The Police seems to be in an impossible situation: if they don’t try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are “racist” (focusing on the rich neighbourhoods). If they do try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are also “racist” (for “targeting” specific races/cultures). It is especially difficult if they try to fight crime in a violent dangerous minority neighbourhood where every routine check/stop can turn into a deadly gunfight in seconds. There are minority neighbourhoods where 97% of violent crime/murders are committed by people of the same race/culture living in that neighbourhood. And yet a single Police incident gone wrong will completely overshadow the reality of this. Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day. Knowing that the next person you stop might try to do his/her best to kill you. While also knowing that any mistake you make will be headline news around the world. It’s an impossible situation.
> And yet a single Police incident gone wrong will completely overshadow the reality of this.
that's because when the police kill people, there are no repercussions for them, no matter how much obvious bias, incompetence, disregard for human life, and malice is apparent in their activity. police can literally murder people on a whim and 99% of the time not even be suspected of any crime much less prosecuted. The George Floyd murder required that it was videoed from start to finish for there to be any chance of an actual criminal trial proceeding. All of the police murders that we hear about now are all news because there is now video. Think of all the decades and decades when there was no video, how many people must have been murdered on a whim, without the event even being considered a crime. But even today, obviously immensely negligent acts, such as the murders of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, still basically have zero repercussions for their killers.
This is nothing like the usual "murder rate", where the violence that occurs between people who are not cops is all considered to be crime, and is handled as such. There's no disagreement on what justice looks like. Murder is bad, but aribtrary murder by state actors with no accountability is worse.
> Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day.
please review the accounts of Uvalde as children and teachers were murdered over an hour while heavily armed and armored police stood around and did nothing but prevent anyone else from being able to help. There are many ordinary jobs that are statistically much more dangerous than that of the police including things like roofing, truck driving, construction (source: OSHA https://www.invictuslawpc.com/most-dangerous-jobs-osha/)
>police can literally murder people on a whim and 99% of the time not even be suspected of any crime much less prosecuted
Same with medical professionals. Medical errors kills over 250k people each year in the US. It generally isn't criminal if they make a judgement that results in someone's death. There's been a number of serial killers in medicine because we give medical professionals the benefit of the doubt due to the nature of the profession.
My point is that these professions aren't your average jobs. It's normal for doctors and police to deal with life and death, and to make decisions that could set off a sequence of events that quickly results in death. So either we have to say that nobody deserves to make these decisions, or we have to hold them to realistic standards.
>Police are protected more than medical professionals.
If that was the case, then why isn't there 250x the public outrage when a medical professional makes an error that kills someone, since they kill 250x more than police do each year[0]?
And I'm not muddying the waters, so I don't appreciate the accusation of bad faith. I think the professions are comparable in nature, but there's a huge discrepancy in how they're treated, despite a massive body count difference.
You don't need public outrage. Doctors can be sued and lose their licenses. They don't have qualified immunity. If they get fired by a hospital, it's unlikely they can cross county lines and find another job at any other hospital. None of that is true for cops.
You're being accused of muddying the waters for comparing medical professionals fucking up difficult procedures to cops using illegal escalations of violence against unarmed civilians. I happen to agree.
And it's a problem that only exists in the US. Other industrial nations don't have anywhere near the police killings we do per capita. I'm sure the reply will be that those places are more homogeneous, which is very "it deports the minorities or it gets police brutality"
When cops actually face anything resembling a consequence for taking human lives we can talk about what public outrage is "disproportionate"
> Medical errors kills over 250k people each year in the US.
Indeed, and it doesn't show up on the CDC's leading causes of death list, even though it should rank in third place.
> Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.
> The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate.
Personally, I think unchallenged hero worship of medical professionals has something to do with it. Similar to the way widespread [albeit less universal] hero worship also shields police.
I think plenty of people say that, actually. There was a very popular discovery channel (or maybe history channel) show that followed around various groups of loggers and just about every episode had someone getting injured or barely escaping injury.
Deadliest Catch, similarly, highlighted the risk faced in one of the other most dangerous jobs, offshore fishing.
That's wonderful! Do loggers or fishers have the ability to kill someone off duty without repurcussions? Do they get paid similarly? Do we give them discounts at stores?
The problem isn't policing and racism. Racism is the symptom. The problem is all of the other problems that lead to the increase of violent crime in the first place. Police are put into an impossible situation indeed.
Police are also part of the problem. They enforce the systemic violence enacted by shitty policy.
Which is weird, because during the pandemic a whole bunch of police were super vocal about not wanted to enforce 'unjust mask mandates' yet they'll go and terrorize minority communities with glee
They are definitely part of the problem, but you're right that it extends far beyond just them
>Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day. Knowing that the next person you stop might try to do his/her best to kill you. While also knowing that any mistake you make will be headline news around the world. It’s an impossible situation.
Defender problem. Just like how pen testers are insufferably smug that throwing random input at your endpoint causes unexpected problems. Nevermind that building secure endpoints is harder than building random fuzzers.
That's not how we do things in the US. Here we punish whistleblowers and tell you that what they found isn't a real problem, the problem is actually the brown people crossing the border
...if they don’t try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are “racist” (focusing on the rich neighbourhoods). If they do try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are also “racist” (for “targeting” specific races/cultures).
Let me outline the counter claim. Police spend more effort on actually solving crimes in rich neighborhood (as per article) but they still need arrests in poor neighborhoods so they arrest people more randomly and on flimsier pretexts. When people complain, they throw out the line you have above.
This does not match with my experience in poor areas. In my experience, the bar to get in trouble with the police is higher because of the vastly greater violent crime rates. Most minor laws see zero enforcement
Admit only minority people into the Police force. Problem solved. If a Policeman kills minority unlawfully then it's just minority on minority crime so nobody will care.
Half the officers charged over Freddie Gray's death were black. No one was less mad over it because of that.
The system can be racist even if its constituents aren't. It shouldn't be a new or unfamiliar idea to anyone here that complex systems can have unexpected outcomes, biases, and emergent properties.
Some of the worst police departments are majority minority with minority leadership all the way up to the mayor's office. This is obviously not a solution
I want to temper the grumpiness of this comment a bit based on the productive discussion we had in the threads.
The authors developed an impressive model and got interesting results, and I appreciate the stated intent to shed light on enforcement bias patterns. However, I disagree with their claim that they have successfully done so in this paper. They have only provided an interesting prediction which needs to be verified with careful data analysis.
If increased crime in poor areas leads to decreased enforcement, we should be able to see this with well-chosen analysis, reporting and visualizations. We should be able to see examples of the claimed phenomenon happening in full context and have the opportunity to consider alternative causal explanations. If the claim still stands after this has been done, it deserves to be taken seriously. At present, the complexity of the model and the fact that Granger causality != Real causality prevent us from drawing any conclusions.
(The above does not refer to the claim about rich communities draining resources from poor communities, which seems to me like pure speculation. I can draw no logical connection between this claim and the results in the paper.)
If the response to increased crime in poor areas is a 35% decrease in enforcement, as the paper claims, this will be obvious in simple plots of crime and enforcement over time in those areas.
No social scientist worth their salt would just report some model-generated plots and claim it represented something about the real world. That's just hypothesis generation. Confirming the hypothesis requires direct data analysis.
> If the response to increased crime in poor areas is a 35% decrease in enforcement, as the paper claims, this will be obvious in simple plots of crime and enforcement over time in those areas.
Will it? Are you looking at reported crimes or investigated crimes? If the cops never show up do people stop calling? I’m not sure how a simple plot tells the whole story here.
No, I'm not talking about how best to set up the model. I'm saying that complicated neural network models have no track record of yielding reliable insights about social phenomena. They are untested. Any insights they supposedly provide must be verified by a human analyst checking the data to see if it really looks like the model says.
This isn't a new or surprising principle, and it also applies to much simpler models. Any scientist knows that, if you fit a line to data, you better plot the data with the line before you make any big claims about what that line tells you about the world, because the data underlying that fit could look lots of completely different ways with different implications [1]. These authors did the equivalent of fitting the line and telling us all about its formula and the big implications of the formula without ever plotting it with the data.
An AI says there is a dog in a particular picture. The truth of this finding has major implications - say a murder case hangs in the balance. Should someone go look and see if there is actually a dog in the picture?
A cutting-edge model can provide interesting leads but they need to be confirmed by a known reliable method if a serious question hangs in the balance.
It seems likely that police have divested from minority communities, which I agree is a genuinely racist outcome.
There are complications, though. In the 90s, leadership figures in minority communities rightly called out under policing as a serious issue that hurt their communities and needed addressing. Nowadays enforcement actions, although increasing overall quality of life and decreasing violence and premature death, are highly politically sensitive, and police in those communities can expect lots of push back and legal actions without the support of political leadership.
It's simple enough to say "well police officers should enforce perfectly," and that would of course be ideal. But in a world where perfect solutions are the enemy of the good, what's the best course of action? There are always tradeoffs, and activists need to recognize them.
There's a difference between not providing enough patrol coverage and poor response time to calls, not taking reports, not devoting sufficient investigatory resources to reported crimes...
...and stopping people for random pat-downs, pulling people over for the slightest traffic infraction or "smell of pot" and then emptying everyone out of the car because someone acted "suspiciously" and searching the car.
That's what activists and leaders in minority communities are referring to when they talk about under and over policing. You can have a community that is both under and over policed.
The typical pattern is: little focus on enforcement around crimes that affect people's lives, and lots of enforcement on "harming society / law and order" type crimes.
Another example of over-policing: SWAT teams showing up with door-busters and sub machine guns and stun grenades to serve no-knock warrants on suspects with no history of violence, over non-violent drug crimes.
When so many common, consensual and mostly-harmless activities are criminalized, especially in communities with less resources to keep things in private homes, "perfect enforcement" becomes impossible by design. Instead, law enforcement have a vast catalog of infractions and suspicions they can use to target people at their discretion. Before we can ever hope to have equitable law enforcement, we need to reform this culture of criminalization. And vastly increasing privacy rights, the same ones being gutted by the current Supreme Court, wouldn't hurt either.
What does enforcement of law look like to you? As in, how do we concretely deploy police resources and use them to improve public welfare?
Is the answer basically "officers only use force against individuals who are actively committing violence against them at that same very moment and otherwise just exist and don't engage with any particular person more or less than any other"?
Divest I see as broader than defund, particularly in that it can involve an organization removing non-financial backing (i.e. officers) from some project. But, sure, close enough.
In other fields, this is called triage. Some communities are bleeding profusely and police can only temporarily stem the symptoms because the root cause is much deeper. In other communities, quick intervention can stabilize the situation
“ These precise predictions enable equally precise evaluation of inequities in law enforcement, discovering that response to increased crime rates is biased by the socio-economic status of neighborhoods, draining policy resources to wealthy areas with disproportionately negative impacts for the inner city, as demonstrated in Chicago and six other major U.S. metropolitan areas.”
In other words, cops abandon poor neighborhoods when crime goes up there and mobilize to rich neighborhoods when crime goes up there. I’d be interested to know the other 6 metro areas, although I have a suspicion of which ones they are and their flavor of DA.
No they knew. It’s just that riots don’t happen that often so they were willing to take the risk and the opportunity cost since other Americans wouldn’t do it.
how would they have known? they were counting on soldiers to save them but were pretty much left to dry. it was only after they started shooting back at looters (who were also armed) it sank in.
"The reason why people in run down neighborhoods get arrested more is because the cops are biased. Also they don't police run down neighborhoods enough."
that's not really as contradictory as it sounds. I wouldn't be surprised if policing in rough areas is both irregular but also harsher when it happens, and that it potentially attracts not the best people and not the best cops.
No, it's completely contradictory. You either want police to police high crime areas or you don't. You either think they should arrest people in those areas committing crimes, or you don't. The police are both biased for enforcing laws, and biased for not, is not a valid position.
Police can be strongly enforcing some laws and regulations, while not enforcing others.
Typically you see under-enforcement of crimes that have direct victims and real impact on people's lives - property and violent crime (say, a stolen car, or stolen bike that leaves the victim unable to get to work/child care, or the victim injured and unable to work, if only temporarily) that directly impact a person's life...and over-enforcement of general "orderly society" crimes and regulations that don't have a direct victim or impact one people's lives.
For example, you'll see cops take 20 minutes to respond to calls of domestic violence, which might come down to being short staffed.
But isn't it strange that every patrol cop in the neighborhood never fails to make sure to check that the corner sausage cart vendor and ice cream van have every single permit in order? And how there's always time to stop someone for a non-functional tail light? And to stop random dudes for pat-downs?
Could this be down to the fact that police need reasons to stop cars in the US? In Australia they set up random stops and alcohol/drug test every driver without needing any suspicion. There is also no chance for racial bias since everyone gets tested.
While in the US they have to come up with a billion bullshit reasons to stop someone which mostly impacts poor people in bad cars.
> But isn't it strange that every patrol cop in the neighborhood never fails to make sure to check that the corner sausage cart vendor and ice cream van have every single permit in order? And how there's always time to stop someone for a non-functional tail light? And to stop random dudes for pat-downs?
it's not that surprising. I'm sure malice is part of the explanation, but it's also just easier. the ice cream van either has the permit or they don't. they're not going to run away. in 30 minutes, the officer gets to add another citation to the monthly tally. it's a nearly certain outcome that takes little effort.
the stolen car or bike is already gone by the time the officer shows up to the scene (if they bother to). it takes an indeterminate amount of time to track down the stolen item, and even more to gather enough evidence to actually charge someone. it sucks, but most people who are evaluated on metrics try to avoid spending a lot of time on tasks where they might come out empty-handed. it's a hard organizational problem to incentivize this sort of work.
When the police start enforcing minor infractions, they get called out for bias too, because the fines and lost work hours to misdemeanor jail time hit the people in those communities "disproportionately". Then there is the revolving door issue we are seeing when DAs are soft on minor infractions, or law makers don't want to spend the money on them in the criminal justice system, so it doesn't make sense for the cops to go after lower level issues when they're budding. They can't win.
If you work a low-end shift job and miss a shift, you're likely to get fired almost immediately, or put on some sort of suspension, or otherwise punished via poor shift assignments and the like. At the very least, you lose income for the shift, and that is likely a substantial amount of money for you. The "court fee" is a substantial amount of money to you. You end up with a public defender who has little influence with the other officers of the court - the judge, the DA, etc. They have a docket a mile long for that day and needs to triage their time and resources, so they push you to plea out so they have time for the guy who is facing a felony or even capitol charge. If convicted your choices are jail or fines, and the fines might be days or weeks of pay you don't have.
If you work a professional job, you have "personal days" you can cash in, your employer provides you with things like free legal assistance via EAPs - or you probably already have established professional relationships with at least some sort of attorney, who you can afford, and who knows someone who knows the judges and DAs in the district you're going to be appearing in, and maybe the whole thing just goes away. The court fees are a rounding error in your weekly pay. And the laws are all "jail time or X dollar fine." So even if you're found guilty - the fine is a rounding error to you.
Reading these comments I realize now that despite Boudin's recall, places like SF -- dominated by leftist ideology -- still have a long, long way to go before bottoming out and smelling the coffee.