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Meanwhile the police are solving the lowest number of crimes on record: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/burglars-go-unpunished-with-only-5-of-cases-solved-sk
by bb123 5y ago
Meanwhile the police are solving the lowest number of crimes on record: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/burglars-go-unpunished-with-only-5-of-cases-solved-sk0p0wjmv https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/burglars-go-unpunished-wi... Less than 5% of burglaries are being solved, and some places less than 1 in 30 crimes reach court. Perhaps policing mean tweets is not the best use of our limited law enforcement resources?
- version_five 5y agoI don't know, making up easy to clear crimes and then solving them seems to be a pretty common MO. If they want to up their stats they are likely to do more of this.
- capableweb 5y agoWe've already fucked up the idea behind metrics in the SaaS world and now every company is chasing just making people active on their platform instead of solving real problem, why not replicate the same success in the afk world? Low amount of solved crimes? Make it illegal to be offensive on Twitter and suddenly lots of crimes gets solved. If you use the wrong metric then people will game it. Now watch governments do the same.
- monkeybutton 5y agoThe stats aren't going to juke themselves!
- bb88 5y agoTo be fair, I thought SaaS metrics learned this from government, not the other way around.
- wisemang 5y agoThis didn’t start with SaaS. I know the Reply All podcast has fallen out of favor but give this episode a listen: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34/ https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34/
- creakingstairs 5y ago> Now watch governments do the same. They've already been doing that for ages: crime rate, gdp, employment, inflation. Here is a clip from my favourite show that highlights this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH_6_8NOfwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH_6_8NOfwI
- disambiguation 5y agoHah first thing I thought of too, love that show.
- rtkwe 5y agoI interviewed at a company that developed call center software and they were fairly up front that part of what they did was occasionally intentionally drop calls to maintain wait time numbers for their clients.
- brightball 5y agoReminds me of a business school story about minimizing hold times…so they started using mute instead and the manager got promoted.
- citrin_ru 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law is probably well known but both corporations and governments pretend that this is not an issue because they don't see any alternatives to metrics and KPIs. Decision making which relies on trust and reputation works well if an organization is small (50-100) and there is no big stuff turnover. Metrics are scalable - you can increase organization size from 1000 to 100000 and they'll continue to work (as bad as before but not much worse).
- logicalmonster 5y ago> If you use the wrong metric then people will game it. Now watch governments do the same. So true. In a world with information overload, the real trick is not having lots of information, it's knowing which variables really matter. Bad bureaucracies and journalists often fixate on the wrong stats, which is usually what's easiest to measure or benefits them personally the most. In the case of Quora, they seemed to prioritize signups and decided to become a gatekeeper to loads of actually useful information for humanity. Twitter appears to be sliding down this same path. The managers responsible for these decisions probably have loads of metrics "proving" that they're geniuses for these decisions, but I'd say that they're not measuring the right variables which are a lot harder to figure out. This may be a controversial statement to some, but in the case of Covid, the governments of the world have been fixating on what benefits them most ("permanent" emergency powers, the beginnings of a digital social credit score system through the backdoor of vaccine passports, shoveling trillions of dollars around that will inevitably lead to gross corruption, a permanent in-built excuses for every failure they preside over, an opportunity to reset the economic system (you will own nothing and like it), etc) and what's easy to measure (the omnipresent "cases") while harming a load of other important variables that also really matter to peoples lives and health: the survival of the small businesses their family built, social cohesion and mental health, early cancer screening, physical fitness and low BMI, the right to absolute bodily integrity, and numerous other important things that are harmed by the fixation on only one aspect of health.
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
- stjohnswarts 5y agoSimilar situation here in the USA. The cops are sitting on their laruels and sipping coffee in parking lots because they feel betrayed by "black lives matter" movement. I know it's anecdotal but I have certainly seen it here in Austin, TX where crime is up like 30% year-over-year. 911 won't even send a cop out for less than a homicide any longer, they just tell you to file a police report online. It's all very deliberate and the city government isn't doing anything about it.
- dntrkv 5y ago> where crime is up like 30% year-over-year > won't even send a cop out for less than a homicide any longer You might have cause-and-effect backwards here. Talk to an actual cop and you'll quickly learn how wrong your theory is.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Guest42 5y agoAgreed, at one point there were teenagers playing baseball in a half full parking lot. I told them to stop and they told me to f off and call the cops if I felt like it. So I did call the cops, and sure enough the support person got on my case and told me it wasn't an emergency in a really harsh manner.
- pie_flavor 5y agoI have to ask, did you call the emergency line or the non-emergency line? Because if you called 911, I can completely understand them getting on your case about it not being an emergency, because it wasn't.
- Guest42 5y agoIt was the emergency line. However, to me it was an emergency as they had 2 baseball bats and were in a group that I deemed as threatening. I began filming them at which point they became more aggressive. This was to have evidence in case they were damaging cars (including my own which was 3 feet away).
- Diesel555 5y agoAh the fallacy that resources can be applied equally everywhere. The fallacy that reducing enforcement of "mean tweets" can equally be applied to increasing the enforcement of burglaries. In microeconomics this dichotomy is described as the Production Possibility Frontier that recognizes tradeoffs exist. I dislike seeing the arguments "why are we spending money here when we could there" when they are not a 1 for 1 trade. We may sacrifice a large percentage of "here" to get a small percentage of "there". Read more on the Production Possibility Frontier if curious what I mean by that. An example is that the guy who solved this "mean tweet" problem is the same guy who could go and solve the burglaries problem. Assume you have a team that analyzes cyber crime that is underemployed but the team is required for rare cases. In their free time they enforce "mean tweets" (I'm not arguing that is okay, I'm arguing about resources). The assumption that they could use their free time better to solve burglaries is probably not true. Unless they Aram Mojtabai from the Blacklist. All of his resources are 1:1 as he can do anything.
- tryptophan 5y agoIts not really a fallacy...you can just fire the the mean-tweet-enforcers and hire more other-crime-enforcers. You are the one making assumptions that firing people doesn't exist as a concept.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago+100 Like
- Diesel555 5y agoI think the OP was simply discussing the officer's time and he may be right. The article doesn't state who initially reported and pursued the charges. But your comment shows the issue I was trying to highlight. You missed the point which was not normative - that resources are not always interchangeable at a 1:1 ratio. You can clearly fire and hire wherever you want. It's the efficiency of that transaction to be discussed. Does the value gained by adding an enforcer outweighs the value lost by removing a "mean-tweet-enforcer"? If the force's problems are caused by a shortage of enforcers and adding one more enforcer provides a huge value... while at the same time this "mean-tweet-enforcer" provides little value, then absolutely, make the trade. But if this "mean-tweet-enforcer" does a lot of other valuable things, and this one article that made the news is just a one-off, while at the same time the police are not at a shortage of people but have process issues leading to the reported evidence failures, and adding another enforcer does not help much - the trade may not value society. I just see a lot of arguments that we should reallocate resources without analyzing the tradeoff where one side may gain little from a lot of expenses. The OPs article states that the burglary issues, from what I can see before the paywall, were caused by evidence failures. If the argument were able to show that the resources lost by looking into this tweet could be reallocated to solve the evidence failures in the article by securing more CCTV feeds or something, then that's a strong argument. Either way, the comparison is theoretical. There are no mean tweet enforcers. The discussion is not normative, but positive. Simply not all resources are a 1:1 trade.
- idiocrat 5y agoAttending digital crimes is less capital intensive.
- rootusrootus 5y agoIt's a problem that feeds on itself. When police refuse to do their jobs, both criminals and victims begin to ignore them. Criminals become more brazen, victims resort to vigilantism. Wealthier areas still tend to get halfway decent police presence, but when that fails, they will just buy their own private security forces.