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This is ridiculous trying to pin the prevalence of violent crime in some communities as the fault of the police. What evidence supports this? Maybe you can say

This is ridiculous trying to pin the prevalence of violent crime in some communities as the fault of the police. What evidence supports this? Maybe you can say that violent crime is an offshoot of poverty, but a lot of poor communities don't have the same violent crime as others..so that's tenuous at best. The big experiment would be to reduce the poverty of all groups and see what happens to violent crime, maybe then we don't need police and can have un-armed social workers. But until then, the correlation is community with high violence...incites violence from police, suspicion is then generated against that group. Simple statistics.

perl4ever 6y ago
Well, I wrote a comment and then I decided to delete it and start over, rereading what you wrote and studying it. First you say it's ridiculous to blame the police. Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it. Then you propose the experiment of reducing poverty. But you don't believe that's the cause! And I don't either. So it seems to me like you're not providing an alternative hypothesis to blaming the police. I think in order to select evidence, two alternative hypotheses are a pre-requisite. And if you think the one is "ridiculous", then it implies you have another one. You just haven't stated it so I am aware. Also, your last two sentences really bother me, despite being far from an expert in statistics. Do you think it's reasonable to say that correlation is symmetric, while causality is not? And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility? It doesn't seem to me like the answer is simple or purely a matter of statistics.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  >And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility Not sure exactly what you mean here. >Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it. I don't necessarily doubt it, but I find it curious that there is not a universal poverty == violence. I think reducing poverty is more of a solution than blaming the police, I apologize if I wasn't as clear with my statement on poverty. My hypothesis is something like this: I doubt police cause violence in communities (except perhaps violence against police). There seems to be a correlation with poverty and violence, it's not universal. Picking a group based on skin color and saying "we reduce this poverty and not other kinds" is fairly immoral, therefore the experiment is to flatten the problem of poverty and control to see if there are spikes of violence across this flat plane and to see in which communities it occurs. That would help to isolate a potential root cause of violence. Other experiments could be done. I'm pretty sure the causality is baked into most people not being an expert in statistic, hence "simple" statistics. If the police are running a really basic pattern matching algo, the line between correlation and causation may not be perpendicular. What I mean is that if the situation on the ground "community A has % higher violence" then in situations interacting with A implies higher chance of % violence. The causality is reached because of the simple understanding. At least that's my take.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Logic and experience lead me to have an appreciation for how harmful and painful catch-22 or double-bind situations are. When people are vocally backing the police at times like these, then I think it's obvious they are empathizing viscerally with the police who are subject to no-win situations, so they have that capacity for empathy. But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions. Have you ever been, in some sense, punished by someone with power or leverage over you, because you were less than trusting, and that made them distrustful or fearful of you? I tend to think this is common, whether or not it's exactly a conscious preoccupation for most. There are things you can't explain, you have to demonstrate and/or experience.
    - jeffdavis 6y ago
      "But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions." How would you explain people who empathize strongly with the images that we've all seen on TV... but then look at the numbers a week later and realize that the narrative of police violence against blacks is highly misleading.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        I haven't been watching TV for ages, but I've had interactions with the police over the years that demonstrate the difficulties that come with a lack of trust on both sides. There doesn't have to be a specific amount of violence in order to prevent dialogue and trust in a community. It's much more significant where and how it's applied. When people are punished for trusting in the authorities, then it's a huge multiplier of the criminal activity that the authorities then blame on the community. I recently learned something interesting about corruption in my state, not directly related to the police, but about how corrosive it is when people are punished for trusting the system. In NYC, rent is regulated in various ways. One thing is that, if a landlord wants to raise rent, they can justify it with a certain dollar amount of renovations, but they may fraudulently inflate that amount. If you are a victim of that and about to be evicted because your rent was doubled, then you can sue in housing court. However, whether or not you have a good case and win, it will be on record that you sued and the authorities subsequently sell access to the data to interested parties, which means, essentially, that if you exercise your rights you will be put on a blacklist and it will be difficult going on impossible to rent anywhere. Now, this sounds like some activist's tendentious characterization, but this idea that the government effectively runs a blacklist came from court documents. The courts are cognizant this is how the system works, and to some extent they try to compensate for it, by for instance granting injunctions to stop eviction early on.

perl4ever 6y ago

Well, I wrote a comment and then I decided to delete it and start over, rereading what you wrote and studying it. First you say it's ridiculous to blame the police. Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it. Then you propose the experiment of reducing poverty. But you don't believe that's the cause! And I don't either. So it seems to me like you're not providing an alternative hypothesis to blaming the police. I think in order to select evidence, two alternative hypotheses are a pre-requisite. And if you think the one is "ridiculous", then it implies you have another one. You just haven't stated it so I am aware. Also, your last two sentences really bother me, despite being far from an expert in statistics. Do you think it's reasonable to say that correlation is symmetric, while causality is not? And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility? It doesn't seem to me like the answer is simple or purely a matter of statistics.

Avicebron 6y ago
>And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility Not sure exactly what you mean here. >Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it. I don't necessarily doubt it, but I find it curious that there is not a universal poverty == violence. I think reducing poverty is more of a solution than blaming the police, I apologize if I wasn't as clear with my statement on poverty. My hypothesis is something like this: I doubt police cause violence in communities (except perhaps violence against police). There seems to be a correlation with poverty and violence, it's not universal. Picking a group based on skin color and saying "we reduce this poverty and not other kinds" is fairly immoral, therefore the experiment is to flatten the problem of poverty and control to see if there are spikes of violence across this flat plane and to see in which communities it occurs. That would help to isolate a potential root cause of violence. Other experiments could be done. I'm pretty sure the causality is baked into most people not being an expert in statistic, hence "simple" statistics. If the police are running a really basic pattern matching algo, the line between correlation and causation may not be perpendicular. What I mean is that if the situation on the ground "community A has % higher violence" then in situations interacting with A implies higher chance of % violence. The causality is reached because of the simple understanding. At least that's my take.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Logic and experience lead me to have an appreciation for how harmful and painful catch-22 or double-bind situations are. When people are vocally backing the police at times like these, then I think it's obvious they are empathizing viscerally with the police who are subject to no-win situations, so they have that capacity for empathy. But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions. Have you ever been, in some sense, punished by someone with power or leverage over you, because you were less than trusting, and that made them distrustful or fearful of you? I tend to think this is common, whether or not it's exactly a conscious preoccupation for most. There are things you can't explain, you have to demonstrate and/or experience.
  - jeffdavis 6y ago
    "But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions." How would you explain people who empathize strongly with the images that we've all seen on TV... but then look at the numbers a week later and realize that the narrative of police violence against blacks is highly misleading.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      I haven't been watching TV for ages, but I've had interactions with the police over the years that demonstrate the difficulties that come with a lack of trust on both sides. There doesn't have to be a specific amount of violence in order to prevent dialogue and trust in a community. It's much more significant where and how it's applied. When people are punished for trusting in the authorities, then it's a huge multiplier of the criminal activity that the authorities then blame on the community. I recently learned something interesting about corruption in my state, not directly related to the police, but about how corrosive it is when people are punished for trusting the system. In NYC, rent is regulated in various ways. One thing is that, if a landlord wants to raise rent, they can justify it with a certain dollar amount of renovations, but they may fraudulently inflate that amount. If you are a victim of that and about to be evicted because your rent was doubled, then you can sue in housing court. However, whether or not you have a good case and win, it will be on record that you sued and the authorities subsequently sell access to the data to interested parties, which means, essentially, that if you exercise your rights you will be put on a blacklist and it will be difficult going on impossible to rent anywhere. Now, this sounds like some activist's tendentious characterization, but this idea that the government effectively runs a blacklist came from court documents. The courts are cognizant this is how the system works, and to some extent they try to compensate for it, by for instance granting injunctions to stop eviction early on.