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The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith. But maybe if we decide to keep them around, these recommendations, along with better civilian oversi

The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith. But maybe if we decide to keep them around, these recommendations, along with better civilian oversight to ensure they're actually implemented, will mitigate the dangers of predictive policing.

mbostleman 6y ago
>>The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith.>> There are ~650k police officers in the US employed by ~18k agencies. Can you provide more detail on how it is that that group has shown us a lack of good faith?
- adamsea 6y ago
  By not publicly and consistently condemning and/or holding their fellow officers accountable when they should be. The blue wall of silence. To be fair after the murder of George Floyd you did see some officers and police chiefs doing this in the initial round of protests. Generally speaking though police departments have proven incredibly difficult to reform - there’s a lot of entrenched behavior, such that even if one officer isn’t engaging in anything illegal themself, the police culture brings huge pressure to bear against anyone who might condemn another officer for breaking the law.
  - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
    This. "Good cops" would be pressuring police unions to crack down on bad cops, and taking the infiltration of American police departments by white supremacist militias seriously. Ergo, there are no good cops, or they are stifled into silence and might as well be bad cops. But as someone else pointed out, this article is about Canada, so I digress…
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      This is such a silly claim. There have been a handful of cases of white supremacists managed to get hired. Out of 800,000 cops. Terrorists, spies, and gang members manage to join government agencies and the military as well. Also, if you don’t know how many bad cops there are, and you don’t know how many good cops there are, and you have no clue how many good cops report on bad cops, you can’t even begin to make that claim. You’re just being an “ACAB” guy, despite the fact that you desperately need police.
      - 14 6y ago
        True. But I do have one anecdotal story. My brother was beat up in custody by local police but they forgot they were on camera or something so my brother got a hold of the footage through a lawyer and they paid my brother enough money he was able to put it to a down payment of a house. The finding of the investigation; the officer involved was guilty of assaulting him among other things such as not telling the truth as to what happened but since he was about to retire in a month they decided they would not be taking action towards the officer. My brother is a loser who probably mouthed him off and had it coming but this officer is also a loser for losing his cool in a professional setting costing me as a tax payer money. Was he actually punished? No. So the next officer as long as he is close to retirement thinks he can get off free. In a just society you get punished. I would be royally screwed if one week before my retirement I hit an elderly patient who got out of hand. So we don't have equal laws for people and police.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        Yeah, so it turns out that unwavering support for unions doesn’t always go as planned.
        adamsea 6y ago
        Unions are a tool - a means for labor to organize and exercise power to see to the best interests of its members. Ideally that functions as a way for labor to negotiate with management for humane working conditions, etc, and for worker solidarity. Any tool can be abused. Plus police unions really do seem like a special case. In part because the profession of policing is one big special case, because they themselves are part of our system of law. Which really all should go without saying - I would hazard a guess that you already know most of what I am telling you :).
      - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
        We do know. They tell us, you're just not listening. https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard... Here's a cop who tried to report on corruption within the NYPD. His squadmates got him thrown into an insane asylum. The NYPD, by the way, is larger and more heavily funded than most armies. https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/05/04/the-nypd-tapes-inside-bed-stuys-81st-precinct/ https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/05/04/the-nypd-tapes-insid... "desperately need police" We used to "desperately need police" to get injured and wounded people to hospitals. The reason why ambulances do it instead is because the doctors noticed that cops would sometimes beat the shit out of patients en route. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/02/12/all-black-ambulance-service-inspired-todays-ems-system/ https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/02/12/all-black-ambulanc... What's wrong with divvy'ing up every responsibility of "the police" and handing those responsibilities off to trained professionals?
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    The US situation seen from French eyes is quite surprising. Here we have the IGPN, which is "the Police of Police" so when an officer does something wrong there's an inquiry about it. But more importantly, there are sanctions. The system isn't perfect by any mean but to give you an example of how infrequent Police murders are, our local BLM movement had to find a 4 year old case as their "George Floyd".
    - legerdemain 6y ago
      How many Palantir contracts does French law enforcement and counterintelligence pay for? Anything in addition to the DGSI contract?
      - jmnicolas 6y ago
        I don't see the point you're trying to make, sorry. My answer was about Police brutality, not privacy.
        legerdemain 6y ago
        Predictive policing is associated with selective policing, increasing the rate of police encounters for a set of people. Getting accosted by the police because I live in an area with higher crime is a danger to my well-being, because every encounter with the police carries risk.
        jmnicolas 6y ago
        We're not speaking of the same thing hence my confusion. To reduce risks with Police encounters, they have to be accountable. It seems to me that the US Police would benefit from more accountability so I gave the example of the French Police. I have no idea what they do with predictive policing here, but if they use it I can tell you with confidence that it's not working at all.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        It’s actually been demonstrated that more police in high crime areas reduces crime and increases safety. When they pull back, crime goes up. So I don’t know why people say this. I also don’t know why people think it makes more sense to divert police resources away from where crimes are happening. Not even the linked report agrees with this.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    None of these criticisms are objective, quantifiable, or actionable as written. I think this is the single biggest barrier to police reform.
- occamrazor 6y ago
  And moreover this report is about Canada, not the US.
  - jahfer 6y ago
    The police in Canada are due plenty of scrutiny for how altruistic their departments might be [1] > The Ontario government ended police access to a COVID-19 database on July 22 after a court challenge by civil rights groups. > Information released during that legal process revealed Thunder Bay police had searched the database more than 150 times per day, on average, between April 17 and July 22, according to the CCLA. That amounts to 14,800 searches, or a rate ten times the average number of searches by other police forces across the province. > Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 reported COVID-19 cases during the time the data was available to police. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-police-covid-results-civil-liberties-1.5691132 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-polic...
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act? The US is not Canada. Police in Canada need safeguards too, to be sure. It's not even close to the same thing. For every 1 person killed in Canada by police, 100 are killed in America, 10X per capita. People in Canada aren't really scared of the police, certainly not in the way Americans are scared of the police. Police in Canada are part of the community, not paramilitary belligerents.
      - jeromegv 6y ago
        Nope, the fact that the police was checking the database has nothing to do with the performance of Thunder Bay against COVID 19, their performance is pretty in line with any remote smaller cities across Canada. In fact they tried to know why they were using it so much, and they refuse to answer. It's the lack of accountability that is the problem. May be there was a real reason for them to use it (10x more than any other city???!), but since they refuse to tell people, anyone can guess.
- FascistsAreLame 6y ago
  If they aren’t beholden under the law for their illegal actions then all this officers are guilty of breaking the law to preserve a police state. The deserve far worse than to not have the blind faith of the electorate they inconsistently help.
- vkou 6y ago
  Unless we've been living under a rock, I think you, me, and the parent poster are well aware of what kinds of institutional problems police in the United States[1] have. Those institutional problems push the individuals that work for police forces into one of three directions - becoming 'bad cops', closing their eyes in response to observing the behaviour of 'bad cops', or being censured and pushed out of their jobs by bad cops. When I observe one cop, without warning, throwing a grenade into a peaceful crowd (Not for any particular purpose. Not to make an arrest. Not to move the police line. Not to enforce an order to disperse, because no order to disperse was made. Just cruelty for the sake of cruelty.) and ~20 cops standing around him not doing a single thing about it, I think that the entire group has shown us a lack of good faith. The thrower for assaulting the public, and the rest of them for not doing a damn thing to stop him. It's possible that there are a few departments that, when their culture is tested like this, will do the right thing. The large metro area departments that have been tested, though, have consistently failed - as have most of their suburbs. (In all fairness, the Bellevue (WA) Police Department for example has (so far) handled the protests reasonably and avoided serious controversy for their past behaviour. Their colleagues across the water in the Seattle PD, though, have demonstrated a complete inability of, as an institution, behaving with any integrity.) [1] And yes, this thread is about Canada. And yes, Canada has similar institutional problems - despicable Vancouver and Toronto PD behaviour at the G20 protests, decades of blatant and systemic racism against First Nations persons (The Highway of Tears, and the Pickett farm murders is a systemic example of racism-by-inaction, while problematic day-to-day interactions are systemic examples of racism-by-action), excessive use of force (In Vancouver, the Dziekański affair - and the follow-up behaviour of the officers involved), etc, etc.
- 29083011397778 6y ago
  How about the time officers of the Lethbridge, Alberta, police department stalked a member of the (minority, NDP) political party while on-duty? [1] [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-western-canada-lethbridge-police-officers-treatment-of-alberta-mla/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...
  - eloff 6y ago
    You can't generalize from one incident to a large group. There are bad apples in every large group. If you can demonstrate an unusual percentage of bad behavior, compared to other developed nations, that'd be more interesting. Either way we could talk about potential ways to improve the situation.
    - jtxx 6y ago
      https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
    - LeonB 6y ago
      The “bad apples” analogy has been done to death. When bad behaviour is detected within a police force, they don’t eliminate the “bad apple” they protect them. No other “good apple” speaks up against the behaviour. Thus — in line with the metaphor - the rot affects the whole barrel.
      - eloff 6y ago
        That's clearly one area for improvement.
        qtplatypus 6y ago
        Which is why you shouldn’t assume people are going to act in good faith. If acting in good faith was universal then we wouldn’t need any form os]f security at all. This is why you have to build systems that assume that there will be bad actors.
- aspaceman 6y ago
  Consistent and repeated acts of violence, following a similar pattern, are reported throughout the country. Even in Canada. These acts have been dismissed as one off cases. Each and every one. Yet they point to a culture that doesn’t address or even care about these problems. That shows a lack of good faith.
- kennywinker 6y ago
  If you have 649,990 cops, and 10 bad cops. And 0 cops arrest the bad cops for their actions. You actually have 650k bad cops. But even setting aside the issue of bad cops, the way policing is done in racialized neighbourhoods means that even if you had 0 bad cops the system would still oppress these groups through things like stop-and-frisk and various other means of over policing or "broken-windows" policing.
  - google234123 6y ago
    Good thing that the number of bad cop arrests is not 0 then. I don't get why people have issues with sending law enforcement to the places where there is literally more crime.
    - qtplatypus 6y ago
      Because it creates a positive feedback loop. More police means more incidences of law breaking get detected as crimes, which results in more police enforcement. Imagine a road network and police with a limited number of speed traps. If you send the speed to the places where there have been more people caught speeding then the fact that the speed traps where in that location will have a higher rate of caught speeders. Another example is drug enforcement. Black people are searched more often then white people for drugs, which results in them being caught having drugs more often which in turn makes police think that they are more likely to have drugs.
      - google234123 6y ago
        It could also create a negative feedback loop: e.g. breaking up gangs or reducing the likely hood the a crime will go unpunished will lead to less crime in an area.
        kennywinker 6y ago
        It could, but it doesn't
    - 6y ago
- jhanschoo 6y ago
  I'm confused by this comment and the comment being replied to. Are we still talking about Canadian police?
- JamisonM 6y ago
  This is a Canadian article, if you would like a good overview of just how much "good faith" you should assume from the management of the largest police force in Canada you can take look at this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-sexual-harassment-history-1.3453413 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-sexual-harassment-hist...
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
No, the police have not shown us that.
bobthepanda 6y ago
Does Canada have the same issues with policing that the US has?
- katbyte 6y ago
  no, not really i think. It's not perfect with some glaring incidents, but overall I'd say much better. There is an order of magnitude less forces, less guns to go around, less focus on drug use and some of the forces (RCMP OPP) are very large. We had some protests basically shut down large sections of the country earlier in the year and it never got violent like in america.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Yes. Against indigenous and minority groups for certain.
  - NicoJuicy 6y ago
    I speak daily with Canadians ( working for a Canadian company from Europe). And there are struggles between French and English. Racism... is nowhere near as bad as in the US. I hear issues about the language mostly that are pretty bad though. Eg. If you speak English you wouldn't get served in a restaurant ( = stories from Canadians from other people they know) There are more examples, eg. "Being forced to learn Canadian French in school", ... But I live in Belgium and we learn 3-4 languages in the flemish part, so that might influence my perspective. And we also have our own issues ...
    - JamisonM 6y ago
      Even in the Frenchest Quebec-nationalist parts of Canada you have to work pretty hard at being a belligerent jerk to not get served at a restaurant for not speaking French. People tell stories all the time about this sort of stuff, you hear it second and third hand.. you go visit yourself, viola! Folks are just pretty decent and eager to engage in commerce with visitors! Complaining about being forced to learn French in school is some classic "western alienation" Canadian politics stuff, the Canadian equivalent of Americans being angry about having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish on the IVR.. one can only sigh at the triviality of these matters..
abstractbarista 6y ago
We (a subset of the public) have shown the police we also don't act in good faith.

mbostleman 6y ago

>>The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith.>> There are ~650k police officers in the US employed by ~18k agencies. Can you provide more detail on how it is that that group has shown us a lack of good faith?

adamsea 6y ago
By not publicly and consistently condemning and/or holding their fellow officers accountable when they should be. The blue wall of silence. To be fair after the murder of George Floyd you did see some officers and police chiefs doing this in the initial round of protests. Generally speaking though police departments have proven incredibly difficult to reform - there’s a lot of entrenched behavior, such that even if one officer isn’t engaging in anything illegal themself, the police culture brings huge pressure to bear against anyone who might condemn another officer for breaking the law.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  This. "Good cops" would be pressuring police unions to crack down on bad cops, and taking the infiltration of American police departments by white supremacist militias seriously. Ergo, there are no good cops, or they are stifled into silence and might as well be bad cops. But as someone else pointed out, this article is about Canada, so I digress…
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    This is such a silly claim. There have been a handful of cases of white supremacists managed to get hired. Out of 800,000 cops. Terrorists, spies, and gang members manage to join government agencies and the military as well. Also, if you don’t know how many bad cops there are, and you don’t know how many good cops there are, and you have no clue how many good cops report on bad cops, you can’t even begin to make that claim. You’re just being an “ACAB” guy, despite the fact that you desperately need police.
    - 14 6y ago
      True. But I do have one anecdotal story. My brother was beat up in custody by local police but they forgot they were on camera or something so my brother got a hold of the footage through a lawyer and they paid my brother enough money he was able to put it to a down payment of a house. The finding of the investigation; the officer involved was guilty of assaulting him among other things such as not telling the truth as to what happened but since he was about to retire in a month they decided they would not be taking action towards the officer. My brother is a loser who probably mouthed him off and had it coming but this officer is also a loser for losing his cool in a professional setting costing me as a tax payer money. Was he actually punished? No. So the next officer as long as he is close to retirement thinks he can get off free. In a just society you get punished. I would be royally screwed if one week before my retirement I hit an elderly patient who got out of hand. So we don't have equal laws for people and police.
      - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        Yeah, so it turns out that unwavering support for unions doesn’t always go as planned.
        adamsea 6y ago
        Unions are a tool - a means for labor to organize and exercise power to see to the best interests of its members. Ideally that functions as a way for labor to negotiate with management for humane working conditions, etc, and for worker solidarity. Any tool can be abused. Plus police unions really do seem like a special case. In part because the profession of policing is one big special case, because they themselves are part of our system of law. Which really all should go without saying - I would hazard a guess that you already know most of what I am telling you :).
    - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
      We do know. They tell us, you're just not listening. https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard... Here's a cop who tried to report on corruption within the NYPD. His squadmates got him thrown into an insane asylum. The NYPD, by the way, is larger and more heavily funded than most armies. https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/05/04/the-nypd-tapes-inside-bed-stuys-81st-precinct/ https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/05/04/the-nypd-tapes-insid... "desperately need police" We used to "desperately need police" to get injured and wounded people to hospitals. The reason why ambulances do it instead is because the doctors noticed that cops would sometimes beat the shit out of patients en route. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/02/12/all-black-ambulance-service-inspired-todays-ems-system/ https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/02/12/all-black-ambulanc... What's wrong with divvy'ing up every responsibility of "the police" and handing those responsibilities off to trained professionals?
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  The US situation seen from French eyes is quite surprising. Here we have the IGPN, which is "the Police of Police" so when an officer does something wrong there's an inquiry about it. But more importantly, there are sanctions. The system isn't perfect by any mean but to give you an example of how infrequent Police murders are, our local BLM movement had to find a 4 year old case as their "George Floyd".
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    How many Palantir contracts does French law enforcement and counterintelligence pay for? Anything in addition to the DGSI contract?
    - jmnicolas 6y ago
      I don't see the point you're trying to make, sorry. My answer was about Police brutality, not privacy.
      - legerdemain 6y ago
        Predictive policing is associated with selective policing, increasing the rate of police encounters for a set of people. Getting accosted by the police because I live in an area with higher crime is a danger to my well-being, because every encounter with the police carries risk.
        jmnicolas 6y ago
        We're not speaking of the same thing hence my confusion. To reduce risks with Police encounters, they have to be accountable. It seems to me that the US Police would benefit from more accountability so I gave the example of the French Police. I have no idea what they do with predictive policing here, but if they use it I can tell you with confidence that it's not working at all.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        It’s actually been demonstrated that more police in high crime areas reduces crime and increases safety. When they pull back, crime goes up. So I don’t know why people say this. I also don’t know why people think it makes more sense to divert police resources away from where crimes are happening. Not even the linked report agrees with this.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  None of these criticisms are objective, quantifiable, or actionable as written. I think this is the single biggest barrier to police reform.
occamrazor 6y ago
And moreover this report is about Canada, not the US.
- jahfer 6y ago
  The police in Canada are due plenty of scrutiny for how altruistic their departments might be [1] > The Ontario government ended police access to a COVID-19 database on July 22 after a court challenge by civil rights groups. > Information released during that legal process revealed Thunder Bay police had searched the database more than 150 times per day, on average, between April 17 and July 22, according to the CCLA. That amounts to 14,800 searches, or a rate ten times the average number of searches by other police forces across the province. > Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 reported COVID-19 cases during the time the data was available to police. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-police-covid-results-civil-liberties-1.5691132 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-polic...
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act? The US is not Canada. Police in Canada need safeguards too, to be sure. It's not even close to the same thing. For every 1 person killed in Canada by police, 100 are killed in America, 10X per capita. People in Canada aren't really scared of the police, certainly not in the way Americans are scared of the police. Police in Canada are part of the community, not paramilitary belligerents.
    - jeromegv 6y ago
      Nope, the fact that the police was checking the database has nothing to do with the performance of Thunder Bay against COVID 19, their performance is pretty in line with any remote smaller cities across Canada. In fact they tried to know why they were using it so much, and they refuse to answer. It's the lack of accountability that is the problem. May be there was a real reason for them to use it (10x more than any other city???!), but since they refuse to tell people, anyone can guess.
FascistsAreLame 6y ago
If they aren’t beholden under the law for their illegal actions then all this officers are guilty of breaking the law to preserve a police state. The deserve far worse than to not have the blind faith of the electorate they inconsistently help.
vkou 6y ago
Unless we've been living under a rock, I think you, me, and the parent poster are well aware of what kinds of institutional problems police in the United States[1] have. Those institutional problems push the individuals that work for police forces into one of three directions - becoming 'bad cops', closing their eyes in response to observing the behaviour of 'bad cops', or being censured and pushed out of their jobs by bad cops. When I observe one cop, without warning, throwing a grenade into a peaceful crowd (Not for any particular purpose. Not to make an arrest. Not to move the police line. Not to enforce an order to disperse, because no order to disperse was made. Just cruelty for the sake of cruelty.) and ~20 cops standing around him not doing a single thing about it, I think that the entire group has shown us a lack of good faith. The thrower for assaulting the public, and the rest of them for not doing a damn thing to stop him. It's possible that there are a few departments that, when their culture is tested like this, will do the right thing. The large metro area departments that have been tested, though, have consistently failed - as have most of their suburbs. (In all fairness, the Bellevue (WA) Police Department for example has (so far) handled the protests reasonably and avoided serious controversy for their past behaviour. Their colleagues across the water in the Seattle PD, though, have demonstrated a complete inability of, as an institution, behaving with any integrity.) [1] And yes, this thread is about Canada. And yes, Canada has similar institutional problems - despicable Vancouver and Toronto PD behaviour at the G20 protests, decades of blatant and systemic racism against First Nations persons (The Highway of Tears, and the Pickett farm murders is a systemic example of racism-by-inaction, while problematic day-to-day interactions are systemic examples of racism-by-action), excessive use of force (In Vancouver, the Dziekański affair - and the follow-up behaviour of the officers involved), etc, etc.
29083011397778 6y ago
How about the time officers of the Lethbridge, Alberta, police department stalked a member of the (minority, NDP) political party while on-duty? [1] [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-western-canada-lethbridge-police-officers-treatment-of-alberta-mla/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...
- eloff 6y ago
  You can't generalize from one incident to a large group. There are bad apples in every large group. If you can demonstrate an unusual percentage of bad behavior, compared to other developed nations, that'd be more interesting. Either way we could talk about potential ways to improve the situation.
  - jtxx 6y ago
    https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
  - LeonB 6y ago
    The “bad apples” analogy has been done to death. When bad behaviour is detected within a police force, they don’t eliminate the “bad apple” they protect them. No other “good apple” speaks up against the behaviour. Thus — in line with the metaphor - the rot affects the whole barrel.
    - eloff 6y ago
      That's clearly one area for improvement.
      - qtplatypus 6y ago
        Which is why you shouldn’t assume people are going to act in good faith. If acting in good faith was universal then we wouldn’t need any form os]f security at all. This is why you have to build systems that assume that there will be bad actors.
aspaceman 6y ago
Consistent and repeated acts of violence, following a similar pattern, are reported throughout the country. Even in Canada. These acts have been dismissed as one off cases. Each and every one. Yet they point to a culture that doesn’t address or even care about these problems. That shows a lack of good faith.
kennywinker 6y ago
If you have 649,990 cops, and 10 bad cops. And 0 cops arrest the bad cops for their actions. You actually have 650k bad cops. But even setting aside the issue of bad cops, the way policing is done in racialized neighbourhoods means that even if you had 0 bad cops the system would still oppress these groups through things like stop-and-frisk and various other means of over policing or "broken-windows" policing.
- google234123 6y ago
  Good thing that the number of bad cop arrests is not 0 then. I don't get why people have issues with sending law enforcement to the places where there is literally more crime.
  - qtplatypus 6y ago
    Because it creates a positive feedback loop. More police means more incidences of law breaking get detected as crimes, which results in more police enforcement. Imagine a road network and police with a limited number of speed traps. If you send the speed to the places where there have been more people caught speeding then the fact that the speed traps where in that location will have a higher rate of caught speeders. Another example is drug enforcement. Black people are searched more often then white people for drugs, which results in them being caught having drugs more often which in turn makes police think that they are more likely to have drugs.
    - google234123 6y ago
      It could also create a negative feedback loop: e.g. breaking up gangs or reducing the likely hood the a crime will go unpunished will lead to less crime in an area.
      - kennywinker 6y ago
        It could, but it doesn't
  - 6y ago
jhanschoo 6y ago
I'm confused by this comment and the comment being replied to. Are we still talking about Canadian police?
JamisonM 6y ago
This is a Canadian article, if you would like a good overview of just how much "good faith" you should assume from the management of the largest police force in Canada you can take look at this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-sexual-harassment-history-1.3453413 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-sexual-harassment-hist...

lawnchair_larry 6y ago

No, the police have not shown us that.

bobthepanda 6y ago

Does Canada have the same issues with policing that the US has?

katbyte 6y ago
no, not really i think. It's not perfect with some glaring incidents, but overall I'd say much better. There is an order of magnitude less forces, less guns to go around, less focus on drug use and some of the forces (RCMP OPP) are very large. We had some protests basically shut down large sections of the country earlier in the year and it never got violent like in america.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Yes. Against indigenous and minority groups for certain.
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  I speak daily with Canadians ( working for a Canadian company from Europe). And there are struggles between French and English. Racism... is nowhere near as bad as in the US. I hear issues about the language mostly that are pretty bad though. Eg. If you speak English you wouldn't get served in a restaurant ( = stories from Canadians from other people they know) There are more examples, eg. "Being forced to learn Canadian French in school", ... But I live in Belgium and we learn 3-4 languages in the flemish part, so that might influence my perspective. And we also have our own issues ...
  - JamisonM 6y ago
    Even in the Frenchest Quebec-nationalist parts of Canada you have to work pretty hard at being a belligerent jerk to not get served at a restaurant for not speaking French. People tell stories all the time about this sort of stuff, you hear it second and third hand.. you go visit yourself, viola! Folks are just pretty decent and eager to engage in commerce with visitors! Complaining about being forced to learn French in school is some classic "western alienation" Canadian politics stuff, the Canadian equivalent of Americans being angry about having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish on the IVR.. one can only sigh at the triviality of these matters..

abstractbarista 6y ago

We (a subset of the public) have shown the police we also don't act in good faith.