[c2471]

The point is that the two are coupled. It is not clear why 0 false negatives is the aim. In almost all hard problems, you cannot have 0 false positives and 0 false negatives.

Normally, getting to 0 false negatives requires a large number of false positives. E.g. if I wanted a 0 false negative pregnancy test, the only feasible way would be to tell some very large proportion (maybe all) test takers they are pregnant.

If it requires 20 innocent people to be killed in order to achieve say a goal of 1 police officer failing to identify a threat, who says that is the right balance?

You want to take emotions out of it, I say the life officer of a police officer is no more important than an innocent person, and given a police officer has a) control of which situations they enter and b) presumably accepts some level of risk from the job the choose and c) Killings by police are an externality that the police system is not incentivised to fix in a meaningful way , they should bear the burden of systemic risk from those interactions. Accepting no less than 1 innocent death for 1 police death seems like the rational baseline, and I think there are compelling points to suggest it should be less than one innocent death to police death.

[lawnchair_larry]

I want to disengage from the false positives/negatives discussion, it’s too abstract to be relevant, and demonstrably false anyway. There exists a system with 0% false positives.

I find point (a) interesting. You posit that they have control over which situations they enter. But one of the major criticisms I hear, after abuse of force, is that “the police didn’t do anything”. It would seem that these are incompatible. They can choose, but we expect them not to. We expect them to put themselves in harms way for us. As a society, we do value civilian lives the same as police lives. In fact, we value civilian lives far more. By and large, so do they. If they did not, they would not ever put themselves in a position where they might be killed. But, we expect them to do just that. If there is a heavily armed lunatic inside his house threatening to kill his wife and kids, we get out of dodge and tell the police to deal with it. I sure as hell am not going near that.

Just look at the outrage and protests every time an innocent man is killed. When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed? Never going to happen. By and large, we don’t give much of a shit about their lives. Most of us don’t even seem to consider them human. They know that, yet they do the job anyway.

Do you know how many police have been killed so far during the riots? One of them was just gunned down in cold blood in Oakland while guarding a federal building. He wasn’t doing any crowd control or engaged with protesters. A white van drove past, stopped, opened the sliding door, gunned him and his partner down, and drove off.

Another police chief was found dead outside of a looted pawn shop last night.

Nobody is ever going to protest this.

[joshuamorton]

> But one of the major criticisms I hear, after abuse of force, is that “the police didn’t do anything”. It would seem that these are incompatible. They can choose, but we expect them not to.

I can't parse what you're trying to say here, which prevented me from responding to the main body of your post, unfortunately.

> Nobody is ever going to protest this.

What would you suggest we protest? There are many dangerous professions. Law enforcement isn't even the most dangerous. They're not even in the top 10. Should we protest car accidents that lead to the death of professional truck drivers?

"Police" is an institution. It has norms and is governed by rules. Police officers are meant to protect and serve society. When they fail to do that, that should be protested. I don't see the value in protesting the fact that law enforcement careers carry risks. Yes, it's true that there are bad people in the world. That doesn't give law enforcement carte blanche to abuse their power, nor absolve individuals or institutions from protest of abuse of that power.

(There's also a relatively snarky response here: Yes, it's regrettable that these officers died in the line of duty. We should dismantle the US police institution in its entirety, which would solve both the concerns of BLM protestors and largely address your concern. While I don't share that view, I do know many people who do.)

[TomSwirly]

> When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed?

When I lived in the United States, on the very rare occasion that a police officer was killed, our community would memorialize him.

But the fact is that police officers kill others at at least _twenty times_ the rate that police officers get killed by non-police officers.

More, if someone kills a police officer, they are almost always caught, and then gets decades in jail. When a police officer kills someone else, nothing happens to them, even when the police officer.

I lived for thirty years in the United States, and I saw the most terrible behavior from police officers - not just brutality, but gross incompetence and corruption (as in "bundles of cash being handed to cops").

Now I live in Europe, and police here are competent and friendly (and also very effective at dealing with violent drunks, I actually laughed to see someone just lifted up from behind by two cops struggling away in midair, hurting no one, not even himself). It's like night and day.

> Another police chief was found dead outside of a looted pawn shop last night.

I wasn't able to find even _one_ police chief who was found dead.

I did find a story about a retired police captain who was found dead, but no one else.

[lawnchair_larry]

https://abcnews.go.com/US/small-town-police-chief-killed-off...

[tripzilch]

"too abstract to be relevant, but ALSO demonstrably false"

come on man.