4 ms·
I feel like police forensic techniques are still stuck in the dark ages. I'd imagine there are similar issues with disregarding chance of false positives to ma
by cwkoss 5y ago
I feel like police forensic techniques are still stuck in the dark ages. I'd imagine there are similar issues with disregarding chance of false positives to make convictions easily in:
- drug analysis
- DNA segment matching
- digital forensics
- lineup identifications
- police sketches
- leephillips 5y agoSome of these are well known. Also, fingerprints. And look up the Prosecutor’s Fallacy. In many cases, the forensic evidence is just theater, and the cops/prosecutors know it is meaningless. But juries and judges buy it.
- swiley 5y agoThe heavy use of fingerprints by cops and immigration bureaus feels extremely barbaric once you read a bit about them.
- ravenstine 5y agoThey haven't needed to advance that much. Shows like Forensic Files, COPS and so forth have convinced most people that the police are far more effective than they really are. Most people have no idea that the majority of crimes, including violent ones, go unsolved. (although this shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's actually been a victim of a crime) This isn't to say that policing in its current form isn't effective at all, but the media (whether intentionally or not) have done an excellent job as the propaganda department for the police. Why improve when everyone believes you're superman?
- mindcrime 5y agoShows like Forensic Files, COPS and so forth have convinced most people that the police are far more effective than they really are. but the media (whether intentionally or not) have done an excellent job as the propaganda department for the police. Personally I say "no way is this anything but intentional". There's way too much pro-cop, pro-military-industrial-complex, pro-sook-agency crap on TV for it to be just accidental. Propaganda is exactly what it is.
- bigyikes 5y agoOr, apply Occam’s razor. People like watching cop and detective shows.
- ravenstine 5y agoDepends on what you mean by intentional. I don't think it's an organized effort merely to promote law enforcement from a political standpoint. Rather, I think such shows are made because they sell well to two crowds: the pro law enforcement crowd and those with a curiosity for true crime.
- handoflixue 5y agoSimple incentives seem to explain that one without needing much of a conspiracy: If you're buddy-buddy with the cops, they'll help promote you, talk to you about cool cases they worked, etc.. If you're instead critical of the cops, they're going to try and undermine you instead. This means that doing a cop show that's anti-cop would be like doing a medical show without ever being able to consult a doctor. You can do it, but you're going to have to put a lot more work into research to get the same sense of verisimilitude.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoSpeaking of TV... You know how people who don't work in government don't realize Parks and Rec is a documentary? And people who don't work in a white collar office don't realize The Office is also a documentary? Well Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a documentary too. The primary artistic liberty these shows take is to take a decade's worth of shenanigans, compress it into one season and cut out all the drudgery in-between. Basically all the stupid "that would never happen" crap happens but spread out over 100x as long and 10x as many people.
- mindcrime 5y agos/pro-sook-agency/pro-spook-agency/
- akiselev 5y agoFunny you should mention the military industrial complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_complex > In Hollywood, many movie productions are directly supervised by the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Film Liason Unit. Directors looking to borrow Army material for their movies need to apply to the DoD, and submit their movies' scripts for vetting. Ultimately, the DoD has a say in virtually every US-made movie that use military resources in their production.
- paulpauper 5y agothat is sorta a myth. they often get solved but it may take a long time. Murder cases for example are never declared unsolved unless a suspect is charged or the presumed perpetrator is dead due to age or other reasons.
- ravenstine 5y agoI presume you meant that they are never declared solved [unless...]? It seems pretty farfetched to say that murder cases are considered solved by default even when a reasonable person would consider them to be unsolved.
- joebob42 5y agoI think he means they are never declared unsolved on the sense that "this isn't solved and we are not going to think about it anymore, unsolved is it's final status"
- Avshalom 5y agothe majority of murder and aggravated assault in the US get cleared (solved) but "violent crime" falls short and everything else is woeful. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r... your local government may keep stats E.G.: https://www.cabq.gov/police/public-reports/annual-reports/uniform-crime-reports-clearance-rates https://www.cabq.gov/police/public-reports/annual-reports/un... , https://staging.policescorecard.org/ https://staging.policescorecard.org/ (or the extremely hard to navigate FBI's UCR page https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/ https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/ )
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoIt's really terrible that these are so clearly broken, and yet they are still used. It's a whole field jerking itself around. It reminds me of the phrase, "Something needs to be done. This is something, therefore this needs to be done." It's remarkable that pseudoscience is a big part of how we (don't) protect our rights. To rant for a second, it seems like a case of what I encounter at work too often as a data scientist. It drives me nuts. There's some statistical fallacy where lay people infer one thing, while the logical inference is something else for some subtle reason, and they respond to the critique with, 'well, yeah but we don't need a super rigorous answer here,' or something along those lines. As if a wrong answer is more correct when you 'don't need rigor.' I think we're in that boat because people so easily mistake approximate correctness in the sense of 'this answer is very nearly the right answer' with approximate correctness in the sense of 'this reasoning is very close to the right reasoning.' The two are interchangeable often enough to create the bad habit, like if you discard an assumption that is very probably true enough, or discard a term that is small. But when they aren't interchangeable, they're really really not interchangeable. (We're also in that boat because enough people cry wolf about rigor in the other direction, like complaining about discarding an error term that really is small enough to safely/rigorously discard)
- dk775 5y agoWait until you hear about data science IN law enforcement
- samatman 5y agoDNA matching is shockingly precise, it absolutely should be the gold standard for evidence. Unfortunately, there have been multiple cases where it turns out the forensic analysis simply wasn't performed, the technician just put whatever the prosecutor wanted to see on the form. Easy way around this is double-blinding the evidence. The fact that this isn't done should make DNA evidence inadmissible in court until the relevant authorities clean up their act.
- tbyehl 5y agoAside from human factors, the use of "touch" DNA analysis is absolutely frightening. The presence of someone's DNA at a crime scene is not necessarily evidence that they were ever there. https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/ https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/ https://outline.com/f9njZV https://outline.com/f9njZV
- the_doctah 5y agoBite mark analysis as well