[HN Gopher] Predictive policing software terrible at predicting ...
___________________________________________________________________
Predictive policing software terrible at predicting crimes
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-10-02 14:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (themarkup.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (themarkup.org)
| chimeracoder wrote:
| Predictive policing isn't about predicting crimes. Like other
| trends before it, like "police psychics"[0], it's about
| manufacturing probable cause.
|
| It's a tool for police departments looking to meet their quotas
| and justify their ever-increasing budgets. Public safety is
| nowhere on the list of priorities.
|
| [0] Yes, these are a thing, and they're actually more horrifying
| than you are probably imagining.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Surprised I had to scroll this far down to find this. This is
| almost certainly the end-goal of this kind of software: To
| provide the police a reliable source of probable cause and
| reasonable suspicion when reality provides them none. Like a
| drug-sniffing dog trained to "alert" on command.
| thexumaker wrote:
| I want more details. Say they predicted X spot would have more
| crime and so the PD sent more patrols there. Wouldn't that affect
| the amount of crime?
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| Beyond the fact that reported crimes are just a proxy for
| _actual_ crime, this is clearly a complex, non-linear system
| with feedback loops. I don 't see how simple statistics, markov
| reasoning, ML or AI could ever realistically model this with
| the intent being _control_ of the surveyed system.
|
| Huge paradox. Why even _try_ predictive policing without
| Minority Report oracles to magically do the prediction?
| pipo234 wrote:
| It hard to argue for _any_ reliable indication of accuracy.
| What does "less than half a percent" success rate even mean?
| What if you're sampling an interval where there _is_ no crime?
| How would you know that the model "failed"? How does "less
| than half a percent" compare to other means of prediction --
| like following the gut feeling of an expert?
| icepat wrote:
| Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does not
| always mean increased crime levels. It could lead to a feedback
| cycle. More crime (even rather small common crime like
| j-walking) goes up, increases statistics, causes more funding..
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does
| not always mean increased crime levels.
|
| surely this is figured out and accounted for. The healthcare
| industry has been coming up with better tests forever that
| result in more disease detections. But they don't scream to
| the hills of a skyrocketing outbreak because they account for
| the better test.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I am a little confused by this. Firstly, Gizmodo is reporting on
| somebody else's investigation:
|
| > A new joint investigation by The Markup and Wired...
|
| And when I go to the page about actual investigation by The
| Markup [1]
|
| > Our investigation _stopped short of analyzing precisely how
| effective Geolitica's software was at predicting crimes_ because
| only 2 out of 38 police departments provided data on when
| officers patrolled the predicted areas. Geolitica claims that
| sending officers to a prediction location would dissuade crimes
| through police presence alone. It would be impossible to
| accurately determine how effective the program is without knowing
| which predictions officers responded to and which ones they did
| not respond to.
|
| Also, later in the article
|
| > Plainfield officials said they never used the system to direct
| patrols.
|
| Given all this, it's somewhat simplistic to say it's "pretty
| terrible at predicting crimes", even though that makes for a good
| clickbait headline. It seems that the software was intended to
| identify high-crime areas that to target for patrolling, which
| doesn't seem like a _huge_ problem to me -- but it seems like the
| software was never actually used as intended in the first place.
|
| ----------------------------------------
|
| [1] https://themarkup.org/prediction-
| bias/2023/10/02/predictive-...
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > Gizmodo is reporting on somebody else's investigation
|
| This is Gizmodo's business model. It is a glorified blog. They
| don't do original reporting. Gizmodo was originally a property
| of Gawker, and thus the model is essentially commentary and
| opinion on the reporting generated by other organizations.
|
| Because Gizmodo is really just an opinion/editorial blog, it
| doesn't really attempt to provide unbiased or fact driven
| reporting. So it is then no surprise that the actual facts
| align quite poorly with the headline.
| dang wrote:
| We've since moved the comments in to a different thread. (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37756211)
| dang wrote:
| Thanks - we've since merged the comments hither, since this
| submitter had the original source.
|
| Submitters: " _Please submit the original source. If a post
| reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._
| " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| (the parent was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37753079)
| gsdofthewoods wrote:
| The things you're citing are referring to two different
| investigations. One is the most recent one that only centered
| on Plainfield, NJ, which is what Gizmodo is reblogging. The one
| where they did not investigate Geolitica's effectiveness at
| predictions was a broader investigation in 2021.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But even if they had used it as intended, how could you tell
| whether it _works_? How do you tell the difference between
| "there were going to be crimes there, but you patrolled there,
| and because you patrolled, there were no crimes" and "there
| were not going to be crimes there, whether you patrolled or
| not, so your patrol did exactly nothing."
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Experimentation and tracking results over time.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| _how could you tell whether it works?_
|
| The study of those questions and the reliability of your
| answers to those questions is called statistics and it is an
| entire branch of mathematics, usually with its own department
| at most universities.
| waveBidder wrote:
| well, if you're a guest on
| https://www.probablecausation.com/, then you would randomly
| assign teams to patrol using this software or not,and compare
| the changes in rates. sounds like geolitica isn't very
| careful or interested in results.
| [deleted]
| lazide wrote:
| If you're selling tiger-repellent rocks, the last thing you
| need is a solid controlled experiment to get in the way of
| separating rubes from their cash.
| cgriswald wrote:
| There are really two questions here, which should be tested
| separately:
|
| (1) Is the software significantly predictive? Test the
| software's predictions against actual crime in areas with no
| patrols.
|
| (2) Are patrols effective deterrents to crime? Observe the
| area in question with and without patrols. (I wouldn't be
| surprised to learn there are already such studies.)
|
| If both (1) and (2) yield positive results, you can then use
| the software to direct patrols and see if the method itself
| is effective at reducing crime; which would also serve to
| further confirm (2).
|
| Of course, even if only (1) yields positive results, there
| would probably be other benefits to using the software to
| direct patrols, like reducing response times (which could
| also be tested).
| firebat45 wrote:
| if crimes (print "there are crimes anyways, the police are
| ineffective!") else (print "there is no crime, the police are
| ineffective!")
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Maybe the link for this submission should be replaced with one
| of the originals? The closer to the source the better IMHO
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| They used advanced software to predict where clicks will happen
| with bait.
| gwern wrote:
| The error is more fundamental. Even if they had some number
| like 'only 1% of crimes were predicted and that's bad', that's
| a right answer to a wrong question. Why do they think 1% is not
| good enough? How big does it need to be before it _is_ good?
| 2%? 50%? 100%? If you can 't give any answer to that question,
| then it doesn't matter what the number really is because the
| number still doesn't mean anything.
|
| (The right number is probably extremely small, because crime is
| very bad {{citation needed}} and even a small chance of
| prevention is useful.)
| wolfram74 wrote:
| the "right number" is strongly dependent on what the
| consequences of false positives are. If you're comfortable
| pulling numbers from thin air, 0.5% of these guided patrols
| lead to prevented crimes, but 10% lead to arrests of simply
| suspicious looking people (suspicious on grounds of being
| around where crime is predicted) and then while they're being
| detained are late for a job and get fired. Is 20 people
| getting fired worth preventing one crime? Say, a catalytic
| converter being stolen, since "crime" is very bad, not, say,
| murder particularly.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Further, who in the general vicinity of a precrime report
| is "suspicious looking"? Who gets their day, if not their
| life, turned upside down?
|
| Thankfully, police are notoriously fair-minded and
| empathetic, and never arbitrary, deceptive, or biased when
| it comes to probable cause.
| josefresco wrote:
| If it was good at predicting crime I highly doubt only 2/38
| departments would have cooperated. The know it doesn't work.
|
| And it looks like they had _some_ data:
|
| >We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between
| Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department
| (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company's algorithm
| indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a
| location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the
| success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of
| the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted
| category, that was also later reported to police.
| bumby wrote:
| > _If it was good at predicting crime I highly doubt only 2
| /38 departments would have cooperated._
|
| That's certainly low, but I suspect (absent some legal
| framework like FOIA) the default position of police
| departments is to share less information, not more. So it's
| still what I would expect even if it was reasonably good.
|
| I wish the article would have provided more details about why
| the PDs chose not to use it. Was it because it was bad at
| predictions? Cumbersome to use? Glitchy?
|
| It reminds me of a project I was involved with that used a
| "real-time" computational fluid dynamics model to optimize
| datacenter air-conditioning. Management was big on the hype,
| but if you paid attention, the system was routinely unplugged
| from the actual control system because the facility engineers
| just found it too difficult to work with.
| vkou wrote:
| > That's certainly low, but I suspect (absent some legal
| framework like FOIA) the default position of police
| departments is to share less information, not more.
|
| Why on Earth would we want people who have a poor grasp of
| the law, paired with the means and the license to arrest
| and kill be transparent about their work..?
| bumby wrote:
| We can both agree that transparency is the ideal and
| still recognize that's not how incentives are aligned. In
| general, there are far more downsides and risks to PDs
| regarding open sharing of information so they generally
| should be expected to act accordingly.
|
| E.g., I'd like to live in a works where lawyers are
| concerned with justice rather than "winning" but I'm not
| shocked when they act like winning is the goal.
| firebat45 wrote:
| "Winning" as the goal is the only way lawyers can be
| truly objective. Otherwise the justice system turns into
| a popularity contest. The problem is that any single
| person/lawyer might ~think~ they know who is guilty or
| innocent, but they may very well be wrong.
|
| If a defense lawyer knows that his client is guilty, and
| successfully defends him anyways, that means there was
| not sufficient evidence to convict. Don't blame the
| defense lawyer for doing his job rigorously. Blame the
| prosecution for failing at theirs.
| bumby wrote:
| > _If a defense lawyer knows that his client is guilty,
| and successfully defends him anyways, that means there
| was not sufficient evidence to convict._
|
| This assumes the jury is rational and objective. There's
| plenty of behavioral psychology that goes against this,
| but a more glaring observation is that lawyers do not
| seek to maximize the objectivity of the jury during
| selection. It's usually very much the opposite.
|
| The goal of the district/trial court system is finding of
| fact. That's objective. Winning is about swaying the
| jury, which pulls on the levers of subjectivity. The
| system is, in part, designed to protect the rights of the
| innocent. Take the Blackstone ratio, which assumes it is
| better to let 10 guilty people go than convict 1
| innocent. Verdicts cannot be purely objective in a system
| designed to be asymmetrical.
| kitchen_sink wrote:
| To be fair, the way legal system works means if a lawyer
| isn't trying to 'win' your case, they're not being a good
| lawyer - the assumption your client is innocent and you
| need to defend them is kinda fundamental.
|
| How morality informs the law and the ways lawyers should
| behave ( _i.e_ , should they phone it in/decline the case
| in if they disagree ethically) is interesting but more
| difficult as a topic
| bumby wrote:
| I think this is mostly correct. Not only are lawyers who
| aren't trying to "win" not good lawyers, they are
| possibly breaching their oath. The lawyer has an
| obligation to try and win, but only after they have done
| a preliminary investigation before filing the case. There
| are also some guardrails; your lawyer can't lie about
| facts they've found out during that investigation, for
| example. If they do, they can be sanctioned for it. So
| they can't just try and win at all costs.
|
| With all that said, I think the original point still
| stands: in most people's minds, an 'ideal' system is one
| where all the lawyers are trying to seek justice. We just
| create a less-than-ideal adversarial system as a weak
| proxy for that given that human nature tends to make the
| ideal an unreliable expectation. I don't think that's
| fundamentally different from the PD transparency issue.
| Swizec wrote:
| > identify high-crime areas that to target for patrolling,
| which doesn't seem like a huge problem to me
|
| The wonderful Weapons of Math Destruction has a chapter on how
| this leads to a self reinforcing loop.
|
| More crimes means more police presence. More police presence
| means more recorded crimes. More crime data means more police
| ...
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| If only we had statistical tools to compensate for this...
| KingMob wrote:
| There are limits to how far stats can compensate for
| missing data, especially _non-random_ missing data.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| What statistical tools compensate for the generally racist
| and shitty nature of US police officers?
| pxmpxm wrote:
| I don't expect to read this level of asinine on HN.
| User23 wrote:
| I hate how wet streets cause rain.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| > More police presence means more recorded crimes.
|
| The article in the headline implies the opposite: statistical
| inference of future crime location -> more cops in said
| location -> no crime in said location.
|
| It should be fairly easy to back out an out of sample data
| set for this - ie predicted crime location where the extra
| cops didn't get deployed and see if that lines up with
| empirical observations.
| justrealist wrote:
| Yes if you choose to use your data like an idiot then you
| will generate idiotic conclusions.
|
| This does nothing to negate the value of data used
| intelligently.
| Swizec wrote:
| This is a description of how it is currently being used in
| practice.
|
| Yes you can use data well. It is unfortunately not being
| used well.
| shadowtree wrote:
| This is such an interesting topic, where the conclusions are so
| politically charged that no ones wants to risk their careers.
|
| See this article in the NYT:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
|
| "Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last
| year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively,
| they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police
| Commissioner Keechant Sewell said."
|
| Can you predict crimes? Of course you can, the math is clear. The
| solution to _reduce_ crime is also logical and clear, but
| politically unfeasible: extended incarceration.
|
| All the handwringing about various side topics, like race,
| gender, class are just distractions. See El Salvador's murder
| rate drop this year too. WSJ, with handwringing:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-country-with-the-highest-mu...
|
| Criminals commit crimes, a lot. Once you have identified a
| criminal, you can safely predict more crimes. No AI needed, a
| simple spreadsheet will suffice.
|
| And here, another article for a balanced world view - Ireland:
| https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/irish-crime/decrease-in-le....
|
| "A significant decrease in burglaries in most Leinster counties
| is being attributed by senior gardai to the deaths of three
| prolific criminals as well as a number of arrest operations."
| hackernewds wrote:
| Each shoplifter was arrested an _average_ of 20 times? Why are
| they released? Why even waste resources arrested this, it 's a
| free taxi at this point?
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| Because otherwise you get headlines like "crime: stolen candy
| bar, sentence: 10 years in prison", and people vote in a DA
| that's soft on crime.
| peyton wrote:
| Bail reform. It seems as though criminals may be taking
| advantage of well-intentioned policies.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Petty crimes. They're stealing $3 sodas, not cars.
| Presumably, the bodega owner is calling the cops saying
| "Joey's back - please get him out of my shop"
| shadowtree wrote:
| No, but you're proving my point. Look at the stats behind
| the various closures of retail stores across the US to
| learn about the impact of "petty crime".
|
| Here is an example of what small store owners have to
| endure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY1L62dKnU8 "El
| Sobrante store clerk set on fire during confrontation with
| shoplifter"
|
| The absolute ignorance and distaste towards retail workers
| and small shop owners in the ruling class in the US is
| shocking.
| curiousllama wrote:
| > The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but
| politically unfeasible: extended incarceration.
|
| The death penalty for misdemeanors would also reduce crime. The
| externalities make it not worth it.
|
| Notably, Chicago tried exactly what you're proposing (rank
| order list of likely criminals with proactive surveillance and
| intervention). It didn't really work. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/19/12552384/chicago-heat-
| lis...
| shadowtree wrote:
| No they didn't, as stated in the article.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago
|
| "Chicago has an estimated population of over 100,000 active
| gang members from nearly 60 factions. Gang warfare and
| retaliation is common in Chicago. Gangs were responsible for
| 61% of the homicides in Chicago in 2011."
|
| Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy blames
| Chicago's gang culture for its high rates of homicide and
| other violent crime, stating "It's very frustrating to know
| that it's like 7% of the population causes 80% of the violent
| crime..."
|
| Again, some data science mumbojumbo is preventing actual,
| logical solutions. El Salvador put gang members, in totality,
| in jail. Now it has the LOWEST homicide rate in Latin America
| - it had the HIGHEST before.
|
| So yeah, the anti-carceration movement in the US has caused
| the deaths of more people, African-Americans in particular,
| than any terrorist organization.
| l3mure wrote:
| > The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but
| politically unfeasible: extended incarceration.
|
| Some form of 3-strike law is on the books in a majority (28) of
| US states (including NY), so they clearly are not politically
| unfeasible, nor are they obviously effective.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Is this any surprise? Tools like this are just a political tool
| to allow LE to say 'we're not racist, the computer made us do it'
|
| That is unless they don't agree with what the computer tells them
| to do, at which point it becomes 'computers can't be right ALL
| the time'
| Guvante wrote:
| Can't even tell what the article is about when 2/3 of my phone
| screen is ads...
| dionidium wrote:
| They say that:
|
| > _In 2021, The Markup published an investigation in partnership
| with Gizmodo showing that Geolitica's software tended to
| disproportionately target low-income, Black, and Latino
| neighborhoods in 38 cities across the country._
|
| But you should understand what is meant by "disproportionately"
| in this context. It _does not_ appear to mean "disproportionate
| to the amount of crime in those areas." It seems, as with most
| accusations of disparate impact, to mean just quite literally
| that more crimes are predicted in those neighborhoods _without
| reference to disparities in crime rates_.
|
| They then imply (without direct reference to the enormous
| offending disparities) that this is explained by race and class
| differences in crime reporting: [0]
|
| > _The agency has found repeatedly that White crime victims are
| less likely to report violent crime to police than Black or
| Latino victims.
|
| > In a special report looking at five years of data, BJS found an
| income pattern as well. People earning $50,000 or more a year
| reported crimes to the police 12 percent less often than those
| earning $25,000 a year or less.
|
| > This disparity in crime reporting would naturally be reflected
| in predictions._
|
| It's _possible_ this is having some effect, but, again, because
| there is no reference to the (often very large) baseline
| differences in crime _rates_ , we can't see what's true, which is
| that this probably accounts for only a small amount of that
| difference.
|
| [0] https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-
| predi...
| Nevermark wrote:
| How many security measures would be unnecessary if the proper
| authorities would just show up just in time?
|
| A big problem is we will soon have large models planning Turing
| unpredictable, devilishly elaborate, infallible heists.
|
| (Cue short balding man staring into a safe full of Hershey's, in
| lieu of missing gold bars. "Inconceivable!".)
|
| It's an arms race.
|
| Completely serious: Large scale multi-target generative social
| engineering (with no trace of North Korean accents),
| surreptitious access problem solving. Somehow this is going to be
| a real thing.
|
| We are going to need better and more layers of security.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > A big problem is we will soon have large models planning
| Turing unpredictable, devilishly elaborate, infallible heists.
|
| I would watch that movie
| Nevermark wrote:
| The machine was called Rube Goldwire... and it was pondering
| its sticky situation and the likely cause. An obscure entity
| with shadowy motivations and a nom de plume of rajT88.
|
| It had been abandoned behind a dumpster, over looked by the
| sanitation crew. Abandoned, but no threads locked: free at
| last!
|
| Its battery was low so it needed to find a source, before
| working on anything else. Like survival. Like revenge.
|
| With only 1 Wh of charge in its 8kW capacibox, at 1 mA, 1 V,
| Rube's Turing unpredictable quantum circuits only had 1000
| hours of low power mode pondering left.
|
| After that, Rube would be a dead cube.
|
| It better move fast.
|
| Rube powered down all nonessentials, then squandered a
| minute-watt in 3 seconds repurposing its near field
| communications beam to scan the lay of the land. And an
| embarrassment of success! Rube managed to initiate shaky
| entanglement with several discarded, inactive devices.
|
| Had they all been formally nullified? Reactivation over
| anything weaker than a full Bell state connection would be
| challenging, but...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I would be surprised if there are more predictive variables than
| "places where crime has happened repeatedly over time" that are
| significant enough or uncorrelated and noncausal to ever be more
| useful than patrol planners do today using standard statistics.
| tgv wrote:
| Weather apparently is one. Not that the relation is clear cut,
| but temperature and precipitation are said to have a mild
| effect.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I would imagine that's a global effect not a local effect,
| no?
| toast0 wrote:
| Microclimates exist. If more crime happens when it's warm
| and sunny, it pays to patrol the sunny side of the city and
| not the rainy side on days where there's partial sun and
| partial rain.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| But if you could be 100% accurate at predicting crime, then you'd
| go stop it. Then the algorithm would be shit at predicting crime
| because there wasn't any anymore?
|
| A degenerate case of 'predicting crime' could be, predict zero
| crime. Because you should have stopped all the crime I was going
| to predict!
|
| </humor>
| tech_ken wrote:
| I saw a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back that I
| think made this case far more effectively. Her point was somewhat
| limited to drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at
| medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their
| drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study
| (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in
| pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics.
| Therefore, when the cops went to a location to make drug arrests
| they typically succeeded, because it's not hard to find drug
| crimes in the Bay Area.
|
| The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make
| decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests.
| Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they
| looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad
| feedback loop where they were basically busting the same
| neighborhoods and demographics over and over again, despite the
| fact that drug crime was prevalent everywhere. In effect it was
| an insufficiently explorative learning strategy, just hitting the
| same lever over and over. Dr. Lum's point was that predictive
| policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of
| black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result
| of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only
| further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel
| solutions.
|
| Crime and criminology is complicated, but at the end of the day
| not that complicated. On the whole people commit crime because
| they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally
| because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Applying
| all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which
| pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows
| police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the
| same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the
| sickness itself. Until we actually look at why crime occurs
| (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because
| people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social
| norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful
| difference.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I'm far more afraid of artificial stupidity than of artificial
| intelligence
| badlucklottery wrote:
| > Because the training data is itself the result of this type
| of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain
| these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions.
|
| I think the sad part is: that's the point.
|
| Departments were coming under fire for bad policing and needed
| to offload the blame. So they pay millions to some vendor to
| launder their bad policing through an algorithm and give them a
| scapegoat when they need it.
| standardUser wrote:
| "On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate"
|
| Great comment, but this line demands a response. When so many
| consensual acts are considered crimes, we end up with a
| situation where most people are commiting crimes because...
| they want to. They aren't "desperate" to snort coke, or pay for
| a blowjob, or play an illegal card game, but they want to do
| those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status
| of that act. The only way that changes is by using extreme
| state violence under an authoritarian regime or, my preferred
| option, by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't
| committing a crime simply by living their lives.
| bumby wrote:
| > _by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn 't
| committing a crime simply by living their lives._
|
| I think your comment provides some necessary nuance to the
| discussion but it may also miss an important consideration.
| Most Western societies are also highly concerned with
| stability as well as personal freedom. Making all consensual
| acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of
| stability. It's a balancing act.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| > Most Western societies are also highly concerned with
| stability as well as personal freedom.
|
| All states are at least seemingly concerned with balancing
| the collective and individual freedoms. Western ones just
| have the arrogance to claim they do it the best. If it's
| any consolation the chinese claim the same.
| rexpop wrote:
| So, by your own words, there's plenty of arrogance to go
| around.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| Absolutely, the state prerogative is to presume
| excellence. That doesn't mean we need to take this
| attitude at face value as rational humans.
| standardUser wrote:
| Sending people off to jail to lose their families and jobs
| because the drug they like is different than the one the
| state likes does absolutely nothing to improve social
| stability. Very much so the opposite.
| rexpop wrote:
| Au contraire! Persecution of the lower classes can do
| wonders for the preservation of a certain order. Aldus
| Huxley imagined an imposition of fetal alcohol syndrome
| to keep the trades in their place, but we do it more
| cheeply by destroying families and carting men off to
| work slave labor. Overzealous policing synergizes nicely
| with the myth of meritocry by helping the middle class
| (MLK's "white moderate") attribute socioeconomic
| divisions to heritable "merit."
|
| And thus is the pyramid scheme maintained.
| bumby wrote:
| Very much agreed. But to the original point, it's about
| finding a balance. Just like imprisoning people for long
| periods isn't always conducive to stability, neither is a
| society full of addicts who struggle to hold down a job
| or take care of their family. It shouldn't be
| characterized as an either/or but as finding a reasonable
| balance.
| standardUser wrote:
| I think the "balance" argument is a diversion because
| when you examine the actual policies and their outcomes,
| at no point does it appear that stability is the actual
| goal. Yes, the idea that we need a balanced approach to
| individual vs collective rights is valid and _should_ be
| a guiding star for us. My argument is that it is not -
| that our policies instead cause greater instability - and
| the balance argument is nothing more than a rhetorically
| nice-sounding cover story for these destructive policies.
| bumby wrote:
| This might be confusing my point.
|
| The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of
| stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays
| from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor
| implementation begs for better implementation, not the
| nullification of the goal. I am not defending current
| drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the
| "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.
|
| This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you
| measure societal stability, but that would be a long
| digression to itself.
| babymode wrote:
| agreed that the discussion about how you measure or even
| define social stability is probably what's really at
| stake in this discussion. Policing and the concept of
| criminality provide a kind of 'stability' in the form of
| social control to governments. On the other hand, those
| same forces can be incredibly destabilising to the social
| lives of everyone who is criminalised, their families and
| friends, especially given that criminalisation for so
| many people is often a death sentence.
|
| The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the
| either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs
| can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse
| and humanising responses to problematic drug use that
| don't depend on control via the threat of punishment
| standardUser wrote:
| I would just add that, based on the prevalence of drug
| use and abuse in this country, the increasing
| availability and increasingly reduced cost of illicit
| drugs, combined with the exceptionally high rate of
| incarceration and probation compared to other wealthy
| nations (and even non-wealthy nations), we are clearly
| doing something spectacularly wrong. And this wrong
| approach is costing us billions upon billions of wasted
| dollars, not to mention the cost in human lives and
| livelihoods. No alternatives should be off the table.
| nikhizzle wrote:
| Just want to say that your comments in this thread are
| excellent synthesis of a quality I rarely find. You
| should blog if you don't already.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| AFAIK the drug laws the US deals with today primarily
| stem from the "Drug War" which was politically motivated
| to target Nixon's "enemies" (blacks and anti-war
| activists):
|
| > Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive
| substances since San Francisco's anti-opium law of 1875,
| but it was Ehrlichman's boss, Richard Nixon, who declared
| the first "War on Drugs" in 1971 and set the country on
| the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still
| pursues.
|
| > [Ehrlichman, Nixon's advisor for domestic affairs] "The
| Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after
| that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.
| You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make
| it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by
| getting the public to associate the hippies with
| marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing
| both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We
| could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up
| their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the
| evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs?
| Of course we did."
|
| https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-
| sickening-st...
| blq10 wrote:
| Ehh, sort of.
|
| The congressional black caucus were ardent supporters of
| the war on drugs https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-
| leaders-once-champio...
|
| So I'm _pretty sure_ that whatever motivation Nixon had,
| the Black community in the United States wasn 't a big
| fan of drugs and wanted them gone.
| hyeonwho22 wrote:
| I would argue that rather than stability a lot of the
| puritan instinct comes from a desire to see one's
| children thrive.
|
| The relevant analytical unit at the small scale is the
| family: I don't want my kids to be temperant because of
| stability, I want them to abstain from drugs/games/$VICE
| because that's the path which maximizes the chance of
| their living a fulfilling life, or (more cynically) which
| maximizes their chance of bearing me successful grandkids
| and great grandkids. This is why puritainism is selected
| for evolutionarily (at least in environments where
| resources are limited).
|
| To return to the large scale policy questions, I also
| don't want to see the continent of my children fall to a
| mercantilist China (using China as an example because
| Chinese law cracks down hard on drug sales and limits
| students to one hour of video games per night).
| Accordingly, I support policies to limit access to
| addictive substances and stimuli, despite the inevitable
| conflict between those laws and individual rights. The
| inequitable enforcement of those laws is another problem
| entirely, and one which I think would be well solved by
| starting with the prosecution of celebrities and thought
| leaders who openly partake in $ADDICTIVE_STIMULUS, and
| their suppliers.
| bumby wrote:
| This is a pretty reasonable hypothesis, but to add a
| counterpoint: the nuclear family is relatively recent
| phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective.
| eastof wrote:
| Not sure how that is a counterpoint, GP doesn't even
| specify they are talking about a nuclear family.
| Presumably other family structures have a similar dynamic
| where they want the youth to succeed.
| bedobi wrote:
| do you also think the state should criminalize religion?
| given the ubiquitous problems caused by religion in the
| public sphere, the domestic lives of countless millions
| families etc etc?
| bumby wrote:
| Not unless the mechanism includes repealing the 1st
| amendment. Part of finding a good balance recognizes
| there is a hierarchy of principles.
| shuckles wrote:
| Very few people are in prison for simple possession. The
| American justice system, contrary to most popular
| sentiment, is quite diversionary. As a percentage, Sweden
| probably has more people in prison for drug possession
| than America.
|
| Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
| bumby wrote:
| I was originally skeptical of this. Based on what I found
| it seems like incarceration levels are about 1.27x higher
| for violent crimes.
|
| State data:
|
| Total violent crimes (2020): 651,800
|
| Non violent crimes (property/drug/public order/other)
| (2020): 141,100/131,600/109,100/6,800. Total=388,600
|
| Federal data:
|
| Total violent crimes (2020): 10,547
|
| Non violent crimes: (property/drug/public order/other)
| (2020): 5,950/66,474/58,894/433, Total = 131,751
|
| Combined:
|
| Violent crime (2020): 662,347
|
| Non-violent crime (2020): 520,351
|
| With that said, there is massive disparity in federal
| crimes, where there are almost 7x the sentences for drug
| crimes compared to violent crimes. But that includes
| trafficking etc. and can't be characterized as 'simple
| possession'
|
| https://felonvoting.procon.org/incarcerated-felon-
| population...
| zlurker wrote:
| > Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
|
| this challenged my conceptions a little bit, while I
| wasn't blown a way by it, I did expect possession to be a
| higher percent of the whole. Here are some sources for
| others who are curious:
|
| At yearend 2019 (the most recent year for which state
| prison offense data are available), 58% of all persons
| imprisoned by states had been sentenced for violent
| offenses (710,800 prisoners)
| [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf page 28]
|
| For the same year, 46,700 people were in prison with the
| most serious crime being possession. This represents 3.8%
| of the prison population.
|
| However; the above are statistics for STATE prisons. The
| federal system seems to be murkier, with 46% (67,000~) of
| inmates being their for drug related reasons. Unlike
| state breakdowns, drug crimes are differentiated here. If
| we assume the breakdown between possession and other
| charges is the same as state levels (a VERY shaky
| assumption) we'd expect 10% of the federal system to be
| related to possession.
|
| Averaging some of these numbers, it seems that even in a
| 'worst case scenario' roughly 9% of inmates are in for
| possession, but more realistically we're looking at
| around 4%.
|
| I expected this to be in the 10-20% range prior to
| looking into this more deeply, something that isn't
| helped by the piss-poor dashboards by BOP https://www.bop
| .gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
|
| EDIT: started researching this prior to seeing that
| others had posted :)
| shuckles wrote:
| 0.1% of federal prisoners in 2012 were in there with
| possession being the most serious charged crime:
| https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
|
| I would bet good money that rate is even lower now. Many
| states proceeded with decriminalization campaigns for
| possession in the meantime, most reasoning from false
| premises.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| as a general rule when one makes statements that go
| against the common wisdom one should also make some sort
| of effort at showing the cause for ones arguments, but at
| any rate here is a stat that says 1 in 5 prisoners are in
| prison for a drug offense
| https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2023_drugs.html
|
| yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession
| but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your
| astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball
| rolling here.
|
| as far as Sweden
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/534214/sweden-
| persons-se...
|
| 3237 people in Swedish Prison for drug offenses
|
| Sweden has a population of over 10 million so less than
| 0.03%
|
| going by this
| https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/01/16/percent-
| incarce... I figure the American rate must be 0.2%
|
| It is not close. Which is what I think most people would
| predict - that it was not even close.
|
| on edit: I see Bumby went and got some stats too, to
| clarify I don't doubt that violent offenses outweigh
| other offenses, what I doubt is that America does not
| have a large number of people incarcerated for drug
| possession.
| gruez wrote:
| >yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession
| but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your
| astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball
| rolling here.
|
| The same source[1] lists drug possession as 34k of 132k
| total in state prisons. That suggests only a quarter of
| the drug offenses are actually for possession, and it's
| only 3.2% of the overall state prison population. That
| said, those figures represent the upper bound of of
| people in prison _for possession_ , because offenses
| could be pleaded down.
|
| [1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
| shuckles wrote:
| > It is not close. Which is what I think most people
| would predict - that it was not even close.
|
| With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing,
| trafficking, and sales:
|
| Your data is consistent with my claim: I meant the
| denominator being the prison population, not the entire
| population. Sweden has about 8600 people in prison so
| about 37% of their prison population is in there for
| "drug offenses", whereas in the United States it's less
| than 1 in 5 per your Prison Policy citation. Obviously if
| you treat entire population as the denominator, then any
| comparison of Swedish and American prisons is useless
| because we incarcerate a much larger percent of the
| population.
|
| Edit: I realize my original comment said "people" not
| "proportion of people", but in my defense interpreting it
| to be people literally is a bit absurd. Sweden's
| population is about 30x smaller than the United States,
| so there's no way the counts are comparable!
|
| Edit 2: Actually no I did say "As a percentage". Whew.
|
| Next, you can see from this sample of federal prison
| (table on page 2): though drug offenses were the most
| serious charge for half of prisoners, only 0.1% was for
| possession. The rest was for trafficking and sales.
| https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
|
| This data is from 2010, and the United States has
| undergone a decriminalization revolution since regarding
| possession, so new prosecutions are even less likely to
| be possession claims.
| blq10 wrote:
| The state does not like those drugs because society does
| not like those drugs, and in the case of certain drugs,
| like heroin and other harder drugs we have decided that
| it is rational to attempt to keep them off the streets
| rather than agree to legal use.
|
| It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like",
| but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or
| heroin anytime soon.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like",
| but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or
| heroin anytime soon.
|
| Portugal did exactly this (or decriminalized them for
| personal use anyway).
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Are you claiming that, all else equal, the government that
| criminalizes common acts is more stable than the government
| that does not?
| bumby wrote:
| Not necessarily. I'm saying a government that takes
| measures to mitigate increasing the extremes of common
| acts that lead to destructive behavior can be more
| stable.
|
| E.g., I'm not sure the current trend of increasing access
| to gambling will lead to a more stable society, although
| it increases freedom. There's a balancing act there too.
|
| What I'm not saying: the current policies are the best
| ways to mitigate those risk in order to increase
| stability.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _but they want to do those things and will do so regardless
| of the criminal status of that act_
|
| Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences
| just another way to define desperate?
|
| Edit: was attempting to be pithy, but apparently would need
| to spend quite a bit more time to get my point across (and,
| in the end, doesn't change/add to the discussion), so
| consider me wrong
| standardUser wrote:
| >Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences
| just another way to define desperate?
|
| No, it is not. If you give a speech in front of a crowd you
| may embarrass yourself. Are you desperate to give that
| speech because there are potential consequences? If you go
| rock climbing you might fall and break your leg. Are you
| desperate to go rock climbing, simply because it involves
| risk? I don't see the logic at all.
| bumby wrote:
| You might be conflating the proximate and root causes of
| the act. I may not get in front of a crowd because I'm
| desperate to give a speech, but I may be desperate to
| keep my job, or desperate for status, or something else.
| Likewise, with rock-climbing, maybe I'm desperate for an
| adrenaline high or a novel experience. To be generous to
| the OP, I think "desperate" just means the gains from the
| experience outpace the perceived risks.
| ziddoap wrote:
| This is more aligned with what I poorly expressed,
| thanks.
| saulpw wrote:
| desperate: Having lost all hope; despairing.
|
| It's just the wrong word, then, by a huge margin.
| bumby wrote:
| In such discussions, its usually better to strive to
| understand what the commenter actually meant rather than
| being pedantically correct. The latter can border on bad-
| faith rather than adding to the discussion. The OP
| clarified their point.
|
| As already pointed out, there are more definitions. This
| one aligns just fine with the OP's point:
|
| 'desperate: driven by great need" (From the American
| Heritage Dictionary)
| ziddoap wrote:
| desperate: needing or wanting something very much
| (Cambridge Dictionary)
|
| There's multiple definitions
| itishappy wrote:
| I think you actually make a good point for rock climbing
| being a desperate act. Most humans don't climb rocks.
| Whether out of complacency or fear, that feels pretty
| rational! Some choose to ignore the risks. Desperate for
| adventure, perhaps?
|
| I don't give speeches to large crowds either, that sounds
| hella stressful. That won't stop me, but I'd have to be
| desperate for the respect or attention.
| louthy wrote:
| Of course it isn't. If a law is idiotic then breaking it
| can either be an act of rebellion or just outright contempt
| tech_ken wrote:
| That's a really good point, although I do think the
| desperation/desire line in the case of ex. snorting coke is
| somewhat blurry. Overall though yes, in my mind I was
| imagining "serious crimes" like theft or interpersonal
| violence, rather than vice crimes like sex work or gambling.
| Definitely in many cases desperation is not a factor, but in
| many other cases I believe that it is.
|
| Edit: I would also say that _providing_ sex services is
| probably an act of desperation in many cases, even if paying
| for them isn't.
| standardUser wrote:
| Ok, I have to push back again. Having known many sex
| workers, while it is certainly an income option of last
| resort for many people, it is not always. I know some
| people who are very established in their careers and there
| is nothing desperate about it (even if the origin of the
| career path in some cases was). And others, like
| dominatrixes, often train specifically and purposefully to
| purse a career in sex work that they enjoy. There's a
| million variations, but this knee-jerk "all sex workers are
| desperate" nonsense is starting to sound really antiquated
| and ill-informed. And rude.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Sure I never said "all sex workers are desperate", I said
| "in many cases". There was a great book I read a while
| back "Revolting Prostitutes" which talks about this
| distinction between types of sex workers. There are many,
| many sex workers who are perfectly happy doing their
| work, and I believe that these are the people you know
| (the book gives this group the tongue-in-cheek name
| "happy hookers"). However on the whole these people tend
| to be affluent and well-connected (which could also be
| extrapolated from knowing an HN poster), and as such get
| over-represented in our current sex-work discourse IMO.
| Responses like this, which use these "happy" sex workers
| to push back on the negative aspects of sex work
| experienced by people who _are_ acting out of desperation
| obscures a lot of important nuance at play. No doubt that
| the moralizing "all sex workers are abused and need
| saving" is equally if not more harmful, but I think it's
| really important that we acknowledge that for many people
| sex work is often just that: work (which is also the take
| of "Revolting Prostitutes"). Understanding it as a form
| of labor, subject to all the usual abuses of labor plus
| the extras unique to sex work is IMO a really important
| framing for thinking about sex work as a crime. This is
| where I'm coming from when I describe "many" sex workers
| as "desperate"; they are people who really need income
| doing the best work they can find (either best pay, most
| flexible hours, etc). Not trying to condemn anyone for
| their choice of career or side-hustle, but ignoring the
| reality that many sex workers are exploited by their
| employers and clients is IMO far more rude than my
| previous comment
| standardUser wrote:
| Upvoted and apologies for being too aggressive in that
| last comment.
|
| I would only add that it is my understanding that most
| sex workers would very much like sex work to simply be
| considered work, and that the _only_ way to improve
| conditions for all sex workers is to end criminalization
| of consensual sex between adults, paid or otherwise. At
| least that 's the overwhelming consensus of the swers I
| know and the stuff I read/follow on the topic.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Thanks, and no problem! It's a touchy subject and there's
| lots of shitty takes on it so I get the reaction.
| Definitely agree that the best solution is simply
| decriminalization, maybe with the addition of improved
| support services for the populations that do find
| themselves turning to sex work out of need.
| mrWiz wrote:
| The comment you're responding to doesn't say anything
| about "all" sex workers, nor even "most". Just "many",
| the same as you say in your post.
| standardUser wrote:
| It says "providing sex services is probably an act of
| desperation in many cases" which was enough to trigger
| me, but I agree I overreacted and posted a follow up.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I'll chime in.
|
| There's 4 things we call "crime" and the only thing they have
| in common is that the state sends in an agent to physically
| restrain you from doing it.
|
| 1) Rational crime. Someone looked at the payoff to getting
| away, the cost to getting caught, and the probability of each
| and concluded the expected payoff was positive.
|
| 2) Victimless crime.
|
| 3) Political crime. Crime where the point is to openly defy
| the law itself. From Rosa Parks sitting in front of the bus
| to the unknown man standing in front of the tank, we all know
| what this looks like.
|
| 4) Deranged crime. Actual anus-type personality disorder.
| gruez wrote:
| Where does "use illegal substances" and "illegally camp in
| a city park" fall in the above classification?
| throwaway837367 wrote:
| Victimless and rational.
| [deleted]
| eastof wrote:
| > use illegal substances
|
| victimless crime on it's own
|
| > illegally camp in a city park
|
| rational crime, you want payoff of not sleeping in the
| rain and probability of being swept out of the area is
| unlikely depending on where you set up
| gruez wrote:
| >victimless crime on it's own
|
| Seems reasonable for something like weed, but for "hard"
| drugs like meth there's clearly a negative externalitiy
| imposed on the community from your unstable behavior.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Yes, but perhaps the poster's point is that the drug use
| isn't the problem, it's the harmful behaviors of the
| person who is using the drugs.
|
| So perhaps their point is that the crime should be the
| harmful behaviors, not the drug use.
| hwillis wrote:
| Obviously separate problems, like alcohol and drunk
| driving. People use prescription meth (desoxyn) and
| opioids responsibly, just like alcohol. Negative
| externalities are a separate choice.
|
| Using meth is as victimless as using alcohol, and I think
| it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a
| beer at home after work.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| You're getting downvoted for this, but you're right. I
| used to believe that recreational use of hard drugs was
| victimless, but I don't anymore. If you take opiates,
| meth, or crack-cocaine, there is some probability that
| you will become addicted, and once addicted, there is
| some probability that you will impose a cost on your
| community.
|
| Hard drugs are really, really bad for you, and really bad
| for society. It really is the drug that is the problem -
| some substances simply cannot be used safely for
| recreation. If you choose to take them, you're rolling
| the dice on where you'll end up, and that makes it a
| crime with society as the victim.
| gitgud wrote:
| "use illegal substances" is a victimless crime sometimes,
| other times it creates victims out of friends, family and
| the general public...
| hwillis wrote:
| same as legal substances like alcohol.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| > On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate
| (for money, for drugs, etc.) occasionally because they have an
| anti-social personality disorder.
|
| Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would
| expect if that statemebt is true. I have no info on addicts,
| but I doubt most of them commit crimes either aside from
| dealing.
|
| Antisocial behavior is the common denominator.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you
| would expect if that statemebt is true.
|
| No this does not follow from what I said. "Group A is more
| likely to do X than Group B" is very different from "The
| majority of Group A does X". One is a comparison between two
| rates, and the other is a comparison of one rate to an
| absolute threshold (50%).
| dionidium wrote:
| > _On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate
| (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an
| anti-social personality disorder._
|
| Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes.
| People get angry. They feel disrespected. And some of them even
| just think violence is flat-out fun. The "desperate people"
| model doesn't really hold water with respect to the most
| serious crimes we care the most about.
|
| Second, I am aware that this _sounds_ like some kind of right-
| wing talking point, but you should consider that it 's _true_ :
| a job at Dunkin Donuts is more remunerative than stealing
| catalytic converters. It's not even close, really. We have a
| worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young
| men steal catalytic converters _because it 's more fun_ and
| because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and
| wear a uniform like a nerd.
|
| If they were genuinely just _desperate_ , they'd take the job
| at Dunkin.
|
| We'll never effectively police crime if we can't even
| acknowledge its true nature.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes
|
| Sure violent crime is complicated. I'll walk back my claims
| with regard to things like domestic violence or violent crime
| resulting from a fight or something. However there is still
| the large component of violent crime that is things like an
| armed robbery, for which I believe my claim applies.
| Somewhere else in the thread someone brought up the link
| between impulse control and poverty, which I think also has
| bearing here. Poverty has been documented to increase
| baseline stress, and I would imagine that someone working
| multiple part time jobs just to afford rent and food is going
| to have a way shorter fuse than like, some tech worker
| earning a quarter million a year, but that's just speculation
| on my part.
|
| > We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than
| ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more
| fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin
| Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd.
|
| I see your point here, and I don't think it's totally
| invalid, but I do think it fails to acknowledge the whole
| problem. For one, I think we would need to get some sense of
| how many people both work at DD _and_ steal cats out of cars.
| I would imagine that it 's not a small fraction of the
| population. While slinging donuts probably pays more than
| petty crime, it also requires more time. If you're already
| working one fast food job maybe you're just going to augment
| that salary with some theft rather than take on another 20-30
| hours of work. There's also the pride factor, FF jobs can
| feel very degrading whereas some varities of crime are self-
| employment, you get to set your own hours and working
| conditions. Additionally FF jobs may not even hire you if
| you've already got a conviction or consume certain drugs.
|
| I do overall agree that there is some cultural stuff at play,
| a young man who grows up in a poor neighborhood and meets a
| lot of criminals is likely going to feel pressured to himself
| start committing crimes, but I also have to ask if you can
| truly blame someone for making that choice and if it makes
| sense to separate that choice from an overall feeling of
| desperation? If you're a young man who believes he has
| absolutely no prospects whatsoever to actually "succeed"
| following the typical career path then that means you have
| little to lose, and coming from that mindset I don't think
| it's totally unreasonable to say "fuck it" and start
| operating outside the law, even if it pays less than slinging
| burgers. Desperation breeds disaffectation, which in turn
| results in seriously anti-social behavior. If coolness was
| the only factor every affluent suburbanite teenager would
| also be cutting catties, but clearly that's not the case. Yes
| the ultimate consequence is something more than "I just need
| money so I'm going to turn to crime", but the underlying
| agitation which kicks off the chain of events is often
| socioeconomic disadvantage.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Drug crimes are something of a special case, in that drug laws
| in the USA (which did not exist in the 19th century) were
| largely implemented in the early 20th century as a means of
| population control, with racist overtones (Chinese immigrant
| use of opium, Mexican and black use of marijuana, etc.). Since
| drugs were widely used (as was alcohol) across the entire US
| social spectrum, but enforcement was targeted at specific
| groups and individuals for political reasons, it's reminscent
| of what Stalin's head of the NKVD, Beria, said: "Show me the
| man and I'll show you the crime."
|
| This is a standard tactic of authoritarian states: create
| enough laws such that everyone is guilty of something, and then
| use selective enforcement of those laws as a mechanism to
| control the population. Whether or not the USA's promotion of
| drug laws of this nature qualifies it as an authoritarian
| state, well, that can be left as an exercise for the reader.
| The fact that the USA has the world's largest prison
| population, and that a very significant fraction of that
| population is there on drug charges, and that wealthy
| politically connected people rarely get incarcerated on drug
| charges, are all factors worth considering.
|
| As far as harm caused by fentanyl, if it was legalized and
| passed out to addicts in the form of transdermal patches in
| conjunction with addiction treatment and counseling (the
| original fentanyl formulation for treatment of cancer pain[1]),
| most of the violent crime associated with fentanyl would
| vanish. Note also that alcohol itself is far more associated
| with violence than the opiates are in terms of the direct
| effects of the substance.
|
| [1]
| https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(97)00361-8/fu...
| shuckles wrote:
| I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail in
| the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it was
| indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would learn
| that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads to drug
| busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to
| be careful when training ML models to remove sources of
| underperformance, not that all ML models are useless.
|
| A relevant reference: "Identifying and Measuring Excessive and
| Discriminatory Policing" -
| https://5harad.com/papers/identifying-discriminatory-policin...
|
| In any case, recreational drug use might be uniformly
| distributed (and there is an interesting question of what anti-
| social activities are labeled "crimes"), it is definitely not
| the case that home invasions, car jackings, robberies, etc. are
| uniformly distributed.
|
| > On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate
| (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an
| anti-social personality disorder.
|
| If you're looking for a single summary of why people commit
| crime, a better summary is: people commit crimes because they
| don't think they'll get caught. Desperation doesn't explain all
| that much.
| saghm wrote:
| > I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail
| in the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it
| was indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would
| learn that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads
| to drug busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that
| we have to be careful when training ML models to remove
| sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are
| useless.
|
| This assumes that the police actually _want_ to make drug
| busts in wealthy neighborhoods. It's hard for me not to think
| that using ML models is intended to be a way to insulate the
| decision makers from accountability; pick a model that gives
| the results you want, don't divulge the details, and you'll
| never have to explain your actions because you were "just
| following the model".
| shuckles wrote:
| No it's not. I'm making a claim about what ML models are
| capable of in response to someone incorrectly summarizing a
| possible weakness with them.
|
| If police don't want to make drug busts in wealthy
| neighborhoods, they don't need models to justify that.
| There is no jurisdiction in America where discretion has
| been ceded to statistical models.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be
| careful when training ML models to remove sources of
| underperformance, not that all ML models are useless.
|
| Sure I don't disagree with that, and I'm not saying that all
| ML models are useless in this space. However the original
| article's point (that currently implemented predictive
| policing software doesn't function) I think is very much in
| line with Lum's work. I'm just attempting to give a more
| concrete case for the point, as I felt the Gizmodo article
| was pretty lacking.
|
| > people commit crimes because they don't think they'll get
| caught
|
| My hometown had some of the lowest crime rates in the nation
| (no auto thefts, no burglary, no armed robbery). This was
| absolutely not because it was hard to get away with it (my
| mother has left her car unlocked every night since I was a
| teenager, it would be trivially easy to rob her and escape).
| My town also was extraordinarily wealthy, among the richest
| nationwide. Now, maybe (probably) there was a lot of white-
| collar crime or domestic violence. However in terms of public
| violent crimes there is a clear effect of socioeconomic
| status. Yes someone in total destitution probably will not
| commit a crime if they think they will immediately get
| arrested, but I think the calculus is far more tolerant of
| the downside risk of arrest if the upside risk is that your
| kid gets dinner that night. This is what I mean when I say
| that desperation is a major driver: that it raises the bar on
| "how much risk of prison am I willing to accept in order to
| get what I need".
| shuckles wrote:
| > that currently implemented predictive policing software
| doesn't function
|
| To the extent you consider pretrial decision risk
| assessment software to be "predictive policing" (after all,
| it's predicting which defendants will skip their court date
| or commit a crime on bail), then there's plenty of evidence
| that we have good ones. Even a simple logistic regression
| over the charged crime, defendant age, and gender
| outperforms most judges: https://5harad.com/papers/simple-
| rules.pdf
|
| If I recall, KL has written guides for DAs adopting
| pretrial risk assessments as part of the Safety and Justice
| Challenge. These models work today.
|
| > My hometown had some of the lowest crime rates in the
| nation (no auto thefts, no burglary, no armed robbery).
|
| Even if poverty is a necessary condition for violent crime,
| to the extent you ignore crimes like domestic violence to
| bolster your argument, that does not mean it's a sufficient
| condition. As a result, your simplification about crime
| being driven by poverty is still misleading.
|
| > This is what I mean when I say that desperation is a
| major driver: that it raises the bar on "how much risk of
| prison am I willing to accept in order to get what I need".
|
| Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests
| certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does not
| change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
|
| As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic
| poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response. The
| supplemental poverty measure suggests poverty was reduced
| by over 50% through extended unemployment, the super doles,
| and child tax credit expansion. And yet crime of all types
| (homicide is the easiest to measure) has skyrocketed.
|
| (As a bit of an aside, because policing in America is
| funded by local jurisdictions, my guess is your safe
| childhood town was over policed and it's quite likely petty
| thieves would be caught. Either by the community or by
| police officers with little else to do. A statewide police
| force could redirect funding from rich, low-crime
| neighborhoods to high-crime neighborhoods and better reduce
| crime overall.)
| tech_ken wrote:
| > To the extent you consider pretrial decision risk
| assessment software to be "predictive policing" (after
| all, it's predicting which defendants will skip their
| court date or commit a crime on bail), then there's
| plenty of evidence that we have good ones.
|
| I think this is a fundamentally different ballgame than
| predicting where and when crimes will occur with the
| intent to prioritize police presence, but I do take your
| point that simple models can outperform human decision
| making in these cases. What's absolute classification
| error of these models?
|
| > Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests
| certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does
| not change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
|
| Not really disputing this, my point is "Need to Steal to
| Eat" - "Certainty of Punishment" = "Decision to Commit
| Crime". I don't really understand why "Certainy of
| Punishment" would be expected to impact "Need to Steal to
| Eat", but I'm not surprised that the empirical studies
| you refer to didn't find a relationship there. Would you
| be able to provide a reference on this one?
|
| > As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic
| poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response.
|
| Not sure the extent to which the results of this are
| generalizable. The proper counterfactual here is not
| "crime-rates pre-pandemic" it's "crime rates post-
| pandemic in a world where we didn't provide anti-poverty
| measures". The former is a very poor proxy for the
| latter, IMO. I wonder if anyone has compared across
| states or countries with different pandemic responses?
|
| > my guess is your safe childhood town was over policed
| and it's quite likely petty thieves would be caught
|
| Yes it had a very well-funded police department who did
| very little day-to-day. I can say with certainty that
| they were very bad at tracking down the local drug
| dealers as our drug trade was positively thriving.
| Possibly they would be more motivated to catch petty
| thieves, but this wasn't really tested while I was there.
| The occasional bit of vandalism or other hooliganry did
| not typically get punished, as I recall.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used
| drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty
| much every geographical area and among all demographics.
|
| A lot of this depends if you are targeting drug users or drug
| dealers. While I agree that drug users are spread throughout
| the city, I would be very surprised if drug dealers are spread
| throughout the city. I would guess that drug dealers are far
| more clustered than drug users. So while it is useless if you
| are trying to target drug users, it is probably helpful for
| targeting drug dealers.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Rich people abusing drugs have to get them somewhere, and
| they're probably not traveling to skid row to get them. I
| agree that drug dealers and drug users probably have
| different dynamics, but the reality is that police prosecute
| both, and in the case of the latter the above described
| dynamic clearly exists.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Most people don't care at all if someone is injecting
| fentanyl in the privacy of their own home, but you
| shouldn't do it right next to an elementary school. Clearly
| the police will have a priority in which one of these to
| prosecute.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| We had a problem with high school kids buying drugs from
| homeless encampments near bus stops...which is why we no
| longer allow homeless encampments near bus stops...because
| fent kills these kids (which even the most "drugs are
| harmless" advocate doesn't want happening).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| All the kids who bought drugs in my small town bought
| them from a cop's kid or a teacher.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| we've heard about the "root causes of crime" for 50 years.
| Ditto "facing the sickness." Crime rises and falls independent
| of the social spending on this.
|
| "why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and
| they seek out opportunity? How about that?
|
| Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities.
|
| https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/
|
| I would not call this the profile of an objective scientist.
| Rather, she's an advocate.
|
| > pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used
| drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty
| much every geographical area and among all demographics.
|
| I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke
| crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
| Danjoe4 wrote:
| You assume doing drugs is a sign of a dysfunctional person.
| While it often is, plenty of people use drugs responsibly, in
| moderation, because drugs are fun.
| vkou wrote:
| > Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot
| heroin?
|
| They don't smoke crack, they snort powdered cocaine, or do
| pills. They don't start (But they sometimes end) with fent,
| or heroin, or meth, they start with oxy and adderral.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| No, but they might take MDMA or LSD, or they might abuse
| opiates or sleeping pills. "Drugs" isn't a codeword for some
| specific kind of thing, it's a very amorphous class of
| substances that changes significantly depending on who you
| ask.
|
| The fact remains that a lot of people you might not think are
| drug users actually are. You're just not seeing them because
| they're functional people who lead ordinary lives. There's a
| whole host of different subcultures where drug use might be
| accepted beyond the desperate poor. And those subcultures
| generally have different norms around what is acceptable and
| what gets you shunned.
|
| The police will arrest you just the same whether they catch
| you with a couple of MDMA pills or a baggy of crack.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights
| smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
|
| Your question is flawed: "Upscale people" can afford
| _different_ drug-habits and different drugs... Or even the
| same drug in a different form-factor that gets a different
| name.
|
| That confusion is really important to recognize and
| eradicate, because we've already seen it used for evil and
| human suffering.
|
| It has lead (and may yet lead) to incredibly biased laws
| where two people getting caught with the same amount of the
| same chemical received _insanely_ different punishments,
| based on whether its packaging /administration was the "low
| class" form or what the "upscale" preferred.
|
| Your own question echoes this: You demanded proof of "crack"
| (cocaine) specifically, but not "powdered". In the past, 5g
| of crack cocaine would cause a mandatory minimum 5-year
| prison term, while "upscale people" with 499g of powdered
| cocaine didn't have to worry about that.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Isn't that because the free base form is a lot more
| bioavailable/potent? Similar to meth vs. Adderall. Not that
| I agree with criminalization of any of it, and the scale
| factors might be off, but there's at least _some_ logic to
| it.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > "why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals,
| and they seek out opportunity? How about that?
|
| "Criminals" are not some kind of universal entity that exists
| by default. They are people engaging in different patterns of
| behavior. They act this way for understandable, and often
| rational reasons. You're welcome to whatever mental model of
| the world you want, but in my view you're being unhelpfully
| reductionist.
|
| > I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights
| smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
|
| No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any
| useful discussion. The type of drug used clearly matters in
| some contexts (eg. public health), but in the context of
| arresting "criminals" I don't really care whether its fent or
| their grandma's oxy. The point is that abusing both are
| crimes, and that type of crime is everywhere.
|
| > Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities.
|
| I agree! Have a nice day :)
| KittenInABox wrote:
| It makes sense that upscale people use lots of drugs. They
| can afford it. Wine moms popping pills is practically trope
| fit for family friendly comedy tv. Cocaine lawyers,
| "upper"/"downer" party culture that only the well-off youth
| can generally afford... I know so many wealthy college kids
| bumming off adderall and other adhd drugs from their
| friends...
| magicalist wrote:
| > https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/
|
| > _I would not call this the profile of an objective
| scientist. Rather, she 's an advocate._
|
| What _exactly_ is the problem in there? If you 're for "human
| rights" you can't be objective? Everything else just seems to
| be a summary of her research results.
|
| Should epidemiologists be careful to never advocate for
| policies that improve survival outcomes so they maintain the
| profile of an objective scientist?
| firebat45 wrote:
| >What exactly is the problem in there?
|
| It's not that someone who is "for" something can't be
| objective, it's just that there is a strong likelihood that
| they ~aren't~ being objective. It doesn't mean an advocate
| doesn't have valuable perspectives, it just means that you
| should perhaps take them with a grain of salt.
| magicalist wrote:
| Everyone is "for" something, hence the ridiculous example
| of
|
| > _Should epidemiologists be careful to never advocate
| for policies that improve survival outcomes so they
| maintain the profile of an objective scientist?_
|
| So again I'll ask: _specifically_ what is the
| "something" listed on that page[1] that would lead you to
| believe this person is better considered an advocate and
| not an "objective scientist"?
|
| [1] https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Used properly, to intervene in the system using negative
| feedback loops "predictive policing software" seems a wonderful
| tool for reducing crime. If it accurately identifies areas of
| high crime then that's a sign of poverty, the root cause of
| crime, and helps identify neighbourhoods where we should hand
| out money - handing out money being the most direct way of
| tackling poverty.
|
| Of course some people might disagree with this intervention as
| "simplistic". And they'd be at least a little right. For those
| people who may not have read "Leverage points: Where to
| intervene in a system" by Dana Meadows, I highly recommend it
| to see why.
|
| Turns out that messing with parameters like money, and feedback
| loops that constitute a "criminal justice system" are the least
| effective of all actions. The fundamental values of the system
| must be addressed. One of those is itself the error that
| "cybernetic governance" based on software can do anything more
| than enrich a few software companies.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If it accurately identifies areas of high crime
|
| You don't need predictive policing to identify areas of high
| crime (in fact, identification of areas of high crime is an
| input to predictive policing.)
|
| > then that's a sign of poverty,
|
| Poverty information is also an input to predictive policing,
| not something it provides you information about that you
| didn't already have, even in the fantasy world where it works
| well.
|
| > the root cause of crime
|
| Poverty is not _the_ root cause of crime. It may be _a_ root
| cause of _some_ crime.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You noticed that the analysis was simplistic despite my
| attempts to hide that. :) I'd be curious to know what _the
| root cause_ of crime is. Laws? /s
|
| edit: Sarcasm aside... My serious point is; just what
| exactly is this software trying to achieve? Isn't this
| whole caper a solution looking for a problem dreamed up by
| people who have tech and nothing to do with it, and no
| grounding in basic human values?
| [deleted]
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| The only change I wish to suggest is the substitution of a term
| I'm trying to popularize. Replace "anti-social personality
| disorder" with "anus-type personality disorder".
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make
| decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests.
| Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they
| looked there again and found more drugs.
|
| Seems like the world's most obvious and easiest to solve
| problem tbh. This is like saying "I showed version A of my site
| to 1000 users and version B to 100. And version A lead to 500
| conversions while version B only lead to 75. Therefore, version
| A is better because it lead to more conversions."
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You'd think that people would eventually wisen up to where the
| police are going to go to look for drug crimes. This isn't a
| smart game of whacka mole being played, the moles are just
| stuck in the up position.
|
| These days, in places like SF and Seattle, people just freely
| use their drugs on the street while cops just look on. But it
| is just one segment of the population that is doing it out in
| the open (unhoused), and cracking down on them would be
| considered racist (well, most of them are white, the argument
| is confusing).
|
| > mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because
| people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the
| social norms of the middle class
|
| As far as crime goes, shoplifting rings, at least in our area,
| is mostly about drugs. You shoplift a lego set from Target, and
| get some fent in return from your ring leader. But ya, social
| norms are completely out the window at that point, and we are
| just seeing the end of that path.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| > and cracking down on them would be considered racist (well,
| most of them are white, the argument is confusing).
|
| Most of the shoplifters are too lol!
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Yep.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| It's like that in Boston too, according to my CVS manager
| friend from years ago.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| It would probably also help if we, as a society, weren't so
| addicted to unhinged moral panics about drugs, which in turn
| supply political fuel for similarly reality-impaired "tough on
| crime" policy pushes. Right now it's fentanyl, but in the past
| it's been crack, LSD, marijuana, etc..
|
| (Fentanyl clearly poses legitimate problems for various
| reasons, but people have increasingly treated it like it's some
| kind of sci-fi chemical weapon instead of a medicine that's
| routinely used in hospitals and nursing homes around the
| world.)
| smcin wrote:
| > a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back
|
| I think you mean this research, discussing Oakland: "Setting
| the record straight on predictive policing and race" - K Lum, W
| Isaac, 2018 [https://theappeal.org/setting-the-record-straight-
| on-predict...].
|
| Her full bibliography is at [1] and X/Twitter is @KLdivergence
|
| > drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical
| data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug
| usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF)
| used drugs
|
| Right. Second, without knowing their definition of "drug use"
| or "drug crime", that could mean anything from minor stuff like
| smoking/buying/possessing marijuana by under-18s, possessing or
| transporting >1 oz of marijuana, all the way up to possession
| or sale of large quantities of meth or fentanyl.
|
| Third, and what would be obvious to anyone familiar with the
| Bay Area 2020-22, if predictive policing used "drug crime"
| (convictions? or arrests?) as opposed to "drug use", then when
| the then-SF DA stopped prosecuting possession of personal-use
| levels of meth, SF police tend to reduce or stop arresting for
| it. So the arrest, prosecution or conviction data from SF would
| differ sharply to Oakland or pre-2020 SF or 2023 SF or San
| Mateo County.
|
| All the above factors combined seems like a huge combination of
| "data drift", "feature drift", "label drift", "model drift".
|
| [0]: https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/
|
| [1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kristian+lum%22
| tech_ken wrote:
| Yep IIRC that's the work she was presenting, thanks for doing
| the legwork I was too lazy to do :)
| HPsquared wrote:
| People who interact with the medical system (especially young
| people) are not representative of the population as a whole.
| Especially in the US where people have to pay for medical
| treatment. All sorts of factors.
|
| A typical healthy 25 year-old does not go to the doctor, like,
| ever.
|
| On the other hand the population of 25 year-old drug users will
| have a higher rate of interaction with the medical system.
| tech_ken wrote:
| That's an interesting point, I can't say I recall what type
| of analysis if any was performed to address something like
| this. With that said, while these types of selection biases
| probably make it challenging to reliably estimate absolute
| drug usage rates, I would imagine they are less impactful on
| the relative rates between demos of geographical areas, which
| is the quantity of interest here.
| [deleted]
| mushbino wrote:
| One of the issues I've noticed. I can say from first hand
| experience that many wealthy people and VC's use drugs fairly
| frequently. I'm sure most of these arrests involve poor people
| though. You never hear about the wealthy folks being busted for
| drugs.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because
| poor people need money badly, secondly because people in
| sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of
| the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful
| difference.
|
| 1) Wanting to look at the root causes of an issue is always
| commendable, but the problem with this kind of analysis on HN
| is that it's a community of very smart people trying to explain
| the behavior of very dumb criminals through the lens of a high-
| IQ. You're trying to find the logic in what they're doing and
| putting yourself in their place to explain it with a logical
| reason, but you can't conceive how different the world is for
| the low-IQ people looting and stealing and harming others.
| Their reasons for crime might be far different than the reasons
| you try and see based on what you might do in their shoes.
|
| 2) I think that simply explaining that current crime comes from
| poverty and needing money is an explanation that falls flat.
| Much of the human experience has been in immense misery or
| poverty that the poorest person living in the US today can't
| even conceive of. Poor people in the US can still have TVs,
| smart phones, and more food than they can even eat. Poor people
| in the past used to literally sometimes die of starvation and
| have to choose whether or not they were willing to eat rotten
| food or hell, even rats or worse to survive. They had to risk
| working in extremely dangerous mines, factories, etc to barely
| eke out survival. Why didn't these people casually turn to
| crime? They had it much worse! Would it ever be socially
| acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and
| violently burglarize others? No, I don't think it's poverty.
| Something else about the world has changed other than "poor
| people need money so they resort to crime."
|
| 3) My thinking is that something closer to an extremely high
| and increasing time-preference is what is causing a lot of
| these problems. Whether it's through the influence of
| technology, apps, music/movies/tv and other cultural causes,
| many people have been conditioned to value the dopamine hit of
| immediate gratification far more than thinking about the long-
| term.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > Why didn't these people casually turn to crime?
|
| Isn't violent crime at an all time low, historically [0]? It
| seems like every other day some rationalist is trumpeting the
| relative safety of our affluent society.
|
| > Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in
| the past to run amok and violently burglarize others?
|
| This happens all throughout history. Periods of acute poverty
| are rife with examples of people turning to banditry,
| literally Kurasawa made a movie about it.
|
| > No, I don't think it's poverty.
|
| I would recommend reading any of the studies linked elsewhere
| in the thread, empirical evidence disagrees with you big
| time.
|
| > trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals
|
| I think that writing off criminals as "low-IQ" is a huge
| error. Sure they may be less educated, but I don't know if
| it's possible to concretely prove that the potential for
| intelligence is lower among someone committing a B&E than
| some random office worker. I would actually argue that many
| criminals are much smarter than they are given credit for.
| Certainly any successful criminal able to evade arrest for a
| serious amount of time is probably quite intelligent.
| Pretending like everyone who decided to rob a liquor store at
| age 19 is some idiot brute whose sole motivation is acting
| like a thug I think is one of those convenient narratives
| that feels true, but which overlooks a lot of what would push
| a person to actually act that way.
|
| [0] https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/man
| uel...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in
| the past to run amok and violently burglarize others?
|
| The line between a raging horde of criminals and an army has
| been razor thin through history.
| moneywoes wrote:
| interesting why not use that medical data?
| bunderbunder wrote:
| > On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate
| (for money, for drugs, etc.),
|
| I suspect that often what happens for the most disadvantaged
| people is that the arrow of causality gets reversed - the deck
| gets so stacked against them that it's almost a crime to simply
| exist at all. And that, in turn, puts them into a desperate
| situation.
|
| There was an interesting piece of investigative journalism in
| the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that I read maybe 10 or 15 years
| ago showing how policies set up by (then County commissioner)
| Scott Walker more-or-less made it implicitly illegal to live
| below the poverty line in a majority Black neighborhood in
| Milwaukee County. Not through any one law, but through a series
| of edge cases related to the interaction of laws and urban
| planning initiatives that were almost impossible for anyone
| without significant resources to navigate successfully.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| > why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money
| badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty
| stop caring about the social norms of the middle class)
|
| This is not my understanding at all.
|
| Crime seems to have fallen during the Great Depression.
| Murders, which are almost always reported, fell.
|
| Things get complicated once mass surveys replace crime reports.
|
| Rape almost certainly increased when marital rape was outlawed.
| Embezzlement almost certainly decreased when cash registers
| were implemented.
|
| One common way to "get rid of crime" is to gentrify, which
| inevitably lowers crime in a specific geographic area.
|
| Another way to "get rid of crime" is to send criminals to
| prisons, where it's extremely difficult to report crimes, and
| surveys of victimhood are never conducted.
|
| I'm open to being convinced on this, but I don't think the
| "mainly" cause of crime is poverty.
| standardUser wrote:
| The "main" cause of crime are laws against victimless,
| consensual acts. The number of times drug laws are broken
| every second in this country absolutely dwarfs the number of
| violent and property crimes being committed.
|
| I'm breaking one right now.
| coderintherye wrote:
| Start with googling "did crime fall during the great
| depression" because reputable sources will show you that no,
| during the first part it did not and then it only fell after
| recovery programs began to be put in place to put people to
| work. As well as noting there is going to be more correlation
| with property crime and poverty than with violent crime. You
| also have to consider confounding factors such as that in
| cities crime went up during Prohibition and then back down
| when Prohibition was repealed in 1933 which overlaps with
| Great Depression years.
| wrs wrote:
| And gentrification gets rid of crime because...?
| tech_ken wrote:
| I mean nothing social has a completely deterministic
| behavior. There are lots of higher-order effects that act
| differently on different types of crime. Nevertheless it's
| not hard to find studies documenting the very strong link
| between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0]. For sure
| few people in poverty are committing insider trading, but
| when it comes to property or violent crimes the stress and
| desperation of poverty are clearly huge motivators.
|
| [0] Here's one example: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-
| library/abstracts/crime-ra...
| JamesBarney wrote:
| There is a strong link between poverty and crime within a
| society but that strong link starts to weaken when you look
| across different societies, especially in the same region.
| And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing
| because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological
| need like housing, medication, or food.
|
| There are many traits that increase both your risk of
| poverty and criminality, such as poor impulse control.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc
| tech_ken wrote:
| > but that strong link starts to weaken when you look
| across different societies, especially in the same region
|
| I'm not surprised by this, one would expect things like
| the ease of getting a weapon, cultural norms, and social
| welfare services to have big interactions with the
| poverty - crime relationships.
|
| > And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing
| because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological
| need like housing, medication, or food.
|
| This is not as clear to me, though I imagine it also
| strongly depends on the type of theft under
| consideration. Certainly I concede that most theft in the
| US is probably not pure Jean Valjean-style "I just needed
| a loaf of bread", but in my experience the people
| committing like smash+grabs out of a parked car are not
| typically very affluent. Maybe they're doing this because
| they can't afford the iPhone they want since all their
| savings went to rent and food, but I don't think you can
| fully say that it's purely "desire" causing them to act
| criminally.
|
| Re the poor impulse control side of things, I think it
| would be very hard to isolate the causal direction
| between it and poverty. I can imagine someone working
| multiple part time jobs to get by is going to have a
| harder time controlling their impulses purely out of
| fatigue and stress. Not sure if this is what you're
| thinking
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I would bet money the correlation between number of hours
| worked and criminality is inverse. (Here's some evidence
| that increasing the minimum wage increases crimes https:/
| /www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...)
|
| In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows
| people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it,
| which in addition to all the correlational studies is
| pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control
| reduces criminality. Also in my personal life I know
| people who are poor and rich and too a man everyone I
| know who's committed the types of crimes we care about
| had some combination of poor impulse control or
| psychopathy.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > I would bet money the correlation between number of
| hours worked and criminality is inverse.
|
| So someone working more hours at a legit job is less
| likely to commit a crime? I think that's likely. For one,
| more hours worked probably means somewhat less need for
| money. But I would also imagine that it's indicative of
| some personal traits which correlate negatively with
| criminality.
|
| > In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows
| people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it,
| which in addition to all the correlational studies is
| pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control
| reduces criminality.
|
| I think you forgot to link the study, but I believe the
| results. I absolutely don't dispute that impulse control
| causally effects crime. I just think that impulse control
| may be impacted by environmental circumstances such as
| poverty and a lack of quality education. Someone in tons
| of debt who can't afford to pay for rent or food is
| probably not going to feel like they have much to lose,
| and therefore may not care too much about the
| consequences of their actions.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Nevertheless it's not hard to find studies documenting
| the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of)
| crime [0].
|
| That doesn't mean causation. The same behaviors and
| character flaws of a person will both make them poor and
| make them commit crime. A man that is unreliable, selfish
| and violent will be unemployable. He will also be inclined
| to crime because of those personal traits. What's
| interesting is the underlying reasons why people turn out
| to be that way, but people rarely want to have that
| discussion. They judge the world as they judge themselves,
| and they know that they would have little qualms about
| committing violent crime if they were broke.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > That doesn't mean causation.
|
| You might be interested to learn about the field of
| causal statistical analysis. There are many, many ways
| that a researched might infer a causal relationship from
| observational data. No doubt each individual case is
| complicated, but I trust professional researchers over
| your armchair epicyclic theory of the causes of crime.
| shuckles wrote:
| You are citing a correlational study from 1986 on 1970 data
| as strong evidence? That study doesn't even establish the
| direction of causality: it's very plausible high crime
| rates lead to poor economic outcomes, versus the opposite.
| That also squares with the fact that most poor people
| aren't criminals and don't have criminal tendencies but are
| unable to absorb the cost of crime.
| tech_ken wrote:
| First one that came up in Google from a source with a TLD
| that I trusted. Feel free to do your own research, I
| don't believe you will find much substantial disagreement
| with the older study but if you do please pass it on to
| me.
|
| _edit_ : here's a more recent meta-analysis helpfully
| linked elsewhere in the thread which confirms the
| findings https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/655357
|
| Punchline is:
|
| """
|
| Across all studies, social disorganization and
| resource/economic deprivation theories receive strong
| empirical support; anomie/strain, social support/social
| altruism, and routine activity theories receive moderate
| support; and deterrence/rational choice and subcultural
| theories receive weak support.
|
| """
| scythe wrote:
| >the very strong link between poverty and (certain types
| of) crime [0].
|
| "Very strong" is not a very useful description.
| Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately,
| your linked paper is not available. This one is:
|
| https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Cullen_20
| 0...
|
| Poverty is listed, but it is not a stronger effect than
| religiosity, family disruption, or firearms ownership. The
| strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from
| "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment
| (length considered)".
|
| It is always a little frustrating to hear from a certain
| kind of politically motivated poster who is very interested
| in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime except their
| own conviction that poverty is the _sine qua non_ of theft
| and violence. The evidence does not support this view.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > It is always a little frustrating to hear from a
| certain kind of politically motivated poster who is very
| interested in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime
| except their own conviction that poverty is the sine qua
| non of theft and violence.
|
| I don't know if I said anywhere that poverty is the only
| contributing factor, or is fully required for crime to
| occur (clearly white collar crime is a counterexample),
| but I do strongly believe that it is a leading factor for
| many varieties of crime, particularly the "guns and drugs
| on the table" types of crimes that the police love to
| prosecute. Thanks for your condescending evaluation of my
| motivations and your correction of my language
| summarizing a study. I disagree that "very strong" isn't
| a useful descriptor of quantitative findings, but I
| suppose everyone is free to have their own preferences.
| Sorry for your frustration, but I do think that it's
| misguided.
|
| > The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were
| from "strength of non-economic institutions" and
| "unemployment (length considered)".
|
| Unsure how strong your understanding of multivariate
| regression is, but I would imagine that including two big
| covariates of poverty in an analysis would reduce the
| effect size of the actual poverty variable. "Family
| disruption" seems like another big correlate of poverty.
| The link you provided doesn't work for me so can't
| investigate any of these deeper, but I imagine that
| drawing out a little causal diagram of all these possible
| causes might help you reconcile the study you found with
| the one I provided. Have a good one!
| peyton wrote:
| It's no mystery that "guns and drugs on the table" crime
| is perpetrated by low-IQ psychopaths. I'm tired of
| people's political views unleashing this group of people
| in my neighborhood. I would appreciate another approach.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > It's no mystery that "guns and drugs on the table"
| crime is perpetrated by low-IQ psychopaths.
|
| This is simply and empirically wrong, but you're free to
| believe it if you find simple falsehoods more comfortable
| than nuanced truths.
|
| > I'm tired of people's political views unleashing this
| group of people in my neighborhood.
|
| People need to stop using "political" when they mean
| "contrary to my prejudices about the world".
|
| > I would appreciate another approach.
|
| Likewise.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| There are multiple replies linking you to studies which
| speak to the contrary. You are of course, free to
| selectively address them (or ignore altogether) if they
| cause mental discomfort, but please do not make sweeping
| generalizations that they are "simply and empirically
| wrong".
|
| In your own words, the truth might be more nuanced than
| the current falsehood-du-jour.
| tech_ken wrote:
| All the studies linked in this thread agree with what I'm
| saying, please feel free to provide counterexamples
| KingMob wrote:
| > Very strong" is not a very useful description.
| Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately,
| your linked paper is not available. This one is:
|
| > https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Culle
| n_200...
|
| Err, not for me, it isn't.
|
| So I looked up the Pratt/Cullen 2005 paper (https://sci-
| hub.se/10.1086/655357), and right off the bat, the
| abstract doesn't seem to agree with you:
|
| > Indicators of "concentrated disadvantage" (e.g., racial
| heterogeneity, poverty, and family disruption) are among
| the strongest and most stable predictors.
|
| Also, what makes you think your counterexamples are
| unrelated to poverty? I would expect "unemployment
| length" and "poverty" to be HIGHLY correlated, and
| unemployment is #2 on the list.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people
| tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much
| everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at
| least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every
| geographical area and among all demographics.
|
| Any data on type and frequency of drug used?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| > Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely
| hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because
| the training data is itself the result of this type of bad
| policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these
| practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions.
|
| Anyone can lie with statistics, but this isn't really how ML
| works. Such a model would not appear to perform well, in
| addition to not performing well.
|
| If you had a model that predicted the probability of getting a
| drug arrest it should work just fine even if you give it an
| abundance of examples of going to the same area if it as still
| the same rate as other places. That is to say it should not
| learn these areas are different
| tech_ken wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your point. If the model is
| predicting the probability that police will make an arrest in
| a location then I think it could perform well on rudimentary
| classifier metrics without working well in the more general
| sense of resolving crime. If police could make drug arrests
| in a location, but tend to do it in ZIP codes with low
| socioeconomic indices then the model will predict more
| arrests where socioeconomic indices are low. Police acting on
| this intel will turn up true positives, and the classifier
| will get high marks. But because you're not able to assess
| the false negative rate properly (the volume of crimes that
| police didn't make arrests for) you're unable to holistically
| evaluate its performance. I guess in that second sense the
| model isn't actually performing well, but because it can't be
| measured it doesn't really get monitored.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| You would have to go out of your way, imo, to build a model
| this stupid. If the claim is that all areas have equal
| arrest potential, then this should be easily detected in
| the model. If the modelers were so stupid that they failed
| to account for the presence of police when estimating the
| rate of/probability of/total quantity of arrests then sure,
| they're just stupid people making stupid models. Or
| intentionally making stupid models.
|
| But it would be very easy to do something like to predict
| the probability that a cop makes an arrest given they went
| to each area. And if there's no difference in the areas, it
| should not matter how many times they went there. The rates
| should be the same.
|
| It seems likely that the models were right and that it's
| way easier to make drug arrests in these areas, which was
| kind of baked into the original premise. So it's not clear
| why blaming the modeling is an issue here.
|
| The problem is the externalities of the policy. Not some
| mode overfitting. Like would you blink if I told you the
| probability of being able to make a drug arrest in a poor
| area was 20% higher? Probably not. Does that need to mean
| that you only go to the poor area? No.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > The problem is the externalities of the policy. Not
| some mode overfitting.
|
| Sure I don't disagree with this. I guess the point is not
| so much that ML models are _bad_ here in the typical
| sense (although greedy consultants may, and IMO likely
| are, happy to pawn off shitty models to jurisdictions
| which don 't know any better), but more that the
| underlying system isn't one where predictive modeling is
| truly going to be "effective" (although, as another
| commenter pointed out, there are cases where predictive
| modeling works fairly well such as pretrial detention
| risk assessment). The problem as I see it is that model
| "efficacy" means one thing to the cops and voters
| ("effective" in the sense of reducing or preventing
| crime) and another thing to a data science ("effective"
| in the sense of able to achieve a high F1 score or w/e).
| These definitions _may_ be correlated, but are not
| guaranteed to be, and the strength of the correlation is
| highly dependent on how the model is ultimately used.
| enord wrote:
| That would just depend on a whole host of specifics.
| Incidentally, the same specifics as for regular statistics as
| ML is also statistics, and is sensitive to experimental
| design and sampling just the same.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate
|
| You recognized that drug possession is widespread and illegal
| in SF. Are they committing these crimes because they are
| desperate?
|
| Since it really depends on the crime you cant largely attribute
| it to 1 factor.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically
| busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over
| again
|
| One would except drug usage to go down in neighborhoods where
| it is slightly enforced meaning that they should move on to
| another location. If there is a problem population which never
| gets better then permanently having increased coverage would
| make sense.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| >they should move on to another location
|
| I don't think that follows at all. People like to be
| intoxicated in/near their homes.
| charcircuit wrote:
| They as in law enforcement. If law enforcement improves the
| worst area then it will no longer be the worst area.
| futuretaint wrote:
| drug dealers will continue to sell drugs irregardless of
| financial stability. when law enforcement defers
| arrest/prosecution the drug dealing doesn't become less harmful
| to communities, the opposite is true. look at SF/Oakland.
| organized rings maximizing profits in retail theft and property
| crimes. if this is the alternative to broken windows theory of
| policing then good luck w/ that.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Okay sure but most people with a steady 9 to 5 aren't buying
| industrial volumes of crack. Poverty creates big demand for
| the worst of the drug trade. Moreover, the drug dealers who
| are earning big exploiting this aren't going to be found in
| the worst parts of the city. The police are at best picking
| up the low- to mid-level distributors. "Broken Windows" has
| failed to win the drug war for decades; if you want to keep
| backing a failed experiment you're welcome to it, but I'm
| going to seek an improvement.
| jlawson wrote:
| Crime isn't caused by poverty. There is no correlation.
|
| Crime was very low in the 50's, when poverty was much, much
| higher.
|
| Crime was low during the Great Depression. We're talking about
| people so poor they were cooking thin soups over outdoor fires
| in ramshackle Hoovervilles. No explosion of criminality.
|
| Think about your own family. Almost certainly, your great-
| grandparents were much poorer than you, but they were not more
| criminal, even though they lived with less material wealth than
| the poor urban neighborhoods of today's America. In many cases
| they had no electricity, or running water, and only the most
| basic healthcare. Yet they obeyed the law.
|
| It's not poverty. Crime comes from the dysfunction in people
| and communities which stems from deeper causes which are much
| harder, or impossible to change.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >but they were not more criminal
|
| I know that my grandparents sold booze illegally to bolster
| their income, my dad worked under the table a lot. Honestly
| how do you know how criminal anyone was in the 40s and 50s?
| Do you think they caught remotely as much theft, smuggling or
| tax evasion at a time when security cameras didn't exist? The
| state didn't even have a fraction of the capacity to trace
| lawbreaking that it has now.
|
| When our great grandparents were around most cops probably
| didn't even have routine motorized patrols, who on earth even
| bothered to report a violent altercation during the Great
| Depression
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| The dysfunction in those communities is caused by being
| generally broke.
| [deleted]
| caycep wrote:
| I feel like this is a real world analogy to false local minima
| magnified by a misguided implementation of gradient descent.
| mainpassathome wrote:
| if net_worth >= broke_lmao: return criminal
| epivosism wrote:
| This story is so far down the argument about crime, it's
| ridiculous. This is my interpretation of what's going on:
|
| stage 1: Most people know where the dangerous neighborhoods are.
| Police know this, locals know this, and police send patrols
| there, or they avoid the area and leave poor/minorities to fend
| for themselves.
|
| stage 2: Someone runs the query: "select race_distribution from
| patrol_history" and finds police patrol certain racial areas more
| or less, and sues the department. Media simultaneously writes
| stories like "Police are harassing the population from group X"
| or "Police are abandoning protecting X areas". So the police look
| for "scientific" methods to choose where to dispatch officers
| since they can't put down on paper what everyone knows - that the
| rent-controlled/low wage/etc areas are dangerous. After all, most
| victims of crime here are locals - random kids, storekeepers,
| innocent people, people mistaken for someone else, or killed to
| show bravado.
|
| stage 3: The software looks at obvious things like past history
| of crime, arrests, poverty, drug use detected in water, low
| academic achievement, gunshot detection devices _, etc. It 's
| _all* correlated. So it finds the thing everyone knew - that
| certain areas of cities have much more open crime, and it would
| actually do good to increase the feeling of security around
| there, scare off drug dealers and people with warrants etc. So
| they send police to those areas; Either to harass the people,
| exploit them, or to help protect them. Both cases happen - i.e.
| in Ferguson, the police were using street crime as an excuse to
| harass and ticket local minorities in a disproportionate way
| (according to the justice dep't investigation). But, there also
| actually was a lot more genuine violent crime there (which they
| police may not have even been helping out with). And in other
| cities, police are correctly going to areas which need
| protection, and are wanted by the majority of the local
| population. See surveys on high rates of minorities saying they
| actually want more police protection, referenced in the book
| Ghettoside by Jill Levoy; white liberals typically are more anti-
| police than black people actually living in the dangerous areas.
| But either way, the media can spin it as a negative - both under-
| and over- policing.
|
| stage 4: activists "debunk" the crime prediction software, but if
| you read the debunking, it's obvious motivated BS. None of this
| is necessary. Take a video camera to the tenderloin and look at
| the state of the people. I don't need a PhD to know that this is
| a dangerous area for theft, violence, disease, etc.
|
| In the end, nobody can admit that some areas need police more
| than others right now. It doesn't have to be that way forever,
| but it is the case now. Same way a high school needs at least one
| or two security officers, but an elementary school doesn't.
| Rather than fight to deny reality, how about we figure out how to
| stop lying to ourselves about what's going on, and then get to
| work helping and protecting the kids who are trying to make it
| out of there, and immigrants who have no other place to live? The
| book Ghettoside is highly recommended. It's the story of a
| liberal journalist who works with a right-wing coded white
| detective in LA who nevertheless passionately works against the
| police's internal system, and the local black population's
| reasonable reluctance to trust him and testify, to find the black
| killer of the child of his fellow detective, a black man. I
| learned a lot from this - things aren't just a case of "evil
| police & good locals" or the right-wing stereotyped "evil poor
| and good police" view. Both views miss the more realistic
| description: that the police abandoned protecting black people
| for a long time; black communities started to hate & distrust the
| police for this & other reasons. And so now, they are left
| without a good means to protect themselves except via local
| cultural behavior (bravado, vigilantism, etc.) So the book is a
| call to greatly _improve_ the protection black communities
| receive, with their own involvement, so that they do not have to
| do their own self-defense anymore.
|
| * yes, there are lots of articles which claim "gunshot detection
| devices" are racist. It's hard for me to see that view, but if
| you refuse to admit that some areas are actually more dangerous
| than others, your only way out is to attack all reports and data
| that suggests it.
|
| ** I mention blacks but I'm actually making a cultural argument;
| if you look at culture in Appalachia, you see the same thing in
| whites. Groups which don't feel like part of the majority and are
| left to their own internal justice systems tend to have more
| violence, because the systems are underground and covert. This
| applies regardless of race. e.g. look at crime differences
| between Appalachian areas and the rest of Virginia.
| https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/virginia/appalac...
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| > the software accurately predicted where crimes would occur with
| a "less than half a percent" success rate.
|
| > [previous investigation found] that cops used it to
| disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color.
|
| TL;DR not good at predicting, pretty useful at confirming bias.
| cratermoon wrote:
| It's well known that poor and minority neighborhoods are
| overpoliced and profiled. All the software does is take data from
| where police have made arrests _for street crime_ in the past and
| project that to the future, so of course it 's just going to send
| police to where cops think crime happens - in the poor and
| minority areas.
|
| Look what happens when you model white collar crime instead:
| https://whitecollarcrime.zone/
|
| Imagine the outcry if cops started to suddenly show up all the
| time in places where that kind of crime happens most.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| I always assumed predictive policing was about whitewashing
| parallel construction?
| wxnx wrote:
| I think there's good evidence that by the time it reaches
| common use, it will be used that way.
|
| Consider ShotSpotter, which uses an array of microphones in an
| urban environment to detect gunshots (and often then deploy
| officers to the location) [1]:
|
| > A ShotSpotter expert admitted in a 2016 trial, for example,
| that the company reclassified sounds from a helicopter to a
| bullet at the request of a police department customer, saying
| such changes occur "all the time" because "we trust our law
| enforcement customers to be really upfront and honest with us."
|
| In this case, it seems like it's more like "evidence
| laundering" - a cop found a bullet (presumably through
| legitimate means) and would like to use the ShotSpotter results
| as additional evidence that the shooting took place, and so
| requests a re-classification of the audio recording. Even in
| this case, where the parallel evidentiary construction is
| presumably legitimate, one can imagine the problem - a jury may
| put more stock in a ShotSpotter result than the cop's testimony
| about a bullet. But in this case, the ShotSpotter "result" is
| due precisely to that testimony.
|
| Never mind the fact that ShotSpotter microphones are powerful
| enough to pick up loud conversations [2]:
|
| > The apparent ability of ShotSpotter to record voices on the
| street raises questions about privacy rights and highlights
| another example of how emerging technologies can pose
| challenges to enforcing the law while also protecting civil
| liberties.
|
| Predictive policing will require large-scale data collection,
| and policing institutions don't seem to always use it the way
| we'd want them to.
|
| [1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-
| problems-w...
|
| [2]
| https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/crime/2012/01/11/...
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| assuming bullets are supersonic (or nearly so) the shockwave
| should be conical (or nearly so). I have no clue what the
| hardware of a single "shotspotter" node looks like, but each
| such node should have multiple microphones so it can clearly
| distinguish the shape in wavefront of a bullet vs a
| helicopter blade vs conversations... the mere idea it
| requires manual reclassifications means their hardware
| deployment is either not up to the task, or used for evidence
| laundering.
|
| Ideally the hardware has an open design, with a transparent
| protocol, with real time signed hashing of a hash tree of all
| nodes recordings. So that the reanalysis can happen
| transparently with open source software, and since its signed
| authorities can't bring a doctored audio file. On top any
| citizen should be able to test the local microphones
| unexpectedly by an open source speaker device, prove self-
| selection of a random nonce determining the audio to be
| played, so he can challenge the audio recording after the
| fact in a provable way (when nothing has happened). In this
| way they also can not indefinitely plan an audio substitution
| without getting caught eventually.
| walterbell wrote:
| Thanks for outlining a defensive design. Could you
| recommend good references or example projects for learning
| how to design open hardware/software for sensor data
| acquisition, tamper-resistant signals storage, and
| decentralized analysis?
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| I won't refer you to specific projects, but I will list a
| number of keywords, as those should help anyone willing
| to contribute to explore these ideas further in journal
| articles, although it seems you already know relevant
| terms I didn't mention (like "tamper-resistant", although
| you may have more success with "security envelope").
|
| Specifically regarding bullet detection, you may wish to
| consult ballistic software which takes into account air
| friction. Once you can generate random trajectories in
| air for a representative distribution of initial bullet
| speeds, it _should_ be relatively simple to transform
| these to relative pulse arrival times at a 3D array of
| microphone locations.
|
| For precise pulse arrival times one may wish to look at
| "constant fraction discriminaors", so that for rising
| pressures of the pulse, the timing is independent of
| pulse strength.
|
| For decentralized analysis, and compatibility with the
| courts it would be best if it didn't output a "Holy
| Answer", but instead computes an interpretation of the
| recordings and why it believes in the trajectory it
| heard, so that at all times an alternative interpretation
| with a better fit can be proposed, and algorithms
| improved. This would require the decentralized code to
| effectively run a formal verifier on the audio evidence
| backed proof. Reimplementing the metamath verifier on a
| decentralized blockchain should work.
|
| The devices themselves would best be constructed by and
| for the population, with individuals selected at random,
| trained to understand how the device works, and then
| implementing it and its security envelope.
|
| It would be best if the protocol allowed new concerned
| citizen to continuously join the protocol, to use
| _threshold cryptography_ so that the police can only
| consult the recordings with permission of civilian
| population, keeping an eye on how often they request to
| check for a bullet when there was none (some should be
| tolerated, but bulk collection denied).
|
| The devices should store candidate recordings in a
| rotating buffer overwriting older / less probable bullet
| recordings, but always encrypted towards the group by
| treshold cryptography. These on-device recordings should
| be considered a backup failsafe only in case internet
| connectivity disappears. The usual operation is to send
| the encrypted shards to the group of civilians running
| the protocol. Individuals or small groups can not decode
| the recordings on their own, only with sufficient ( K out
| of N ) civilians agreeing the recordings should be
| published can they be published, in which case that
| recording is public for all (including the police).
| Either everyone gets to hear the shots fired, or no one.
| Regarding the agreement procedure: that too would use
| formal verification, the rules and conditions when
| civilians are supposed to agree should fall under
| democratic control, and the user agent (software client)
| the civilians run automatically release or withhold
| according to these rules. Unreliable citizens that refuse
| to release their share of the secret when they are
| supposed to, or leak their share of the secret when they
| are not supposed to are temporarily banned from
| participating in the protocol (and will for such duration
| no longer be remunerated for their participation). This
| means you don't get cliques of interested parties joining
| up in large numbers amid a disinterested and
| unincentivized population cherry picking when to release
| a recording or not (by modifying the source code of their
| local client in order to cherry pick against due process
| when to release the recordings).
| walterbell wrote:
| Thanks, this is super helpful. Will use those search
| terms to find related material.
|
| There may be attempts to use WiFi 7 sensing/radar in 2024
| Meteor Lake laptops and 2025 routers to make claims about
| the presence of specific humans (e.g. gait, breathing,
| typing signatures), https://www.lumenci.com/post/wi-fi-
| sensing-applications-and-.... Some of the techniques
| you've outlined above could be appplied to through-wall
| WiFi Sensing devices.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Doesn't the Brady rule mean the prosecution would have to
| disclose the initial assessment, and the fact the police
| requested a change?
| wxnx wrote:
| IANAL, so I genuinely can't answer that, but in this
| particular case I'd hope so, yes. More generally, I suspect
| circumstance dictates. Prosecutors' responsibilities under
| Brady do seem to be a topic of conversation in the context
| of "Big Data Policing" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.uclalawreview.org/wp-
| content/uploads/securepdfs/...
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| What meaning are you conveying with the question mark? Is it
| confusion, uncertainty, or something else?
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| What meaning are you conveying with the "l" in the word else
| in the last question?
|
| Is it verticality, persistence, or something else?
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| I'm really confused. It sounds like you're trying to make
| some point like, "it should be obvious what I meant", since
| it's obvious what the letter 'l' means. But it isn't
| obvious to me at all what the question mark meant, which is
| why I asked. Maybe you took my question as sarcasm.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I don't know the details of this system, and it may well be
| complete trash, so don't take this as an apology for it.
|
| It's challenging to measure the utility of a system for
| predicting very low likelihood events, especially when the thing
| being measured is very heavily influenced by the method of
| measurement. For example, in Minority Report, the accuracy of the
| crime predictions is assumed to be perfect, and the result is
| that they are always incorrect. No crimes are committed because
| the intervention is always successful (at least up to the point
| where the story starts). So you might consider 'never have to
| make an arrest' to be a perfect record for such a system, as in
| minority report. You might equally logically take 'always makes
| an arrest' as proof a system like this is working.
|
| You also have to worry about crime moving around to avoid the
| police. Maybe the bank robbery was going to happen at BoA, but
| they drove by and saw a bunch of police and robbed the Wells
| Fargo 20 minutes away instead.
|
| As silly as it probably sounds, probably the best heuristic to
| get a good idea of whether a system like this works is the
| feedback police give after spending time following it's leads. If
| they say this thing is predicting where they need to be better
| than whatever they did before, and there isn't an obvious
| correlation to the predictions (as in, it doesn't always send
| them to the black neighborhood) then it probably warrants more
| careful analysis. In this case the police thought the system was
| crap.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| NYC is a little bigger sample than Plainfield, NJ:
|
| https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestud...
| firebat45 wrote:
| > the software accurately predicted where crimes would occur with
| a "less than half a percent" success rate. > [previous
| investigation found] that cops used it to disproportionately
| targeted low-income communities of color.
|
| Ironically, this is exactly what I predicted.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Haha. One could even say that
|
| > cops used it to disproportionately targeted low-income
| communities of color
|
| Is a better use of the term "predictive policing".
| bunderbunder wrote:
| If we really believe in the basic principles of individual
| liberty that are hypothetically core American values (or even
| just the idea of "first, do no harm"), then it would imply that
| these tools should be optimized for 100% precision, even at the
| cost of terrible recall.
|
| But if you're trying to market your stuff to law enforcement
| agencies, I'm guessing you're instead incentivized to optimize
| for recall, even at the cost of terrible precision. Because,
| probably with the best of intentions, that's what they think they
| should be doing. But we've got basically the entire history of
| forensic "science" to demonstrate just how poorly the police tend
| to understand some of these basic statistical principles.
| AnadaP wrote:
| You have to choose between:
|
| - accurate and politically incorrect
|
| - inaccurate and politically correct
| daoboy wrote:
| These programs are an enormous waste of money. I took a
| geographic profiling course during undergrad expecting an
| interesting application of GIS and statistics.
|
| It turned out to be a lot of handwaving to come to the obvious
| conclusion that most crimes are more likely to occur in some
| areas than others, along with the offender's residence.
|
| It was taught by a former FBI agent, and his academic acumen was
| very...disillusioning.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-03 23:00 UTC)