[ucm_edge]

Junk science is a huge problem in law enforcement. Treating lie detectors as canonical, the blood splatter analysis to recreate crime scenes, this kind of stuff.

It is especially problematic because police orgs are generally pretty good at adopting new techniques. But unfortunately the marketplace of ideas they have to shop in suffers from overrepresentation of garbage products. A huge part of law enforcement enhancement is going to involve cleaning this market up.

[Sakos]

> Junk science is a huge problem in law enforcement. Treating lie detectors as canonical, the blood splatter analysis to recreate crime scenes, this kind of stuff.

I'm not sure what's the bigger problem. The use of junk science by law enforcement or how law enforcement and their methods are portrayed by popular media that ensure the use of junk science (and other harmful methods) can persist long-term. I'm sure everybody and their mother has seen Dexter (who works as a blood splatter analyst) or any number of shows/movies or all the news where police dogs are portrayed in an incredibly positive light (I'm looking at you, Paw Patrol).

[kneebonian]

> any number of shows/movies or all the news where police dogs are portrayed in an incredibly positive light (I'm looking at you, Paw Patrol).

Listen dude there I have enough beef with paw patrol to make a texas ranchers BBQ look ill equipped, from the fact the mayor is an idiot, that obnoxious chicken the fact the town has outsourced all of it's emergency functions to what is basically the mafia, the fact that they sit on a money printer of toys and the fact that the song haunts my house day in and day out.

But to say that Paw Patrol is a problem because it has a police dog in it and that he helps people is equivalent to saying that Daniel Tiger is anti-Democracy because it has a Royal Family.

[xapata]

Does Daniel Tiger portray a royal family as benevolent, and a democratically elected leader as incompetent? If so, it sounds like it's anti-democracy. Perhaps unintentionally so, but perpetuating those mythologies nonetheless.

[r3trohack3r]

> the fact the mayor is an idiot, that obnoxious chicken

Man, for real. Literally every other episode this lady loses her chicken and the paw patrol have to risk life and limb to get it back. Like, at some point, maybe you shouldn't have a pet chicken?

[scrollaway]

I think you will enjoy this video breakdown from Skip Intro: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rwhUpu9MfZ0

It’s a superb video essay and absolutely worth the watch! But to be clear, it’s also playing into the meme that paw patrol is copaganda, so take it as a mix of comedy and serious analysis :)

The gist of the video is that, while paw patrol is not copaganda, it is problematic for parallel reasons. It’s also a terrible tv show as you noted.

[dinkumthinkum]

I wouldn’t say it is superb. On this channel every third video is about how sone random show is “copaganda”, literally. The concept of that portmanteau is already fairly stupid to begin with.

[scrollaway]

Ever heard "don't judge a book by its cover"?

Skip Intro has excellent videos all in all. "Copaganda" is his series diving into cop shows (and analyzing them in the context of what is and isn't copaganda). He doesn't claim that a particular show is copaganda just because he's analyzing it.

If you "wouldn't say [the video] is superb" because, instead of watching it, you've looked at the titles of his other videos, I dunno what to tell you.

[britneybitch]

Other than the chicken, that description is a perfect match for New York City.

[Mikeb85]

As someone with a 5 month old this post is simultaneously enlightening, hilarious and terrifying.

[kondor6c]

Also, why isn't there more supervision of Alex who has to be near 6?

Daring Danny X and his antics have with Alex's accidents have got to be near a third of their call volume

[baryphonic]

HN comment of the year

[kneebonian]

Glad this didn't come 4 days later.

[Sakos]

How? It's mostly devoid of substance or any real insight or understanding. It's not a great comment just because you happen to agree with it. Just check out the Skip Intro video if you don't get it, it's like a 101 course on media as propaganda and the effects of media on cultural values.

[mcguire]

This is the HN comment of the year: whiny, pedantic, and with a weird agenda.

[Sakos]

So you have nothing to say of substance either. This is HN, not Reddit. If you can't contribute, this isn't the place for you.

And yes, my agenda of wanting more accountability for police who murder citizens and destroy their lives by abusing their power is "weird". What's wrong with you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris Or maybe you just don't care that the Supreme Court decided that police dogs are fine and current training is sufficient to prove their reliability despite overwhelming evidence showing otherwise

> Harris was the first Supreme Court case to challenge the dog's reliability, backed by data that asserts that on average, up to 80% of a dog's alerts are wrong.

> In the first 9 months of 2011, dogs alerted (and police searched) 14,102 times, and drugs were found only 2,854 times—a false alert rate of 80%. Those results, they say, are surprisingly consistent – in 2010, the false alert rate was 74%.[3] Further still, the study found that individual dog's performance varied wildly, with accuracy rates ranging from a high of 56% to a low of 7%, with two-thirds of the dogs performing below the average.

> The United States Supreme Court returned a unanimous decision on February 19, 2013, ruling against Harris and overturning the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court.[29] In the unanimous opinion, Justice Elena Kagan stated that the dog's certification and continued training are adequate indication of his reliability, and thus is sufficient to presume the dog's alert provides probable cause to search, using the "totality-of-the-circumstances" test per Illinois v. Gates. She wrote that the Florida Supreme Court instead established "a strict evidentiary checklist", where "an alert cannot establish probable cause ... unless the State introduces comprehensive documentation of the dog's prior 'hits' and 'misses' in the field ... No matter how much other proof the State offers of the dog's reliability, the absent field performance records will preclude a finding of probable cause."[30]

[dinkumthinkum]

You joke but there are leftist articles about Paw Patrol and the patriarchy, globalism, and every other -ism you can imagine.

[kneebonian]

Ya but there are leftists articles about everything it turns out when you put 7 billion people on the internet and give them the ability to say things you can find lots of stupid things.

[krapp]

> But to say that Paw Patrol is a problem because it has a police dog in it and that he helps people is equivalent to saying that Daniel Tiger is anti-Democracy because it has a Royal Family.

Any positive portrayal of police in US media is problematic. Teaching children to trust the police is only going to get some of them jailed on fabricated evidence or killed, especially if they aren't white and affluent.

edit: Ok, apparently Paw Patrol is Canadian, so mea culpa. I guess the police are actually civil servants there. It's still a problem when shown to US children.

[dinkumthinkum]

Why is and positive portrayal of police problematic? I think the leftist notion if “problematic” is problematic. You’re being very hyperbolic by writing that trusting police will get you killed and jailed. That is something someone living in a leftist / TikTok fantasy world would think.

[20after4]

It's what someone living in the real world would think. Ask any defense attorney if you don't want to believe random internet commenters.

[dinkumthinkum]

I love in the real world and know that’s nonsense. So, if I poll 10,000 defense attorneys, 90% or more are going to tell me this childish nonsense. What if I polled victims of crime, let’s include victims of police crime, my guess you might think the majority of crime must be done police.

Actually, by your logic, you must think the vast majority of crimes or an enormously significant amount of crimes are committed by police because you claim trusting police will get you killed or jailed. However, it is certainly true that enormous numbers of people “trust”, in some sense, the police but the problem we do not see the numbers of those people being killed/jailed to support your position.

[KennyBlanken]

Portrayal of police dogs in a positive light is necessary because otherwise people would see them for what they are: living probable-cause generators and loopholes on laws and regulations on police brutality.

There's plenty of evidence police dogs are worse than a coin flip and react to their handlers - but the supreme court said that was irrelevant and upheld basing a search off a dog's reaction to be valid. Dogs also act as a proxy for brutal, violent treatment of someone.

[brookst]

The media is a trailing indicator. It can lead to feedback loops and reinforce the bad behaviors it represents, but things like Dexter come about because some writer hears about police using blood spatter analysis and mythologizes it.

If junk science were rejected where it matters, the media wouldn’t use it either, or would at least treat it they way they do dowsing or psychics.

The media will serve any demand, no matter how dumb. But there has to be demand. That’s my theory anyway.

[Sakos]

It's a feedback loop, yes. You need popular support from voters to be able to implement changes in police procedure. Who's going to vote for the guy who wants to "gut" law enforcement methods when all their lives TV has told them that's just what the police does and how criminals are caught? Especially when the other guy is saying "look at him, he wants to protect criminals".

[KennyBlanken]

It's not a trailing indicator or feedback loop when you have the police and military actively pushing narratives on TV producers and Hollywood, even controlling scripts in exchange for access to extras and military equipment/facilities.

[watwut]

Those are at least fiction. I have seen documentaries where pseudo psychology (not holding eye contact means you are lying, this or that entirely normal behavior treated as something chillingly sinister, parent deemed nit sufficiently crying) was treated as sure clue of guilt.

And gut feelings, gut feelings of detectives were literally treated as evidence in those documentaries

[scarmig]

Most documentaries should be considered a subgenre of fiction. Inspired by reality, but mostly interested in telling a compelling narrative.

[britneybitch]

They're not always treated as fiction though. Some police officers model their behavior after what they see on TV. And police departments have given shows access to locations and props in exchange for favorable portrayal. John Oliver did a show about it recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I

[cratermoon]

LA PD essentially invented the cop show. https://timeline.com/dragnet-lapd-propaganda-cop-bb19d9a5fb6...

[tetraca]

I think the practice is supposed to be a little more than what's depicted there. When they start an interrogation, they try to ask light or at least easy questions to see how a suspect answers without real pressure, then when they hit a hard question, they compare the responses and look for clusters of behavior which might indicate deception when taking into account how they behaved in contrast through the rest of the questioning. Not to say that it's going to be particularly accurate/good.

[NikolaNovak]

Right, but to oversimplify, as innocent as I am, I will react differently when asked "enjoying the weather today", "where were you on night if December 12th", and "did you murder Mukelefa Stanjipoljic". There'll be contrast just as baseline!

I had a law enforcement in-law who was confident he could figure out a man by shaking his hand and looking at him in the eye, etc etc. He was perennial favourite of all the sleezy salespeople around because while he was certain he was getting a deal and being taken care of and getting the good stuff, for anything I had any insight into (computer, car, photo, and music stuff), he was getting ripped six ways to Sunday. But his confidence was not to be shaken.

[rnd0]

I'm pretty sure that the lack of police accountability is a far worse problem, to be honest. It eliminates any chance that we can reform law enforcement to any significant degree.

[tyingq]

They are somewhat intertwined though. If police can feed anyone to the DA, and the DA can then use a variety of sketchy tactics (including junk science, but mostly other stuff) to punish them, then it all works. If it kept resulting in cases that get thrown out, the feedback loop would slow it down some.

[Agentlien]

I've often wondered how exactly Paw Patrol's ample budget is allocated and under what authority they operate. Moreover, does the mayor using them for her personal errands constitute an abuse of power?

[mbg721]

I can absolutely imagine "CSI: Phrenology", if the timeline had worked out a little differently.

[loteck]

Let's make sure we add "gunshot detection" to this list, since that is the currently popular for-profit junk science product that police are pouring millions of dollars into acquiring all over the US.

[wrigby]

I’d be interested in understanding this better - what kind of sensors do you have in mind that are junk?

[BryantD]

ShotSpotter’s results are iffy, which appears to be a combination of a) ShotSpotter employees overriding the AI and b) weaknesses in the tech. There’s also some potential for reinforcing bias if you only put the sensors in neighborhoods you’re already worried about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264686 has previous discussion on this from a number of viewpoints.

[googlryas]

The goal of police is public safety, and nothing to do with preventing reinforcing biases.

If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness, even though there are no polar bear attacks there?

[alasdair_]

The problem is that ShotSpotter doesn’t actually work very well at all.

I mean, if I make a magic box that has a 1% chance per day of calling the police and telling them a crime happened nearby and then only stick that box in areas where poor people live, you could see how that would lead to a whole lot of calls for police in those areas. You can also see how, by having a vastly higher police presence in those areas, more crimes will be detected in those areas, even if the base crime rate is the same as in a different area.

In the past, ShotSpotter employees have gone into the system and changed things after the fact to claim that their system detected shots in a specific area that it never detected. They did this while working with the police to come up with probable cause for an arrest after the arrest happened.

This kind of thing makes it easy for the cops to arrest people they want to arrest without any actual evidence of a crime. This is generally considered a bad thing in the USA.

[Kye]

I still encounter people who think a map of crime is an actual map of crime, like SimCity, and not a map of policing. They really do believe it reflects reality. Most times they snap out of it when you point out it's impossible to map crime without collected data, and then it's a short hop to realize policing is how you get that data. And any intellectually honest person will recognize the biases inherent to that data.

[subradios]

These biases are also present in murder convictions, widely used to benchmark crime rates over time and geography due to the inability of police to ignore dead bodies selectively.

It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is.

Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities.

Black communities are majority-support of the same or more police per Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...

Removing police from poorer areas hurts poor people more than edge case concerns about individual prosecutors playing fast and loose.

[BryantD]

I’d like the public to be safe from the public servants who carry guns as part of their day to day work. If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is, they’re more likely to use force when it isn’t warranted. Thus, I’m not as safe.

I conclude that it is a matter of public safety to avoid reinforcing biases.

Since the article this thread is about shows that some portion of police are willing to believe any damn thing, I think my concerns are reasonable.

[AlbertCory]

> If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is

Could it be "bias" to look at crime statistics? Maybe it's less safe than you think it is.

[cratermoon]

> If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness

This is already reinforcing bias, because your question presumes that the places law enforcement deploys this tech are where it needs to be. To use your analogy, cops like deploying polar bear detectors based on how much snow falls in a place, because "everyone" knows that polar bears live in snowy places.

[fallingknife]

This system is not designed to find out where shootings happen. We know that already. It's just designed to detect them faster.

[RHSeeger]

> The goal of police is public safety

To be clear... the goal of the police _force_ is to enforce the law. The goal of (some) individual police officers is public safety, but certainly not all of them (and some days, it seems like not many of them... but you generally only hear about the bad stuff in the news, so take that with a grain of salt).

[Quinner]

The goal of the police is to have secure jobs with a decent salary and benefits, and ideally be meaningful in some way (could be promoting public safety... could be exerting power over others).

Often enforcing the law helps secure budgets (especially when it comes to enforcing drug laws with lucrative civil forfeiture seizures), but more recently many police departments have tried a different tactic when budgets have been threatened: actively refusing to enforce the law, in order to increase crime and prompt political change.

[nisegami]

The goal of the police is to maintain the status quo.

[dsfyu404ed]

They use microphones to detect gunshots. It works in a controlled environment but in an actual municipality the data needs enough "massaging" by human analysts to get what are still fundamentally low-quality tips it's somewhere between redundant and a waste of resources.

[cratermoon]

> the data needs enough "massaging" by human analysts to get what are still fundamentally low-quality tips it's somewhere between redundant and a waste of resources.

And those analysts are part of a law enforcement community that is rife with biases about crime and guns, which means most of the places where the system finds gunshots are where the biased people (who by default placed the detectors according to a bias) expect to hear gunshots.

[weakfortress]

If you've ever shot a gun or been around guns you'd know the rapport of various guns is not always consistent. Often, it is difficult to tell the difference between a gunshot and a firework for example. Even something like dropping a wood pallet far enough away can sound like the echos of a gunshot. Backfiring from a car can sound remarkably close to a small caliber rifle. If a gunshot doesnt happen quite literally within a few dozen feet of you it's often hard to tell. Typically the way you can tell is people who shoot guns generally don't do it once. Several rapports tend to raise the probability of a gun.

ShotSpotter works in isolation because in isolation a certain noise profile is almost certainly a gun shot. Like most ML aiming to change the world it's powered by p-hacking.

[selimthegrim]

the report, rapport is not something I want to have with a gun unless I am a character in Full Metal Jacket

[mhb]

Flock Safety Raven

Gunshot Detection and Location System

Combine gunshot detection with ALPR evidence to drive better outcomes

https://www.flocksafety.com/products/raven

[partdavid]

The list goes on: instant-drug tests used for traffic stops with undeclared and uninvestigated false positive rates, drug sniffing dogs (cf. https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs... for example), burn patterns in arson investigation, etc.

[Spooky23]

Agree.

The problem imo is that cops have an insular culture and are trained to control situations. That control is often an Illusion. They are also often exempt from some of the procurement rules that apply to other government entities. So they tend to accept handshake claims from people identified as “good guys” through some connection or the salesman’s former on the job status.

Another issue is that they don’t pay for or maintain technology in many cases, and the organizations tend to want to fund overtime, gas and bullets over all else. Police rely on grants to buy stuff with tight timelines. So there’s a tendency to blow the federal grant quickly on something cool that some “good guy” promises.

[schwartzworld]

Citations Needed did an episode a few years back on how TV Copaganda represents forensics as a much more solid "science" than it actually is. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-94-the-goofy-pseu...

[Waterluvian]

I don’t think it’s that the market is full of garbage. There is a demand from law enforcement for the garbage. They want science tools to confirm their biases and broken practices.

[8note]

Not really science tools. They want authoritative looking tools to confirm their biases and broken practices.

A scientific tool could prove a different direction than what law enforcement wants it to say.

[akudha]

I am terrified of affecting someone's health, freedom or money (especially health and freedom) unknowingly, mistakenly etc. How do people who lie in court, use unproven tools etc to screw someone's entire life sleep at night? This is so far beyond my comprehension.

[Bluestrike2]

Well, for starters, they don't actually think their junk science is junk science. If you're confident that you were right all along, and you nailed the "bad guy," you're going to sleep just fine. All of these people believe they're helping further the cause of justice; very few go to work thinking "this is bullshit, I know it, and I don't care." Given their training and experience--even though it's experience in a field we later define as junk science--they become confident in their own work, and confirmation bias is omnipresent. Not just for individual cases, but for entire forensic fields and methods.

It's not exactly the same, but there have been countless examples of prosecutors and police officers who, when faced with convictions overturned due to DNA evidence, continued to maintain that the person was nevertheless guilty despite that evidence. And if I'm being totally honest, I can't even imagine how tempting that fantasy would be.

The alternative is acknowledging that you got it wrong and an innocent person paid an extraordinary price for your failure, losing years of their life behind bars. Worse yet, your failure allowed allowed the actual murderer/rapist/etc. to get off scot-free and potentially harm others.

It's terrifying enough to imagine screwing up a single case. Now imagine screwing up hundreds or possibly thousands, after spending years using what you believed to be forensic science that turned out to be little more than bullshit. In that light, the temptation to search for alternative explanations, fight against information and evidence that contradicts your theory of the case, etc. has to be overwhelming. And while there are absolutely people in the justice system who don't succumb to that temptation, there are plenty who do.

[dragonwriter]

> Well, for starters, they don't actually think their junk science is junk science.

For starters, they don't actually care. If it will provide an excuse which can arbitrarily and selectively be cited to justify action, they will embrace it and train their officers on it; if public belief in it is likely to lead to more deference to law enforcement and fear of crime, they will also blast it in their PR (see magic fentanyl). If it will provide an excuse for actions that woild otherwise seem to violate civil rights, they’ll also invest heavily in it.

Truth isn’t relevant to many od the things police agencies pay to train officers on; power is. And the people—often former law enforcement themselves—crafting and selling these ideas know the market they are targeting.

[20after4]

They convince themself that the person is really guilty (of something, maybe not even the thing they are accused of, just generally bad / evil / wrong color / wrong religion. really whatever it takes for them to believe someone deserves punishment) .... then the ends justify the means.

[thecrash]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

[nucleogenesis]

Yeah this isn’t surprising considering these are the people who think touching or breathing near fentanyl can kill you

[feet]

It doesn't help that law enforcement organizations seem to higher the dullest knives in the drawer, of course they can't tell bs from non-bs. Whatever confirms their biases gets green-lit

[anigbrowl]

The thing is that prosecutors and courts are supposedly harboring some of the sharpest knives in the drawer, yet they cheerfully accept and often pass on BS at face value when it's expedient to do so.

[sobkas]

> The thing is that prosecutors and courts are supposedly harboring some of the sharpest knives in the drawer, yet they cheerfully accept and often pass on BS at face value when it's expedient to do so.

Court system have one basic goal, to be a test if accused party have enough money to spend on lawyers, experts and their expertise. Affluenza much?

[feet]

Supposedly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, considering the state of the system I have a hard time believing it