5 ms·

I get the garbage-in-garbage-out data side of things, but what I don't understand is how it seems to take issue with the idea that certain areas have higher cri

I get the garbage-in-garbage-out data side of things, but what I don't understand is how it seems to take issue with the idea that certain areas have higher crime rates. For example, how the new system looks like the old system because of the point it makes that some "laser zones" are now "neighborhood engagement zones". This is sort of naively how I'd expect policing to work. I live in a small town between Chicago and Gary, IN, and I know where is safe and where is less so. I'm genuinely curious if "best practices" for the police are not to focus where crimes usually occur? For example, in my town on Halloween, a 13 year old out trick or treating with his grandma was shot and killed. When I read where I sadly wasn't surprised. Like, should or shouldn't the police have been generally patrolling that area that night?

dmurray 5y ago
If the police patrol the bad areas, it's racial profiling. If they patrol the good areas, it's favouring the rich. The only winning move is not to patrol at all.
- sovietmudkipz 5y ago
  I’d hope police chiefs have thicker skin enough to make the right choice despite the (agenda pushing) flak they might receive. At the end of the day, it’s hurt feelings vs hurt people. The mission must come first! That said, this is a position that requires a willingness to expose oneself to the pain and suffering of condemnation, in which the average person’s conviction would very quickly waver and capitulate to whichever wind the “public” opinion (read: corporate media mogul’s opinion) might blow. Haaarrddd stuff to expect.
  - RHSeeger 5y ago
    > flak they might receive But they don't get "flak". They get a community of people misrepresenting the facts making it look like they're racist. And that turns into a national news story. And that turns into them being told to resign because the people above them don't want the political heat. I get that there are police officers that are, indeed, racially biased. But calling what the ones doing the right thing "flak" and dismissing it does a disservice to the good ones. It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      You can ignore the racial angle and still come away with the criticism that the culture among most police departments in American is VERY antagonistic towards the populations they serve. I could bang on about my personal experience but it's not super relevant here. Just look at any major police scandal in the past decade. There's almost always an attempt at a cover up, and always a ton of officers that knew about it and did nothing. No matter what the crime or infraction is, police protect their own and circle up in the face of even the most benign criticism. There's a great book called I Got a Monster [1] that details Baltimore's infamous gun task force, and it's shocking how many people knew what they were up to for years. People who look the other way aren't good apples. For a bit of history, Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop [2] does a great job detailing the growth of us vs. them thinking among police nationally. > It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job). Police are almost NEVER fired. The number one goal of police unions is to prevent any firing for any reason ever, and they are very successful at that. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Got-Monster-Americas-Corrupt-Police/dp/1250221803 https://www.amazon.com/Got-Monster-Americas-Corrupt-Police/d... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610394577 https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...
      - RHSeeger 5y ago
        > Police are almost NEVER fired But police chiefs and above are forced to "resign" much more commonly. And it happens when the optics are bad on something that was the right thing to do (like policing higher crime areas more, when those areas have a higher rate of minorities).
        ch4s3 5y ago
        I don't really se a lot of evidence for that, and I don't see how it relates to peoples' general displeasure with policing. I would also note that the kind of policing like stop and frisk that people hate, is not the kind of policing that actually prevents crime. THere's a giant body of research on this. Across America police departments, regardless of how "focused" they are on high crime areas seem to have abysmal closure rates for murders, assaults, rapes, and property crimes. Police in the US are far too focused on dumb shit like clearing corners, and policing nuisance crime. Moreover, who cares if a police chief, a political appointee, resigns? It means almost nothing for day to day policing which is governed by lower level union members and informed by trainings selected by the police unions.
- juuular 5y ago
  This but unironically
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I think patrolling is ok. The problem starts when they start stopping people to look for drugs especially. I still remember when marijuana was illegal in LA. You could walk around in rich areas, smell it everywhere, but the cops wouldn't constantly stop people and raid houses like they did in poor areas. So it makes sense to me that there is a perception that in poor areas police patrolling is done to catch the inhabitants whereas in rich areas it's done to protect the inhabitants.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  When people talk about profiling, they aren't talking about patrolling.
adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
the problem with this logic is that "crime rate" depends on what cops see, and whether they already people for it. since cops are much more likely to give warnings instead of tickets to white people, cringe rate statistics aren't very trustworthy.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Cops don’t give warnings for serious crimes, so those stats are far more trustworthy. Just look where murders happen to know the actual crime rate of an area.
  - musingsole 5y ago
    No, but they still have to hear or see those serious crimes to pursue them. No matter how you frame it, where the cops put their boots will necessarily increase crime reporting much like increasing a good's price necessitates a drop in demand.
    - merpnderp 5y ago
      No for murder they don’t need to be there. Neither armed robbery, rape, shootings, etc. There are a whole class of crimes we have reasonably good statistics on. Not perfect but good enough to know the trend and magnitude.
    - xphilter 5y ago
      That doesn’t even make sense. If police aren’t trustworthy, why would someone report a crime. Suppose I want to report a crime in my house, that would involve inviting police inside. If I know them to be corrupt (maybe they go snooping or drop some drugs or steal from me), there’s no way I’d put myself in that situation, so I wouldn’t report the crime.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Generally more applicable to car break-ins and assaults than murders though per the parent post?
  - 5y ago
mc32 5y ago
Outsiders and opportunists like to believe people in high crime areas want crime. They hate crime as much as anyone else. There is a love hate relationship when some of your relations engage in low level crime and get caught in the fight against crime for the 20th time. “Why did they have to come for Gary again, he never hurt anybody”. But Gary didn’t want to go back in for robbery, so he ran and got shot. But when mrs Jensen has her house broken into she’s upset this happened to her, not realizing her son Gary while not “dangerous” is part of the atmosphere of crime that allows her house to get broken into. One of the ways to combat that is to do what Giuliani did in New York and attack all crime including quality of life and other low level in addition to organized crime and gangs. The other way is to do it the Soviet way and have neighbor rat on neighbor and ship the baddies off to the gulags (often they did worse than that). What doesn’t seem to work is being nice to crime and suggest crime to go away. It needs persistent pushback whether in the US, Albania, China, Belize, etc. One thing which would help is to have better funnels away from crime to divert people at high risk of joining crime into regular sustainable jobs. But this takes culture. If all your friends are making "good" money stealing catalytic converters and they constantly nag you to join them, it's hard to not get involved.
- geofft 5y ago
  New York also has been getting increasingly richer. Mrs. Jensen's kids almost certainly don't have a deep-seated desire to commit robbery, they want the material results of having committed a robbery. If you want to stop robbery, getting better at catching Gary only makes him faster at running; you need to prevent Gary from deciding that joining his friends in a robbery is the most rational option. There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid. During Giuliani's tenure, unemployment in Manhattan dropped from almost 10% to 5%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN The median income rose from $54K to $93K, which even adjusting for inflation is a >40% increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 The number of people below the poverty line dropped from 340K to 270K even as population grew slightly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 (None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)
geofft 5y ago
Does patrolling the area prevent 13-year-olds from being shot and killed? This sounds like a silly question, because it's so ingrained in how we think about policing and crime, but I think it's a question we have to reassess when crime is low. If an area is entirely lawless - in such a state of societal collapse that everyone is allying with a local gang for their protection - then having police patrol the area is likely useful in the same way as sending UN peacekeepers to areas controlled by warring armies or sending knights to clear out dangerous medieval roads. But most places in the world these days have functioning governments. A news report about the shooting (https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2021-11-03/indiana-man-charged-in-fatal-shooting-of-trick-or-treater https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2021-11-03/indiana-m...) says: > One of the trick-or-treaters told police that he exchanged words with a man about 30 to 45 minutes before the shooting, which happened around 7:30 p.m. The man threatened to get a gun and shoot them, according to court documents. > The group later saw a car with five or six people inside who appeared to be staring at them. The man who had exchanged words with one of the youths got out of the car with some of the other occupants. Another man took a “shooting stance” and shots were fired at the trick-or-treaters, court records said. > A police officer captured Crews after the father of one of the youths chased him in the neighborhood, according to court records. It's pretty clear that, even if this is a more dangerous area than some posh suburb of Chicago, it's still relatively safe, since not only were there kids out trick-or-treating by themselves, they felt comfortable getting in a verbal argument with someone who threatened to shoot them and they stuck around the area for 30-45 minutes. You don't do that in an area where shootings are particularly commonplace. So, suppose that the police were patrolling the area. What would have been different? The man was caught - did he genuinely expect not to be caught, and would increasing police presence have dissuaded him? He also, apparently, got out of the car and started shooting - would there have been enough time for a police officer to react and save the child's life? Meanwhile, the article talks about how "predictive policing" focuses on crimes that are not murder: > Searching for a robbery suspect described only as a Black man between the ages of 16 and 18, officers stopped 161 people and arrested 10 at the intersection where the store was located in a span of two weeks. [...] > Some encounters turned deadly. In 2016, LAPD shot and killed 31-year-old Keith Bursey Jr at the intersection, after the car Bursey was a passenger in was stopped by gang enforcement police investigating “an odor of marijuana”. If a police patrol in Indiana had stopped and searched every car on Halloween with "an odor of marijuana," would they have found the car with the armed man and saved this teenager's life? If they had done a dragnet search for a teenager who stole some clothing, would they have made the area safer? The problem (and I'm not saying I have an easy solution!) is that overpolicing doesn't particularly contribute to lowering crime rates, past a certain point. If you're trying to prevent a genocide in occupied Srebrenica, by all means, send in armed patrols and authorize them to use their arms. If you're trying to prevent some ten murders a year, all of which have unrelated causes, though? It's very much the "Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done" sort of reasoning. And that doesn't even get into the fact that overpolicing can make the area even more dangerous by fostering a distrust of police - if you were a teenager in a bad part of town and the news liked to call you and your friends "youths," and you got in an argument with someone who threatened to shoot you, would you feel comfortable telling the local police patrol?
fullshark 5y ago
Like most taboo academic subjects it involves joining that data with demographic data.
CPLX 5y ago
Using “crime” as a catch all term is a fundamental error in this analysis. There’s no reasonable discussion of this issue that doesn’t start with assessing the goals, outcomes, and tactics, of America’s multi-generational War on (some) Drugs (when used by certain people). The vast majority of policing and deciding which neighborhoods to patrol has literally nothing to do with stopping property crime and assaults. If it did this conversation would look totally different.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dmurray 5y ago

If the police patrol the bad areas, it's racial profiling. If they patrol the good areas, it's favouring the rich. The only winning move is not to patrol at all.

sovietmudkipz 5y ago
I’d hope police chiefs have thicker skin enough to make the right choice despite the (agenda pushing) flak they might receive. At the end of the day, it’s hurt feelings vs hurt people. The mission must come first! That said, this is a position that requires a willingness to expose oneself to the pain and suffering of condemnation, in which the average person’s conviction would very quickly waver and capitulate to whichever wind the “public” opinion (read: corporate media mogul’s opinion) might blow. Haaarrddd stuff to expect.
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  > flak they might receive But they don't get "flak". They get a community of people misrepresenting the facts making it look like they're racist. And that turns into a national news story. And that turns into them being told to resign because the people above them don't want the political heat. I get that there are police officers that are, indeed, racially biased. But calling what the ones doing the right thing "flak" and dismissing it does a disservice to the good ones. It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job).
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    You can ignore the racial angle and still come away with the criticism that the culture among most police departments in American is VERY antagonistic towards the populations they serve. I could bang on about my personal experience but it's not super relevant here. Just look at any major police scandal in the past decade. There's almost always an attempt at a cover up, and always a ton of officers that knew about it and did nothing. No matter what the crime or infraction is, police protect their own and circle up in the face of even the most benign criticism. There's a great book called I Got a Monster [1] that details Baltimore's infamous gun task force, and it's shocking how many people knew what they were up to for years. People who look the other way aren't good apples. For a bit of history, Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop [2] does a great job detailing the growth of us vs. them thinking among police nationally. > It can be VERY hard to do the right thing, especially when it means it's the last thing you get to do (before you lose your job). Police are almost NEVER fired. The number one goal of police unions is to prevent any firing for any reason ever, and they are very successful at that. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Got-Monster-Americas-Corrupt-Police/dp/1250221803 https://www.amazon.com/Got-Monster-Americas-Corrupt-Police/d... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610394577 https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...
    - RHSeeger 5y ago
      > Police are almost NEVER fired But police chiefs and above are forced to "resign" much more commonly. And it happens when the optics are bad on something that was the right thing to do (like policing higher crime areas more, when those areas have a higher rate of minorities).
      - ch4s3 5y ago
        I don't really se a lot of evidence for that, and I don't see how it relates to peoples' general displeasure with policing. I would also note that the kind of policing like stop and frisk that people hate, is not the kind of policing that actually prevents crime. THere's a giant body of research on this. Across America police departments, regardless of how "focused" they are on high crime areas seem to have abysmal closure rates for murders, assaults, rapes, and property crimes. Police in the US are far too focused on dumb shit like clearing corners, and policing nuisance crime. Moreover, who cares if a police chief, a political appointee, resigns? It means almost nothing for day to day policing which is governed by lower level union members and informed by trainings selected by the police unions.
juuular 5y ago
This but unironically
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I think patrolling is ok. The problem starts when they start stopping people to look for drugs especially. I still remember when marijuana was illegal in LA. You could walk around in rich areas, smell it everywhere, but the cops wouldn't constantly stop people and raid houses like they did in poor areas. So it makes sense to me that there is a perception that in poor areas police patrolling is done to catch the inhabitants whereas in rich areas it's done to protect the inhabitants.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
When people talk about profiling, they aren't talking about patrolling.

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago

the problem with this logic is that "crime rate" depends on what cops see, and whether they already people for it. since cops are much more likely to give warnings instead of tickets to white people, cringe rate statistics aren't very trustworthy.

merpnderp 5y ago
Cops don’t give warnings for serious crimes, so those stats are far more trustworthy. Just look where murders happen to know the actual crime rate of an area.
- musingsole 5y ago
  No, but they still have to hear or see those serious crimes to pursue them. No matter how you frame it, where the cops put their boots will necessarily increase crime reporting much like increasing a good's price necessitates a drop in demand.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    No for murder they don’t need to be there. Neither armed robbery, rape, shootings, etc. There are a whole class of crimes we have reasonably good statistics on. Not perfect but good enough to know the trend and magnitude.
  - xphilter 5y ago
    That doesn’t even make sense. If police aren’t trustworthy, why would someone report a crime. Suppose I want to report a crime in my house, that would involve inviting police inside. If I know them to be corrupt (maybe they go snooping or drop some drugs or steal from me), there’s no way I’d put myself in that situation, so I wouldn’t report the crime.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Generally more applicable to car break-ins and assaults than murders though per the parent post?
- 5y ago

mc32 5y ago

Outsiders and opportunists like to believe people in high crime areas want crime. They hate crime as much as anyone else. There is a love hate relationship when some of your relations engage in low level crime and get caught in the fight against crime for the 20th time. “Why did they have to come for Gary again, he never hurt anybody”. But Gary didn’t want to go back in for robbery, so he ran and got shot. But when mrs Jensen has her house broken into she’s upset this happened to her, not realizing her son Gary while not “dangerous” is part of the atmosphere of crime that allows her house to get broken into. One of the ways to combat that is to do what Giuliani did in New York and attack all crime including quality of life and other low level in addition to organized crime and gangs. The other way is to do it the Soviet way and have neighbor rat on neighbor and ship the baddies off to the gulags (often they did worse than that). What doesn’t seem to work is being nice to crime and suggest crime to go away. It needs persistent pushback whether in the US, Albania, China, Belize, etc. One thing which would help is to have better funnels away from crime to divert people at high risk of joining crime into regular sustainable jobs. But this takes culture. If all your friends are making "good" money stealing catalytic converters and they constantly nag you to join them, it's hard to not get involved.

geofft 5y ago
New York also has been getting increasingly richer. Mrs. Jensen's kids almost certainly don't have a deep-seated desire to commit robbery, they want the material results of having committed a robbery. If you want to stop robbery, getting better at catching Gary only makes him faster at running; you need to prevent Gary from deciding that joining his friends in a robbery is the most rational option. There are a few criminals who genuinely are motivated by the crime itself (serial killers, rapists, etc.), aka "want crime" - but for exactly that reason, they're unlikely to be influenced by a change in the "atmosphere of crime." For most quality-of-life crime (including organized crime!), criminals are rational economic actors like anyone else. They don't want crime, they want to get up the first layer of Maslow's pyramid. During Giuliani's tenure, unemployment in Manhattan dropped from almost 10% to 5%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYNEWY1URN The median income rose from $54K to $93K, which even adjusting for inflation is a >40% increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 The number of people below the poverty line dropped from 340K to 270K even as population grew slightly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCPI36061 (None of this is to say Giuliani was or wasn't responsible for the changes, just to propose an alternative causality than the attack on crime. Nor does it ask where the unemployed or poor in Manhattan went or to defend it, it's only looking at the statistics. And also none of this is to say that Gary isn't morally culpable for his deeds, it's just that the goal of reducing crime isn't the same as the goal of assigning moral culpability.)

geofft 5y ago

Does patrolling the area prevent 13-year-olds from being shot and killed? This sounds like a silly question, because it's so ingrained in how we think about policing and crime, but I think it's a question we have to reassess when crime is low. If an area is entirely lawless - in such a state of societal collapse that everyone is allying with a local gang for their protection - then having police patrol the area is likely useful in the same way as sending UN peacekeepers to areas controlled by warring armies or sending knights to clear out dangerous medieval roads. But most places in the world these days have functioning governments. A news report about the shooting (https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2021-11-03/indiana-man-charged-in-fatal-shooting-of-trick-or-treater https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2021-11-03/indiana-m...) says: > One of the trick-or-treaters told police that he exchanged words with a man about 30 to 45 minutes before the shooting, which happened around 7:30 p.m. The man threatened to get a gun and shoot them, according to court documents. > The group later saw a car with five or six people inside who appeared to be staring at them. The man who had exchanged words with one of the youths got out of the car with some of the other occupants. Another man took a “shooting stance” and shots were fired at the trick-or-treaters, court records said. > A police officer captured Crews after the father of one of the youths chased him in the neighborhood, according to court records. It's pretty clear that, even if this is a more dangerous area than some posh suburb of Chicago, it's still relatively safe, since not only were there kids out trick-or-treating by themselves, they felt comfortable getting in a verbal argument with someone who threatened to shoot them and they stuck around the area for 30-45 minutes. You don't do that in an area where shootings are particularly commonplace. So, suppose that the police were patrolling the area. What would have been different? The man was caught - did he genuinely expect not to be caught, and would increasing police presence have dissuaded him? He also, apparently, got out of the car and started shooting - would there have been enough time for a police officer to react and save the child's life? Meanwhile, the article talks about how "predictive policing" focuses on crimes that are not murder: > Searching for a robbery suspect described only as a Black man between the ages of 16 and 18, officers stopped 161 people and arrested 10 at the intersection where the store was located in a span of two weeks. [...] > Some encounters turned deadly. In 2016, LAPD shot and killed 31-year-old Keith Bursey Jr at the intersection, after the car Bursey was a passenger in was stopped by gang enforcement police investigating “an odor of marijuana”. If a police patrol in Indiana had stopped and searched every car on Halloween with "an odor of marijuana," would they have found the car with the armed man and saved this teenager's life? If they had done a dragnet search for a teenager who stole some clothing, would they have made the area safer? The problem (and I'm not saying I have an easy solution!) is that overpolicing doesn't particularly contribute to lowering crime rates, past a certain point. If you're trying to prevent a genocide in occupied Srebrenica, by all means, send in armed patrols and authorize them to use their arms. If you're trying to prevent some ten murders a year, all of which have unrelated causes, though? It's very much the "Something must be done, this is something, so this must be done" sort of reasoning. And that doesn't even get into the fact that overpolicing can make the area even more dangerous by fostering a distrust of police - if you were a teenager in a bad part of town and the news liked to call you and your friends "youths," and you got in an argument with someone who threatened to shoot you, would you feel comfortable telling the local police patrol?

fullshark 5y ago

Like most taboo academic subjects it involves joining that data with demographic data.

CPLX 5y ago

Using “crime” as a catch all term is a fundamental error in this analysis. There’s no reasonable discussion of this issue that doesn’t start with assessing the goals, outcomes, and tactics, of America’s multi-generational War on (some) Drugs (when used by certain people). The vast majority of policing and deciding which neighborhoods to patrol has literally nothing to do with stopping property crime and assaults. If it did this conversation would look totally different.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]