7 ms·

The problem is that the police are being asked to do what amounts to population control, of a historic problem population in the US, that has no real desire to

by panic 10y ago

The problem is that the police are being asked to do what amounts to population control, of a historic problem population in the US, that has no real desire to be controlled, on the behalf of people with no real desire to be seen as controlling them. The most the algorithm can do is provide a justification for well-known solutions to crime (or the perception of crime), but laundered through math & obfuscated reasoning so as to not be seen as too racist. Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones it? Somehow, up until like the 1960s-1970s, this was not an issue. Was it not an issue, or did you just not hear about it? The 1960s civil rights movement happened (and in many ways is still happening) for a reason.

h4nkoslo 10y ago
Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones this sort of thing? Blacks have ~4x the murder rate of the combined white / hispanic population, and IIRC something like 6-8x the murder rate of the disaggregated white population, depending on how exactly you segment hispanics. It ends up being approximately half of all murders. Note that this tends to be a geographically concentrated population, often next to an incredibly low-murder urban(e) white area, so you end up with cities like Chicago where the goal is to keep the anarchy from spilling over into your tax base. It's not delusional to think that dealing with facts like this is a major area of concern for law enforcement and local political leadership, especially when people are so quick to denounce any contemplation of reality as racist. I guess if you wanted to put on your PC goggles and studiously avoid any discussion of race, you could do the intellectually dishonest thing and talk about things like "the population of South Chicago", but being intellectually dishonest doesn't seem to have gotten us very far. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
- badsock 10y ago
  OK, so let's say people agree with you all the sudden. Now that you've framed it as a race thing, what sort of policy are you going to implement based on what you decide? If you're going to take any kind of punitive action against people based on their race, that's not a "offending the PC police" thing, that's a human rights violation. If it's not punitive, then that's affirmative action, which you already have and has been discussed to death. What's the point of framing the discussion around race, given that the result of going down that avenue isn't useful, and that the discussion itself is going to be bitterly divisive?
  - h4nkoslo 10y ago
    You're misunderstanding me. I am saying that the raw statistics indicate that dealing with crime in serious way requires imposing not-crime on the black population. That is just a point of fact, and Eric Holder's subordinates at least agree with me. Mechanisms to do this run into exactly the sorts of problems you mention (all of the plausible solutions appear to be either "racist" or empirically ineffective). There are discarded social technologies from <1970 that evidently succeeded in reducing both the black crime rate, and probably also the extent to which black crime affected whites & was thus basically ignorable. Examining those technologies in depth & figuring out what if anything is useful sort of exceeds the bounds of a tiny comment box. But let's please get accurate diagnoses first of the decision calculus facing, say, Rahm Emanuel as he decides what policies to implement, and why he doesn't seem to be able to crack the problem. Giuliani was able to mostly solve the problem in New York, but he was able to do things like eliminate freedom of movement for blacks, avoid effective criticism due to his protection of large swathes of the media community, import replacement populations to drive out his more troublesome constituents, finance it via a boom in his city's FIRE economy, etc. It's not clear that that would work in, say, Detroit, or that those policies were in retrospect conformal with contemporary ethics.
    - panic 10y ago
      Men commit more crimes than women. Do you think we should eliminate freedom of movement for men? "Import replacement populations" of women to drive them out? The reasons people commit crimes are complex. Visible attributes like skin color or gender do not cause people to commit crime, and using statistics to argue this is incorrect and racist.

by panic 10y ago

h4nkoslo 10y ago

Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones this sort of thing? Blacks have ~4x the murder rate of the combined white / hispanic population, and IIRC something like 6-8x the murder rate of the disaggregated white population, depending on how exactly you segment hispanics. It ends up being approximately half of all murders. Note that this tends to be a geographically concentrated population, often next to an incredibly low-murder urban(e) white area, so you end up with cities like Chicago where the goal is to keep the anarchy from spilling over into your tax base. It's not delusional to think that dealing with facts like this is a major area of concern for law enforcement and local political leadership, especially when people are so quick to denounce any contemplation of reality as racist. I guess if you wanted to put on your PC goggles and studiously avoid any discussion of race, you could do the intellectually dishonest thing and talk about things like "the population of South Chicago", but being intellectually dishonest doesn't seem to have gotten us very far. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

badsock 10y ago
OK, so let's say people agree with you all the sudden. Now that you've framed it as a race thing, what sort of policy are you going to implement based on what you decide? If you're going to take any kind of punitive action against people based on their race, that's not a "offending the PC police" thing, that's a human rights violation. If it's not punitive, then that's affirmative action, which you already have and has been discussed to death. What's the point of framing the discussion around race, given that the result of going down that avenue isn't useful, and that the discussion itself is going to be bitterly divisive?
- h4nkoslo 10y ago
  You're misunderstanding me. I am saying that the raw statistics indicate that dealing with crime in serious way requires imposing not-crime on the black population. That is just a point of fact, and Eric Holder's subordinates at least agree with me. Mechanisms to do this run into exactly the sorts of problems you mention (all of the plausible solutions appear to be either "racist" or empirically ineffective). There are discarded social technologies from <1970 that evidently succeeded in reducing both the black crime rate, and probably also the extent to which black crime affected whites & was thus basically ignorable. Examining those technologies in depth & figuring out what if anything is useful sort of exceeds the bounds of a tiny comment box. But let's please get accurate diagnoses first of the decision calculus facing, say, Rahm Emanuel as he decides what policies to implement, and why he doesn't seem to be able to crack the problem. Giuliani was able to mostly solve the problem in New York, but he was able to do things like eliminate freedom of movement for blacks, avoid effective criticism due to his protection of large swathes of the media community, import replacement populations to drive out his more troublesome constituents, finance it via a boom in his city's FIRE economy, etc. It's not clear that that would work in, say, Detroit, or that those policies were in retrospect conformal with contemporary ethics.
  - panic 10y ago
    Men commit more crimes than women. Do you think we should eliminate freedom of movement for men? "Import replacement populations" of women to drive them out? The reasons people commit crimes are complex. Visible attributes like skin color or gender do not cause people to commit crime, and using statistics to argue this is incorrect and racist.