6 ms·

There still needs to be visibility. Only the recent ubiquity of cell phone cameras has allowed the public at large to see interactions between citizens and pol

by rrmm 11y ago

There still needs to be visibility. Only the recent ubiquity of cell phone cameras has allowed the public at large to see interactions between citizens and police. Before this it was easy to dismiss or just be ignorant of how often police abuse occurred to certain groups of people. It was the officer's word against these "thugs". Getting everyone to admit a problem exists and getting our heads around how frequently it occurs is the first step towards resolving it.

saturdaysaint 11y ago
"It's crazy that once personal video recorders became ubiquitous UFOs stopped visiting Earth and cops started brutalizing people all the time" -@stephenjudkins
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us. Say 1 in 500 police interaction is bad (terrorizing innocents at gunpoint) and 1 in 10 000 is, well, criminal (police maiming or killing someone innocent). That's 0.5% and 0.01% of all interactions, respectively. Even assuming that all police interactions, good and bad, are recorded in detail by third parties, in a country as big as the United States that still gives a steady stream of police brutality cases to run on nation-wide news, day after day. So even though in my example the problem is minor and mostly random in nature, even when most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly, the overall perception will be that police brutality is a big problem that absolutely needs to be dealt with right now. In fact, in this case, the only real problem is media reporting and people believing it instead of doing the math. Now I don't know the real numbers for the police problem in the US, but it wouldn't surprise me if cases of brutality were even rarer than in my example. And even if this is a totally 100% legit problem, there are many, many others - from terrorism to immigrants to vaccines causing autism - that are simply manufactured by news reporting. This all makes me believe that the biggest danger to our civilization are we ourselves - and our massive overreactions to media-manufactured non-problems.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > that still gives a steady stream of police brutality cases to run on nation-wide news, day after day. US police brutality is so routine that it mostly goes un-reported, or gets minor attention on very local news media. That's changing now. Part of the problem is that US police don't even count how many people they shoot and kill. I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism. Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy? Now one can say that it's only fringe outlets that go anti-vaxx nowadays. But mainstream sources do exactly the same type of reporting - omitting or not doing the math, blowing things out of proportion by literal orders of magnitude, etc. - when it comes to GMOs, or e-cigs, or immigrants, or terrorists, etc. The feedback loop between readers and publishers can turn just about absolutely anything into a nation-wide scandal.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      > Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy? So that's a different claim. When he first appeared he was credible - he got published in a peer reviewed respectable journal after all, and he was actively trying to con people. Once his paper had been debunked, well, yes you're right there. There's no excuse to keep pushing his theory once we know he's falsified his data, taken samples illegally from people without their permission, etc.
      - 11y ago

by rrmm 11y ago

saturdaysaint 11y ago

"It's crazy that once personal video recorders became ubiquitous UFOs stopped visiting Earth and cops started brutalizing people all the time" -@stephenjudkins

TeMPOraL 11y ago

I used to believe this but now I'm more careful - there are several biases that rear their ugly heads in problems like these. On the one hand, what GP alluded to is that bad interactions will be overrepresented in any kind of police reporting app that doesn't force you to rate every interaction you were in. On the other hand, you have the usual publication/media bias and availability heuristic working against us. Say 1 in 500 police interaction is bad (terrorizing innocents at gunpoint) and 1 in 10 000 is, well, criminal (police maiming or killing someone innocent). That's 0.5% and 0.01% of all interactions, respectively. Even assuming that all police interactions, good and bad, are recorded in detail by third parties, in a country as big as the United States that still gives a steady stream of police brutality cases to run on nation-wide news, day after day. So even though in my example the problem is minor and mostly random in nature, even when most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly, the overall perception will be that police brutality is a big problem that absolutely needs to be dealt with right now. In fact, in this case, the only real problem is media reporting and people believing it instead of doing the math. Now I don't know the real numbers for the police problem in the US, but it wouldn't surprise me if cases of brutality were even rarer than in my example. And even if this is a totally 100% legit problem, there are many, many others - from terrorism to immigrants to vaccines causing autism - that are simply manufactured by news reporting. This all makes me believe that the biggest danger to our civilization are we ourselves - and our massive overreactions to media-manufactured non-problems.

DanBC 11y ago
> that still gives a steady stream of police brutality cases to run on nation-wide news, day after day. US police brutality is so routine that it mostly goes un-reported, or gets minor attention on very local news media. That's changing now. Part of the problem is that US police don't even count how many people they shoot and kill. I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism. Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy? Now one can say that it's only fringe outlets that go anti-vaxx nowadays. But mainstream sources do exactly the same type of reporting - omitting or not doing the math, blowing things out of proportion by literal orders of magnitude, etc. - when it comes to GMOs, or e-cigs, or immigrants, or terrorists, etc. The feedback loop between readers and publishers can turn just about absolutely anything into a nation-wide scandal.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy? So that's a different claim. When he first appeared he was credible - he got published in a peer reviewed respectable journal after all, and he was actively trying to con people. Once his paper had been debunked, well, yes you're right there. There's no excuse to keep pushing his theory once we know he's falsified his data, taken samples illegally from people without their permission, etc.
    - 11y ago