertainment subscriptions (Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, cable, and so on), which again reduces your footprint vs most everybody else. Your job requirements are typically far lower and far less connected, leaving a smaller footprint (no zoom meetings, no zillions of digital profiles, no linkedin, no networking, no slack, no conferences, and on and on).
If you don't have purchasing power, the privacy invading fiends in the commercial sphere mostly don't care if you exist or not. They are not motivated to go out of their way to track you. You don't count, you don't show up in their numbers. Think of the numerous services (Kroger or Walgreens cards; Peloton; eBay, Etsy, PayPal, Coinbase, brokerage accounts; Apple services; and 400 others) the middle class and above sign on to, and how they get tracked by them regularly.
Politically you also matter a lot less, because you're far less likely to vote if you're poor vs middle class and above. So you're tracked, profiled and contacted far less often by the political machine. And you have no money to give them, so they care that much less about keeping tabs on you.
This does not mean that Apple is free of contradiction, such as with their unpopular announcement to scan your pictures for child porn. But in the sum Apple has been making privacy easier for everyone, and not just for technical folks.
That is certainly an option but it is not one I think many rich people have taken, at least not for the purpose of avoiding surveillance. Most rich (i.e. top 1% or top 5%) people just don't care that much if they appear in passing on someone else's porch camera. They believe (I think correctly) that the odds of that causing them any material harm are close to nil. There are a small handful of people who value privacy from mass nonspecific surveillance for its own sake, but it's an attitude that is not that common in the US, at least as far as we can tell from revealed preferences.
(Ed: I now see by "this" you're referring to bad behavior surveilled, not surveillance. In that case, I would tend to agree with you.)
Do you really believe this is going to be effective? In your scenario where the police are unresponsive to reports, what makes you think that they're suddenly going to care if you send them a bunch of surveillance video of illicit activity?
The drug dealers know when they're operating in safe territory. In places like San Francisco, people openly deal and use drugs on the street because they know that they are likely to get away with it.
I bet if you posed as a journalist, some of these people would even let you photograph their activities, all while flashing big smiles.
That's missing the point, and possibly willfully missing the point?
The point is.... people are being watched. Both criminals and police change their behavior when they know they're being monitored, or under surveillance.
> They both involve cameras but I don't see the connection aside from that, and would dispute one thing being the inverse of the other.
Again, I can only guess willful ignorance it to blame. criminals take steps to avoid cameras, or cover their faces. Police are less likely to abuse their authority when the body cam is activated. Do you see the connection, in both scenarios the subject changes behavior.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-city-budget-police-f...
We had been approached by a client (a friend of mine) who wanted to make a security center for neighborhoods, that we could sell. And for a long time, I had the idea that video encrypted as close to the camera as possible could be very useful in solving crimes where otherwise you'd only have personal testimony (e.g. cases of alleged rape etc). But the keys would have to be produced only through a valid subpoena and court putting together their BLS signatures to group-sign something etc. Each minute and each camera would be encrypted with its own key.
I wanted full accountability and transparency: whoever is accessing the video would have to access limited amounts, and there would be a log of the reasons why.
We called up IBM and they had some interesting AI stuff that would work at the edges to detect potentially dangerous activity (knives, mobs etc.) and flag it for the operators of the system. Such a flag would be a valid reason to decrypt a few cameras for a few timeslots. The people with access would decrypt only what was needed, and the investigation itself would be logged -- why was this or that minute or camera decrypted. To decrypt too much would require greater authorization.
What I wanted to avoid is a panopticon where all the feeds are piped to some center. Sadly, the current social media companies have created such a panopticon with our willing participation, and we don't understand that better, far more accountable and auditable systems can exist, where we don't have to rely on centralized actors.
If you're curious, we can do a lot more than security cameras, this is just one possible application. Here we use it to earn credits for watching podcasts, live or recorded:
https://app.freetalklive.com
And we are also using it for students to be taught by teachers remotely, and know whether they are attending or not
http://teaching.app
Here is our overall ethos and approach: https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/
PS: What I described here would be a potential solution to Apple's Client Side Scanning. What they're missing is accountability and transparency on the side of the people decrypting the footage: essentially a system of warrants, logs, same as doctors use to explain why they ordered this or that test. And furthermore they are missing the decentralization element: you just have to "trust Apple" because they won't give you their backend software. We do. That's why open source is superior. So you can run it yourself, and there is no concept of trusting a large centralized corporation. It's just software that runs on hardware you bought and own. No one is extracting rents, gathering your data, except your own community and by whatever agreement that is set up locally etc.
Oh, and the roles and permissions should be stored on a community blockchain, not a centralized database:
https://github.com/Intercoin/CommunityContract
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-polic...
In some ways, but not all ways, it harkens back to a time when the smallness of towns and the percentage of people in towns meant that over 90% of people lived under “democratic” surveillance. One major difference is that today you cannot skip town to start a new life with a clean, if unknown slate. Your history will follow you and we’re not allowing for people to turn a leaf as easily as before. At the same time it means serious offenders will have a harder time getting away with violent crime.
If the population at large didn’t commit crime (in a perfect world) we wouldn’t need policing. Given that’s just fantasy, policing is for now necessary. Distributed citizen policing devolved this back into the citizenry. Is that good, or is it bad? It has both. On the one hand everyone will have biases for and against things. On the other hand, those under threat have better recourse (against stalkers, casing a home, burglaries, etc.)
What sort of policing is significantly different from it and how many countries does that exist in?
* Devolvement to the lowest levels of municipal and/or county government, making standardization of training and practices across the entire country (much less individual states) virtually impossible. This is in contrast to countries like France, where the national police forces are an order of magnitude larger than municipal forces and command correspondingly greater authority.
* Use of force & weapons-carrying. It's my understanding that the vast majority of normal LEOs in Western Europe do not carry guns on them during their normal patrols, and that use-of-force incidents (including civilian deaths) are correspondingly lower in most of Europe[1].
* Prevalence of policing fraternities and unions. Again, it's my understanding that these are a somewhat unique feature of American police forces: other countries might have labor protections for LEOs, but do not have pseudo-official organizations that provide cover for officer abuses. The closest thing I'm aware of is the ECP[2], which seems to be more of a legislative group.
[1]: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Confederation_of_Poli...
Also deferment of consequence. When a cop does something wrong, neither he, nor his union, nor the department, nor his pension fund, nor his budget face any financial consequences; that's a burden of the city, ultimately the tax payor, who ironically is the group being infringed upon.
That being said, my understanding is that those armed forces are usually gendarmerie in Europe -- half police, half civilian military. The US doesn't have anything resembling that because of Posse Comitatus[1], so they're difficult to compare directly.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
I’m familiar with the Virginia Defense Force off the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Defense_Force
Since the unorganized, universal militia can be called up by the federal government, in any groupings or manner Congress chooses to adopt, that's not true.
Some states have organized militia or military reserve forces that aren't part of the federal military reserve system the way the National Guard is, though.
> A defense force established under this section may be used within the jurisdiction concerned, as its chief executive (or commanding general in the case of the District of Columbia) considers necessary, but it may not be called, ordered, or drafted into the armed forces.
Military members aren’t allowed to join them for that reason.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/32/109
...by act of Congress, which is reversible by act of Congress, which is exactly what it would take to actually activate a draft anyway.
Constitutionally they are just as subject to Congress power to call forth the militia as anyone else.
Don't take the above and think that i'm implying police in europe are more heavily armed on average.
The rise of distributed private security à la e.g. Citizen’s subscription service is a counrerfactual, albeit weak one, to this claim.
Private security forces have always existed! I don't think these provide a counterpoint, given that they lack any meaningful legal authority. At best, they're another example of police authorities devolving the grinding, boring enforcement work that they're ostensibly paid by citizens to do.
Not even close in my opinion. All the authority, discretion, power, and immunity is retained by the police. They're simply using citizen's hardware/info, possibly to the detriment of that same citizen (depends on how far they expand the use).
Isn’t the murder solve rate in Oakland, San Francisco, Chicago, etc well all below 50%. Either the murders are allowed or the methods are failing.
Imo the only real reason we even see murder rates falling are due to cell phones. People can call for help and survive more. That’s why we see so many people shot, but fewer murders than the 90s. Violence is up.
source: Kaiser medical system Registered Nurse
CCTV absolutely reduces crime in areas where petty crimes are actually enforced. The evidence provided by the camera is critical.
Really it should be the brick and mortar stores who capitalize on this. Start advertising in certain areas that have high package theft and cut into ecommerce market share.
Are you claiming a successful government would limit the ability of people to access public information?
It's one thing to offer defense services that follow you, but it's concerning to think that your neighbor or ex or stalker could soon call Nextdoor to send goons to your house.
Turns out it was the Tesla parked behind me that was automatically flashing lights at me. There was nobody in that car.
I wonder if it's even legal here to install a camera in a public place like that?
Depends on where you are, if you're on private property, and how your nation defines 'reasonable expectation of privacy' if they define such a thing at all. In a lot of North America, as long as you're in public and the camera is in public, it is entirely legal.
- Ray Badbury, Farenheight 451
One is how many things have not come to pass... Given that it was printed in 1998, we've had over twenty years to see predictions not come to fruition.
But another is his prediction of this precisely: that in a world where cameras, data recording, and analysis is cheap and easy, the big question is who will control their use: governments, individuals, non-government groups, or some mixture of the three. The one thing we can basically guarantee won't happen is a return to the pre-surveillance days... Like the car, these technologies cause society to re-organize around them such that those who don't have access to them (or try the Luddite approach of refraining from using them) have less power and eventually become marginalized.
So the question becomes: "What is the best way forward," not "How do we get back?"
On its face, this article suggests a 'surveillance state,' brought about by people surveilling their own property. The assumption here is that porch cameras are merely a way to attempt to stick it to thieves/pranksters who are simply the collateral damage of capitalism. However, porch cameras also function as communication devices, personal safety devices and informational devices about non-suspect behavior relevant to a resident.
The underlying argument seems to be that the pursuit of 'safety' in the face of economic disparity and racial injustice is inherently discriminatory. Unfortunately, by hinging on porch cameras, it doesn't make much of a case.
Is it possible to want to work towards a kind of universal justice but also not want a homeless shelter next to a kindergarten or the home where you are raising young children? Is it selfish to want to extend that to the elderly, or to single mothers, to yourself? And yes, there are elderly people, single mothers and even children in shelters, but some shelters consist largely of people struggling with powerful addiction and/or mental illness. On the other hand, there may not be a categorically better placement of the shelter, and we might even suggest that proximity to such facilities is the cost of dense urban living.
To me, that's definitely worth writing and debating about, but this unfocused article built on controversial assumptions doesn't add much.
The main issue is that the cameras capture other people's properties too, or (less problematically) public spaces. If it truly were only the owner's property, then this wouldn't be an issue.
I guess I'm not very moral.
These porch cameras make me think of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for some reason. A well armed society is a polite society.
I now wonder how Zoomers, the generation born into the panopticon, may have adapted. Will they be more moral, more careful, more circumspect? Or less? Or some mix?
I'm encouraged by, and take as evidence, the rise of consent culture. Which is definitive moral progress.
Package carrier walks up. Scans the package, taps the scanner to the box, drop the package in the box, and off we go.
Sell them at Home Depot. People would buy.
And off we go.
Even then I find about half of my packages still end up on the front porch despite me indicating otherwise using the carrier's service to indicate where to leave packages. I haven’t had a package stolen in very many years so I guess that’s a good thing.
https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/book-drop-picture-id979...
But neither of our ideas will work, because the boxes are too big some of the time.
It’s a low value crime of opportunity. Merely hiding packages visually would likely prevent most incidents.
You don’t even know if they contain anything of value and most would probably be empty.
These thieves are just snatching a dozen (or two or three) small boxes at a time, opening them in an alley (or whatever) and dumping anything that isn’t of value.
As for frequency, people are more likely to take something if they don't have to confront a person. There are also a lot more packages available to steal today since more people order online now.
Package theft also varies heavily by location. I live in a medium sized city but I actually don’t know anyone who has had a package stolen off their porch. I’ve easily had over a thousand packages left at my (highly visible) porch all afternoon over the years without a single theft.
OTOH, if I lived in a few certain cities I wouldn’t want to leave any packages lying out for any period of time.
Yes usage of video data should be limited, etc.
In the end this is like the dashcam cameras that helped cut on the amount of fake insurance claims and "he said/she said" accidents where one of the parts is clearly at fault.
Statistically this is False. It's driving a lot of current policy pushes and the people who repeat it most are the ones who pay the most lip service to fighting dis/mis-information, but it's not actually true.
> Time and time again we see someone get called on a welfare check only to be shot to death
You really need to pierce your bubble and ask what else happens that might not be shown to you. The news isn't real. Not really, anyway. Every single outlet has a bias and "lying by omission" to shape a narrative is common.
For example, did you know George Floyd is hardly the first person to have died under the knee of the police officer? At least 2 times before it, it was a minority officer killing a white man. You can watch it with your own eyes:
Here's Tony Timpa being killed this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c-E_i8Q5G0
Here's Joseph Hutcheson being killed this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnsE6_lVkrE&list=LL&index=50...
Another thing that's been so sad to watch recently is peoples' disbelief in how different the reality of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation is from how it is presented to them on the news, when they simply watch the actual trial. E.g.: https://twitter.com/sarahbeth345/status/1458593872557133825
There are two issues with this:
1. Civilians are also murdered by police who are responding to non-violent offenses. A good example here would be the classic “shot during a routine traffic stop” situation. That won’t show up in the stat from your sources. Your source tries to say that by “controlling for violent crime, the racial disparity goes away” but that doesn’t make any sense.
2. Huge disparity across different LEO organizations. For example, according to this Harvard study, in Chicago the racial bias in the statistics is much stronger than in other areas: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-wh...
That same study also concludes that once you account for and amortize things, you are still 3x more likely to die in an encounter with LEO if you are non white.
And as another poster said [1], even if there were bias, that does not equate to likely, in absolute terms. The idea that you're essentially sending a black person to death, or rolling the dice on their life, by calling the cops on them for nonviolent crime, is ridiculous.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200539
This is basic, the study (at least on my glance) appears to not account for anything like this at all.
Also the source isn't everything but its political leanings are somewhat-important as this type of misdirection that I've just showed here is used all the time to craft narratives around statistics, so even when you're crafting leans in a certain direction and you still can't tell the story you'd like, it's a strong indicator that the data more distinctly show certain patterns.
You can’t use a stereotype to excuse LEO’s treating people like stereotypes. Especially when there’s a tremendous amount of evidence that shows that those stereotypes are externally enforced (systemic racism, for example). I don’t want to debate whether or not that is a thing, that’s a separate discussion, and it’s totally unrelated to the one we’re having here.
> If a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.
This is some insanely racist bullshit that you’ve just said so I don’t think that there’s going to be a productive end to this debate and this will be my final comment in the discussion. That’s as civil as I’m willing to be about it.
When I say "If a certain demographic were ... 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence", that is a post-fact observation, with the demographic being the specific collection of people pulled over.
Why would you interpret it the way you did? Holy shit. I feel like we're going into the "math is racist" territory.
> it’s just a discussion about the fact that non-white people are more likely to be subject to LEO violence
There are answers, but you're ignoring them.
1. They are using the Fatal Encounters dataset - probably the best, most complete, least biased dataset (GOOD)
2. It turns out that police aren't actually killing very many people (VERY GOOD), so there isn't a lot of data.
3. They are doing their analysis at the MSA level as a simplification to account for the fact that people move around and don't just stay at their house or only in their city. They state that they are doing it and why they are doing it (GOOD).
4. They are using a statistical process that assumes that everything (race/ethnicity, deaths, etc) is normally distributed within the MSA. In real life, this is not remotely true, but they acknowledge this fact (GOOD?)
5. Their analysis finds that many of the higher racial disparities found within MSAs occur in MSAs with the lowest rates of police killings and/or a lot of places with high rates of geographic segregation. In other words, places with the least amount of data and places where #4 holds the least.
I don't think anyone is going to claim that this is a bad study, or wrong, or anything like that. It looks pretty solid to me. It's just that you are trying to draw some conclusions from it that it can't support.
I would also like to point out that "If you are in a police encounter (traffic stop, arrested for theft, etc), what is the likelihood of being killed by the police?" is not a question being answered by this study. "If you live in this metropolitan area, what is the likelihood of being killed by the police?" is what this study provides the answer to. That includes such things as people in nursing homes, toddlers in daycare, etc. Saying "You are 3x more likely to die in a traffic stop if you are black" is, sadly, probably very true - but it is not what this study is about nor what it proves:
> We use population denominators to align with, and allow comparisons to, previous demographic work in this area, and because using race-specific crime or arrest counts—themselves shaped by racial bias and segregation—yields estimates of a different and potentially biased contrast than the rather simple ones we answer here: in which metropolitan areas are people most likely to be killed by police, what is the difference in these rates by race, and how does this vary across MSAs?
This is a weird way to frame the issue. Are black people arrested for violent crime more often? I don't know, but if they are, that changes the conclusion. This seems like an obvious thing I'd want to find out if I were posting that Twitter thread.
> I am showing that when you control for violent crime rate, the disparity vanishes.
No, arrest rate and crime rate are not the same. That's the whole point of the discussion about bias in policing.
If you ask a more straightforward question, like "how often are people killed when they interact with police?", the statistics look different. Here's a study that says:
> On average, there were large racial/ethnic inequities in the rates at which White and Black people were killed during police contact. Across all MSAs, Black people were 3.23 times more likely to be killed compared to White people (95% CI: 2.95, 3.54, p<0.001).
- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The NYTimes however did research it and found that "this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of...
> The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin. And police bias may be responsible. But this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter.
Absolutely agreed: using the FBI data in that NYT article, there's no way to tell why Black people are killed more frequently. All it tells you is that deaths are disproportionate. Using other studies with further data, like the one I posted, gives us a clearer picture.
> Ok sure, but in turn your comment ignores/doesn't contain any data on the statistics of crimes committed by race or what behaviors that lead to escalation appear more among different races.
Correct, I am taking it as a given that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit crime or somehow provoke an officer to murder them during an arrest.
"I looked at it and the study doesn't account for anything. For example, if a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.
This is basic, the study (at least on my glance) appears to not account for anything like this at all."
I don't even know how to account for that, really. Is it your honest interpretation of what I'm saying that black pignment is the literal cause of violent responses? Geez...
I mean, I don't think this discussion will be fruitful now, but just in case:
This is like logic 101. We're not debating that race causes behavior - it does not. But that doesn't mean there isn't an overlap between demographic and behavior. For example, there is an overlap between being black and being lower-income in this country. There is a relationship between low-income/poverty and violence. Do you understand that?
Skin color is not the cause. I'm completely happy to ignore it. You could equally say "people who respond aggressively are 3x likely to be shot." It is you making the racial connection, not me.
Edit: there are two other problems:
(1) It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed, regardless of which ideology the account is battling for or against. Why? Because HN is supposed to be for curious conversation, and ideological battle is the antithesis of that. We ban accounts that are using HN primarily for this, so if you'd please stop doing that, we'd appreciate it.
(2) Given your arguments in this thread and your commenting history, I'm remembering that someone complained to us about your username being an ethnic slur (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22beaner). I emailed you about this on June 24 and you never replied. At a minimum, the username is trollish given these associations, and trollish usernames are not allowed on HN. I'm not going to ban your account for this right now because I think it's fair to give you a chance to course-correct your account to conform to the site guidelines. At the same time, I think you should be using a different username. If you want to pick a different username, we can rename it for you.
"Is it your honest interpretation of what I'm saying that [...]? Geez"
"I mean, I don't think this discussion will be fruitful now"
"This is like logic 101."
"There is an overlap in this country. There is a relationship. Do you understand that?"
"It is you making the racial connection, not me."
I'm not sure if the data exists for this. You'd need to record a huge sampling of police interactions and somehow classify the behavior of the civilian independent of the police to see if they were "aggressive" or "escalated", which is quite difficult. And part of the issue is that many behaviors that police often claim are aggressive are obviously not, so who gets to define these words? Very tough.
Overall, I think I agree that given the data we've discussed in this thread, there's no way to prove whether or not disproportionate deaths are caused by police bias. I started this conversation to respond to a question in the Twitter thread you linked: "I'm going to keep tweeting this until someone can explain to me how this is possible if there is truly pervasive racial bias in policing". I maintain that it is absolutely possible, and seems likely given the data we have here, but definitely not proven.
I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often in the developed world. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people:
White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3
White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2
White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8
The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). Because we as a species are very good at estimating race and sex at a glance, the number for men is the one that's relevant to a police officer walking down the street. If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe.
This is a hard thing but it is a true thing. Most of the differences in how police treat Black vs. White people in the U.S. are driven by this phenomenon, not racism on the part of cops or "the system", though that is small but inevitable part of the feedback loop here. There is an argument to be made about a legacy of slavery or systemic racism, and maybe it's important to do that, but those arguments are completely irrelevant to the cop who's walking a beat in a bad neighborhood--White or Black. Whatever a particular police officer's commitments to colorblindness may be, there is no way for them to not use this information. If you were that police officer, walking a beat in a dangerous neighborhood, you would (like all people) involuntarily learn from the statistics in the world around you.
Real solutions to the real problems of murder and differential policing in the U.S. require people who are brave enough to look the problem right in the eye.
There's a lot of work to be done, please be part of the solution.
FBI UCR murder offender data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Census data: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-e...
I would be interested to see how the statistics look if you control for income or zip code. My assumption would be that in a given "bad neighborhood", there is no racial discrepancy in murderers, even if there is overall for the country. So I would not expect an officer walking a beat to be able to use race for any proactive purpose.
Obviously this is a big assumption that would take substantial work and data to prove, but that is what I meant by my "given". It's the same as saying that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit white collar crime - statistics show White people do it more often just because they have more opportunity.
I agree that the data you outline would be useful to look at. I'm sure someone has done some analysis to arrive at an approximation. My guess is that it doesn't change much, though there will be neighborhoods where basically everyone you encounter is of the same race so race isn't informative (if the "cop walking the beat" example is the animating one).
If I'm understanding you correctly, the basic thought is that economic circumstances might explain the difference in murder rates. They do not (i.e., there is a lot of evidence to suggest it is not causal), though obviously there is correlation. There are many chronically poor (or poorer-than-average, since no one in the U.S. is actually poor) populations that do not show significantly elevated rates of violent crimes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're effectively saying that random people deserve to die because random people get convicted because they share a skin color.
You're right that people who are shot by police don't get convicted of anything, of course.
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I feel pretty positive about this actually. This will be the tipping point for many to finally question all the info they get from the corporate media.
For a long time I saw garbage reporting on subjects that I had the slightest familiarity but I still blindly believed their reporting on any other subject, until something clicked in my mind and now I can't unsee it. I'm sure many are experiencing this click due to the trial.
Only if they actually get to see the reality presented to them somewhere. I fear that most people still won't. If they've been in the bubble for years, there will be nothing indicating to them that they should venture outside of it this one time.
Please omit such swipes from your comments here. They're a form of personal attack, which is against the site guidelines and is really bad for communication, especially on difficult topics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: your comments have degenerated into outright flamewar below. We ban accounts that do that. Please review the guidelines and please don't do any more of that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
If you query the data set it looks like 38 unarmed black men were shot by police in 2015.
To determine likelihood of a random “black porch pirate” being shot by police, we should look at the % of police encounters that end in unarmed shoots.
I found a random quota post [1] that says the number of police encounters in 2015 was around 53,469,300.
Back of a cocktail napkin numbers show that we’re talking about something in the neighborhood of .00006% of encounters end in an unarmed black person being shot by the police.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-estimated-number-of-police...
If there's a virus that hit a billion people, where 100 of them are people with blue hair, and there were 110 deaths, 90 of them being blue-haired people and 20 from the rest of the billion, if you had blue hair would you be extra worried?
sure it only kills 0.0..something..09% of people, but...
Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Of course the numbers are exaggerated, but it's to make a point.
If you want to do some maths, please give a percentage of black police encounters that end up with the black person being shot, and compare that with other races. The first number is probably very low as well, but my instinct is that the comparison will be shocking.
In any case, police in the US are woefully undertrained hotheads. In contrast, I saw a video today from Europe where a suicidal woman had a knife and officers around her. One of them pepper-sprayed her, it didn't work, and suddenly another hit her with a big fencepole that he pulled out of the ground. She was a threat to mostly herself, and luckily they didn't neutralize the threat by a bullet that could've been fatal.
36x (adjusting for population) a really small number is still a really small number. While all else equal I'd like to see the number reduced, there is much lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58911296
>Judge Melissa Clarke found that audio data collected by cameras on a shed, in a driveway and on the Ring doorbell was processed unlawfully. She noted that at the time it was not possible to turn off the audio recording facility - that happened in an update in 2020.
I would have assumed all camera makers implemented a software toggle to disable audio recording. It seems like a basic function to avoid violating laws against recording audio when you are not party to the conversation. It is Amazon though, so I guess I should not be surprised.
...and...
>She said that she found the audio data that could capture conversations "even more problematic and detrimental than video data".
So it wasn't just a doorbell aimed at the street. It was the totality of the video and audio surveillance of an area that the neighbour could reasonably expect to be somewhat private.
That can seem, to some, like a noble if naive thought. Yet Gilliard offers a retort. “The likelihood that it was a Brown or Black person who egged my car, based on where I live, is pretty high,” he says. “When you call the police on a Black or Brown person, there’s a good chance you are putting their life in danger. I don’t think that is a thing one should do lightly.”
The mental gymnastics of well-intentioned paternalism is humorous to see in practice. If it’s rational not to call the cops in this situation because the risk of negative externalities is far too great, then two conclusions are possible: (1) black/brown people are rational actors and they know the chance of getting caught/punished is very low, thus are incentivized to continue breaking the law, thus creating a vicious cycle where more law breaking begets more leniency, which begets more law breaking or (2) black/brown people are not rational, and need the benevolence of others to make sure they do not end up in jail.
Either way you slice it, it becomes clear that even well intentioned individuals are mostly acting out of self interest. It’s in the interests of Gilliard to not call the cops because losing a $50 package that will be reimbursed anyway is less important than projecting the image that he deeply cares about black and brown people.
It's as though the reason he's against the surveillance is because it strengthens neighbourhoods and the identity around them, presumably with his implied ideal being an atomized specimen of a group identity, who must amplify narrative to survive.
Surveillance turns people into helpless targets for predators when the consequences of being caught defending yourselves are greater than giving predators what they are after, which rewards them, and they come back. Eventually what surveillance mainly does is empower a tiny minority of truly terrible people who for them the cameras are never on, or they don't care, and these are the most malicious and nasty people around.
Once was for the social crime of walking with my teenage son and once for the more serious crime of walking with long hair.
It would seem the last thing emotionally fragile homeowners need is better surveillance ability.
Now for those Facebook/Nextdoor groups. I rally dislike them. Too many crazy people that report weird stuff (and racist too).
Cameras today can even be used as self defense. People are less likely to hit someone in public if they are being filmed. Look how phone cameras changed the way police do things for example. Why? because they know they are being filmed and cannot get away like they used to. I rest my case.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic there. Filming police brutality is like a national pass time. Cameras haven't changed anything. Having more examples of police beating the crap out of people is the only "change" I've seen.