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You know, a problem with all this discourse about police bias and racial inequity is that it ignores, or chooses to wave away, some fundamental truths about pat

You know, a problem with all this discourse about police bias and racial inequity is that it ignores, or chooses to wave away, some fundamental truths about pattern recognition, and the dual (sometimes conflicting) charge being given to law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement officers are charged with preventing crime. They are also human beings who learn quickly and use pattern recognition. They would not be effective if they didn't do this. Pattern recognition after years of serving in law enforcement tells you that certain cars and driving behaviors are suspicious. That people who are behaving out of place in a certain neighborhood at a certain time of day are suspicious. That there are reliable indicators that someone is deserving of higher scrutiny if their behavior warrants. You would be a fool not to listen to these accumulated and learned indicators of crime prevention. But now they are being told (or strongly disincentivized) that they must be unbiased. That appearance alone is not sufficient to raise an alert. Well, unfortunately, that is not true, and no law enforcement officer would tell you that every car driving in a neighborhood is equally likely to be a candidate if a robbery were reported. Or that if a violent drug deal went down, every person on the street would be equally likely to be involved. Sure, law enforcement personnel should be trained to not allow uninformed or personal biases to come into play. But the job of policing most definitely is a job that involves identifying patterns and learning biases (in the most technical sense of the word) in order to be effective. You want totally unbiased policing, yet you want police to be effective? Those two things are in conflict, and we need to make some grown-up choices about what is tolerable. An "unbiased" world is a fantasy.

londons_explore 6y ago
Couldn't agree more. We need to throw out the idea of removing bias, and instead decide which biases we are happy to use to do policing, and which we are not. Personally, I think this line is impossible to draw, and therefore we should pay people who are inconvenienced by the police. Police stopped your car? Receive $15. Police busted into your house with a warrant? Receive $1000. Now we can let the police use any source of bias in their policing decisions, with the knowledge that those being inconvenienced are being paid well to compensate.
- raducu 6y ago
  I totally agree (no, I actually don't)... IF the money comes from the cops own pocket.
raducu 6y ago
Of course you cannot say or do anything of value without generalization. However: there's a big difference between stopping a certain type of car after a robbery and stopping certain kinds of cars every day, without any specific reason, until you can charge a black youth with cannabis possession. A white person hasn't ever been stopped in a "routine" traffic stop and a black youth has been stopped 4 times in the last month and then searched because a cop claimed he "smelled marijuana" -- that is a bias problem.
trabant00 6y ago
Paraphrasing something I heard a while back: "Without preconceived ideas I wouldn't be able to find my way in the bedroom at night". Reconsidering everything you think you know in every situation is clearly impossible and can only lead to inaction and indecision. I've worked a few years on spam filtering. There is no way you can achieve zero false positives and negatives. You can only make it easy to appeal mistakes and processes to minimize their impact. The same is true for the legal system.
drewcoo 6y ago
> Law enforcement officers are charged with preventing crime. Some people think the current system it's not preventing crime well. What with the bias and all that. This is underscored by the police brutality in the media. > You want totally unbiased policing I don't think anyone has suggested that's even possible. People have claimed there are gradations somewhere between "totally unbiased" and the current state. And some of us would to try out "somewhat less biased" for a while. Just to see if that's better.
bsder 6y ago
> Law enforcement officers are charged with preventing crime. This is your fundamental attribution error. Making crime prevention a fundamental job of police officers places them directly at odds with the community by putting police officers in too many situations where they are "judge, jury, and executioner." That's a very fundamental problem that all the current protests about the police are trying to drive home. The only "prevention" that a police officer should be doing is simply being present. Anything else (checkpoints, traffic pullovers without actual violation, etc.) is just asking for abuse.
AlotOfReading 6y ago
This feels like a false dichotomy. To use a hypothetical, there's a world of difference between stopping someone because they have anti-theft ink all over their hands a block from a recent bank robbery and doing so because they're purple skinned and statistically, so are most bank robbers. Trying to avoid the latter doesn't mean preventing the police from putting 2 and 2 together on the former and making that case in court.
czzr 6y ago
Behavioural profiling is perfectly fine, racial profiling is not. The problem with algorithmic based approaches is that they often embed naive correlations that apply population statistics to individual people - this is exactly what you don’t want.
raxxorrax 6y ago
> You would be a fool not to listen to these accumulated and learned indicators of crime prevention. If you are a police officer in a hotspot for crime, you start to believe far more humans are criminals than not. That isn't an accusation, but it requires effort to realize that you aren't dealing with representative groups of people in your day to day job. That said, the current tone in that debate is probably too poisoned. There are even accusations that crimes weren't followed up because of the religion of perpetrators in Europe. Or that sentences are significantly lighter if you have an immigrant background. If that is the case, it is certainly not helpful in any way.

londons_explore 6y ago

Couldn't agree more. We need to throw out the idea of removing bias, and instead decide which biases we are happy to use to do policing, and which we are not. Personally, I think this line is impossible to draw, and therefore we should pay people who are inconvenienced by the police. Police stopped your car? Receive $15. Police busted into your house with a warrant? Receive $1000. Now we can let the police use any source of bias in their policing decisions, with the knowledge that those being inconvenienced are being paid well to compensate.

raducu 6y ago
I totally agree (no, I actually don't)... IF the money comes from the cops own pocket.

raducu 6y ago

Of course you cannot say or do anything of value without generalization. However: there's a big difference between stopping a certain type of car after a robbery and stopping certain kinds of cars every day, without any specific reason, until you can charge a black youth with cannabis possession. A white person hasn't ever been stopped in a "routine" traffic stop and a black youth has been stopped 4 times in the last month and then searched because a cop claimed he "smelled marijuana" -- that is a bias problem.

trabant00 6y ago

Paraphrasing something I heard a while back: "Without preconceived ideas I wouldn't be able to find my way in the bedroom at night". Reconsidering everything you think you know in every situation is clearly impossible and can only lead to inaction and indecision. I've worked a few years on spam filtering. There is no way you can achieve zero false positives and negatives. You can only make it easy to appeal mistakes and processes to minimize their impact. The same is true for the legal system.

drewcoo 6y ago

> Law enforcement officers are charged with preventing crime. Some people think the current system it's not preventing crime well. What with the bias and all that. This is underscored by the police brutality in the media. > You want totally unbiased policing I don't think anyone has suggested that's even possible. People have claimed there are gradations somewhere between "totally unbiased" and the current state. And some of us would to try out "somewhat less biased" for a while. Just to see if that's better.

bsder 6y ago

> Law enforcement officers are charged with preventing crime. This is your fundamental attribution error. Making crime prevention a fundamental job of police officers places them directly at odds with the community by putting police officers in too many situations where they are "judge, jury, and executioner." That's a very fundamental problem that all the current protests about the police are trying to drive home. The only "prevention" that a police officer should be doing is simply being present. Anything else (checkpoints, traffic pullovers without actual violation, etc.) is just asking for abuse.

AlotOfReading 6y ago

This feels like a false dichotomy. To use a hypothetical, there's a world of difference between stopping someone because they have anti-theft ink all over their hands a block from a recent bank robbery and doing so because they're purple skinned and statistically, so are most bank robbers. Trying to avoid the latter doesn't mean preventing the police from putting 2 and 2 together on the former and making that case in court.

czzr 6y ago

Behavioural profiling is perfectly fine, racial profiling is not. The problem with algorithmic based approaches is that they often embed naive correlations that apply population statistics to individual people - this is exactly what you don’t want.

raxxorrax 6y ago

> You would be a fool not to listen to these accumulated and learned indicators of crime prevention. If you are a police officer in a hotspot for crime, you start to believe far more humans are criminals than not. That isn't an accusation, but it requires effort to realize that you aren't dealing with representative groups of people in your day to day job. That said, the current tone in that debate is probably too poisoned. There are even accusations that crimes weren't followed up because of the religion of perpetrators in Europe. Or that sentences are significantly lighter if you have an immigrant background. If that is the case, it is certainly not helpful in any way.