33 ms·

In a small Virginia town, citizens review police like Uber drivers

128 points by danso 4y ago

cato_the_elder 4y ago
It's Black Mirror already.
- jandrese 4y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. If they are rating these public servants on their service to the public that would be within the scope of a job review. Or think of it as one of those "how was your service today" questionnaires you get sometimes. This isn't about policing someone's personal life. But on the other hand, Yelp reviews are already problematic and extending them to civil servants probably doesn't help the situation.
  - tehlike 4y ago
    someone above commented: "Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?"
  - aksss 4y ago
    I think the down-board view is that Uber’s rating works because the drivers also review the riders. Are police able to rate the people (I hate saying citizens because police are “just” citizens too.)? Will this still work “like Uber” with only one side of the transaction doing the rating? What happens when police rate people? Who views this score? Is it a precursor to dating someone? Hiring someone? This is where it starts to resemble black mirror.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    An interaction with police is usually an inherently negative experience. There are plenty of people that would rate an officer 0/5 for giving them a speeding ticket regardless of how pleasant and polite they were. In fact, a police officer giving a speeding ticket with a smile on their face would come off as extremely condescending and feel like they're doing it as a power move asserting their authority.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      There are others were you will appreciate the job the police officer is doing. Like if you get your bike stolen and they track it down and return it to you. Or you get mugged and they catch the mugger. Of course if your police are not doing this then you may not be inclined to rate them as highly.
- linkingday 4y ago
  no, a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia. and we already live in it. giving citizens a way to speak up about potential abuses is in no way harmful
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia “State“ or “government“ is just whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular (usually geographically bounded) context. So, apparently, dystopia is universal.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ameister14 4y ago
      > "Whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular context" Are you sure that's the definition of "state" or "government?" I don't think it is.
      - mellavora 4y ago
        I agree that the definition is problematic, though commonly accepted. The argument for goes back to Hobbes, and thus is in one sense foundational to western democracies. But it runs into problems when you look at the other aspect of western democracies, which is that power resides in the people and is only conditional granted to authority figures (i.e the "king" rules by consent of the governed, not by divine right). Thus the people have the ultimate right to legitimate violence. Also remembering that Hobbes was arguing for a king, not an elected representative...
        ameister14 4y ago
        That argument might come from Hobbes but it wasn't his definition of a government either. Absolute authority as he saw it was simply a requirement for effective government. Boxers have something of a monopoly on legitimate violence in the context of a boxing ring, but that doesn't make them a government.
derac 4y ago
Gave me a ticket 1/5
- nxm 4y ago
  This^. The rating system puts the public in danger as a result if the right punishment (proper fine) is not given.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    Fines are stupid to begin with. If they are too low nobody will care and the sheer number of people breaking the law makes enforcement pointless. If they are too high, they can send the average person into financial ruin, and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble. Even a ticket of a couple hundred dollars insane to the average American. In either case, without any proper oversight, this money just ends up going towards the funding of police departments, who are then incentivized to give out more tickets. Ultimately they act as tax collectors rather than protection for those living in their jurisdiction. Our people used to run bad cops out of town, now we can't even be bothered to fire them.
    - derac 4y ago
      Where I am from, if you get enough strikes on your record you can lose your license.
    - clairity 4y ago
      > "...and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble." this is why tickets should be income-contingent, if not wealth-contingent (much trickier and more invasive, so unlikely).
      - photochemsyn 4y ago
        In Finland, it's apparently the case, and Switzerland as well. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-tickets-are-linked-to-your-income https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-t... However, improving traffic infrastructure (separating bicycles and pedestrians from cars and trucks with physical barriers, reducing the flow of traffic through city centers, etc.) is a much more effective way of reducing traffic-related injuries and fatalies, which is what the fines are supposed to encourage.
floren 4y ago
It's a worthwhile experiment but the first thing that came to my mind was: oh, everybody exchange cards in the locker room and give each other good reviews--it's anonymous, after all.
theonlybutlet 4y ago
Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?
- derac 4y ago
  Exactly my thought and this is what happens at the end of the article.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  If the townsfolk (who pressure the politicians who pressure the chief who pressure the officers) would prefer that to you hassling them over those kinds of transgressions then yes. Weed, fireworks on the 4th of July, teenagers fishing without licenses, there's all manner of things that are illegal at the state level yet locally accepted when done tastefully that the cops should not be ticketing people for because they people they serve generally do not support that.
  - daenz 4y ago
    It's not "the townsfolk" who would give the officer a rating in that situation, it's the person getting pulled over for a dangerous vehicle. "The townsfolk" very likely want dangerous cars stopped, but that likely won't be reflected in any ratings by the people pulled over for dangerous vehicles, so it's biased. It's naive to assume the thought process is "well, I was breaking the law, but the officer was professional, so 5/5"
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      Why do you think people driving shitboxes (or any other crime) will give unfavorable ratings at a higher rate than people who get cited for other crimes? If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's constantly enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable resulting in "man, that's bullshit" reactions from the people being ticketed then it will show in the aggregate stats and the chief will hopefully say tell him to knock it off and do something that has a higher ratio of public safety to pissing people off. Literally every trade where customers rate performance has had to grapple with this. It's a solved problem. The real value add is using the ratings to compare members of the team, different types of interactions, etc, etc. Anyone who's ever managed or worked from a ticketing system should be familiar with this.
daenz 4y ago
I think their heart is in the right place (officers should have direct and transparent reputations to people). But in order to implement this "correctly", you need to go one step further into a dangerous territory: the ratings that an officer receives should be weighted by the rating of the person who rated them. Absolute scumbags shouldn't be able to hurt reputations in quite the same way as upstanding people. If you have 5/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1.0. If you have a 1/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1/5.
- redsid 4y ago
  Hah. So, China's social rating approach on all citizens as the starting point
- ct0 4y ago
  The "scumbags" most likely know the cops at their best and worst. Rating a cop is relative as they provides a wide ranges of services. It's all relative.
  - daenz 4y ago
    Which is why their rating is still counted, but its biased by what society thinks of the person doing the rating. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of better here. If ratings are something people want to do, you have to bias ratings with additional context, otherwise there is no mechanism to help separate ratings from honest and dishonest people.
    - throwaway787544 4y ago
      But this is also a premature optimization and potentially YAGNI. Yes, you want down-weighting because of one potential complication. But you haven't even built and operated this system yet, so you don't know if this workaround you're applying will even be necessary or will end up causing larger issues. One example of this is "voter fraud". It is possible to commit voter fraud, and so certain parties want strong identity guarantees to vote. But voter fraud isn't happening in practice, and stringent ID requirements actually suppress minority votes. It is better to implement the simplest possible system first, observe it, and fix problems later as needed, after careful analysis of the running system.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Ratings systems suffer from an 'outlier syndrome', where most ratings are from folks at the ends of the bell-curve. Even averaging such data doesn't come close to any kind of true measure. One can imagine Police work would be subject to such effects even more strongly, as they deal often with people at their worst. It's the job after all.
havblue 4y ago
If this system is anonymous, why can't the officers simply not give cards to people who already hate them and maybe file some fake reviews as needed to boost their metrics?
peanut_worm 4y ago
I can think of so many issues with this it could fill a book. How about just holding police accountable if they commit a crime?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Easier said than done. Aside from some headline incidents, cops do things regularly that would be considered a crime if done by anyone else. It's part of the job. It's also the fundamental premise for qualified immunity. It's largely why we have so much trouble holding obvious bad cops accountable.
nxm 4y ago
I’ll take an officer that actually enforces laws who is less cordial over one who allows crime/violations to go u punished with a smile just to get a good rating
throwntoday 4y ago
I used to live in Warrenton, the police there and in all of Virginia are absolute bottom of the barrel trash. I have never come across a more hostile, self-involved, power tripping force anywhere in the world with the exception of China. Virginia's police departments make California look good.
AlexandrB 4y ago
These rating systems are a generally poor representation of reality and don't solve the problem they're trying to address. With Uber/Lyft/DoorDash ratings, people one might consider "woke" will almost always give a 5 star rating unless something goes horribly wrong (i.e. an actual crime is committed) because they understand that the worker's livelihood depends on their rating. Other people will use the rating as leverage to extract special treatment (similar as what happens with tipping). Finally, there's some number of people who will give "genuine" ratings, but even these are often bimodal (5-star or 1-star). Applying the same system to police will probably change which group does what, but won't change the outcome: the ratings will be gamed and largely useless. Arguably it's even worse because of how politicized the subject of law enforcement has become. I don't understand why this broken model of crowdsourcing ratings is being applied over and over again to different aspects of society. It's as if the managers and MBAs of the world have given up even trying to manage people and want to outsource the task to a howling mob of strangers.
- deleted 4y ago
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- robonerd 4y ago
  > I don't understand why this broken model of crowdsourcing ratings is being applied over and over again to different aspects of society. It's as if the managers and MBAs of the world have given up even trying to manage people and want to outsource the task to a howling mob of strangers. I think it's a manifestation of McNamara's Fallacy. Soliciting ratings is just one method of quantifying things, putting problems in terms of numbers so we can do math with those numbers and generally feel like we're being objective and scientific about the matter. It liberates people from having to get into the weeds of making subjective qualitative judgements. There are obvious problems with it; McNamara's fallacy was being willfully blind to qualitative considerations which turned out to be very important to the war. Furthermore, by picking and choosing what you want to measure, and which metrics to value or ignore, you often end up with a process that although ostensibly objective, is effectively subjective.
- runako 4y ago
  And yet, the fact that there are ratings appears to result in higher-quality ride services than taxis. Anecdata, but in my experience rideshares (which have ratings) are cleaner, more punctual, have fewer no-shows, and let's zero incidences of refusal to carry than taxis. Obviously there are likely a number of confounders involved, but I would be surprised if ratings were not an important factor.
djyaz1200 4y ago
This is clever and I agree with the comments regarding their heart being in the right place but this is a flawed approach. The customer service experience of criminals isn't the right thing to optimize and probably has nothing to do with outcomes if not inversely correlated with crime reduction. The very idea that we can view and treat police officers like we do customer service people at say the mall I would argue is causing issues between community and police. If you're ever talking to a police officer you're obligated to follow their lawful commands, and if you have any issue with them the forum to litigate that is court not with the police or through something like a net promoter score. If anything the experience of the people not interacting with the police aka the broader community IS the thing to optimize for. Maybe mail out surveys and ask people where the police are doing well and where they could be more helpful.
- garyfirestorm 4y ago
  the customer service experience of citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries - to whom the police serve!
  - tifik 4y ago
    > citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries I was always curious about how true this statement actually is. I understand that the state runs primarily on money from taxes, but what part of that is actually coming from local citizens pockets? I imagine there are places where most money comes from tourism or goods exports.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      You don't typically pay your money on a tour to the state. You pay it to a hotel, an amusement park, etc who then pays it to the state instead of employees.
      - tifik 4y ago
        Yes, but my point still stands. The money that ends up with the state didn't originate from a local.
karmelapple 4y ago
I've always found it interesting that when I'm pulled over for a traffic violation, a police officer can use their discretion on whether to punish me. I've been pulled over a few times for speeding, and a couple times I simply got a warning, and other times I got a ticket and had to pay a fine. If I committed a crime, why should an officer have that leeway? They caught me, I should have to pay the consequences... right? I've wondered if part of the reason for that discretion is a tacit admission that the fines / consequences for these tickets are simply too high.
- 0des 4y ago
  The purpose of a traffic stop is seldom due to traffic infractions. Traffic stops are an access vector, or as police call it, a point of contact.
  - bostonsre 4y ago
    Are there any numbers to back that up? I'm sure there are some bad apples out there that make up excuses because they think someone looks suspicious tho. But it also seems like there are a huge number of bad drivers out there that do dangerous things and having traffic laws that are sometimes enforced seems like it has to curtail some of that behavior.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Just talk to any cop. If they are honest, they'll tell you this very thing. In fewer degrees than it takes to get to Kevin Bacon, I was witness to an investigation where one individual was thrown the book to convince them to work off the charges being filed by rolling up. A traffic stop is precisely how they made first contact with people up the chain. It's like criminal investigation 101. So much so, it is part of every cop drama
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - 4y ago
dylan604 4y ago
I had an incident involving someone forcibly entering my home that required police assistance. The two responding officers would have absolutely received a 5/5 rating from me. The next day the same asshat decided in his short time in my home that I was woefully short of canned vegetables, and graciously delivered a can of peas through my front window. This required a second visit from the police, and the two responding officers that morning would have received 1/5 rating from their rudeness and absolute lack of caring accusing me of "maybe smoking a little something and being just a bit paranoid". Then accused my house of being a grow house because I had a couple of Kino lamps from doing product photography. Absolute joke of a uniform and prime examples of why police have such low appreciation with the citizens.
nineplay 4y ago
Based on some recent experiences I've been thinking that police forces need something that is almost like a JIRA taskboard. Incidence type, officer name, data, upload picture/videos etc. It wouldn't just be for police positive/negative interaction. Any crime could be entered, any criminal behavior. We have an incident in our school district with an individual who has shouted at children and parents and on a few occasions has tried to enter the school. Obviously bad stuff, obviously particularly concerning given recent events. During a school board meeting it came out that the police only knew of 3 incidents out of probably dozens. There's not a clear path from seeing the behavior, reporting it to the school, reporting it to the police, and being able to put all this information in one place. It's probably a pipe dream to think that someday we could have a dashboard where everyone could monitor these issues, but it might address a lot of problems.
jcrawfordor 4y ago
I feel that there are a lot of concerns in these comments that come mostly out of misconceptions about the broader complexity of police oversight and professional standards and the way this kind of system integrates into it. I serve as part of the police oversight system in a major city and would love to consider a program like this, which I think would tend to actually mitigate many of the problems people are raising here, rather than make them worse. 1. Virtually all police departments already solicit direct feedback, both positive and negative, from citizens. This is just an effort to significantly increase the amount of feedback received through lower friction (phone based experience encouraged by officers rather than a paper form you ask the officer for or a website you go to later). For departments under supervision, DOJ generally requires that police departments or their oversight agencies accept positive and negative feedback, including anonymously, from the public. Part of the motivation of this kind of program is explicitly to increase the amount of positive feedback, because as a rule of thumb higher friction feedback processes result in more negative average feedback in this kind of situation (only people who are really pissed off go to the effort), but less friction to feedback also results in a better cross section of the population responding (traditional methods like paper forms tend to bias towards proficient English speakers, individuals with more free time, etc). Currently, even very busy police officers typically receive only a small handful of citizen comments and they are virtually always negative and resulting from a complex or extreme situation. This makes all sorts of biases and edge cases a major part of the data - in fact the majority of it. Significantly increasing the number of "reviews" will make them far more positive on average, and more related to actual officer conduct and not unusual interactions. 2. The fact that certain people give more consistently negative feedback and that certain officers, due to their assignments, interact with these people more frequently is well understood and already significantly influences police department metrics. For example, officers with advanced training in crisis intervention can be expected to receive more complaints, rather than less, because they are dispatched to interact with a community that is more likely to complain. The increase in overall volume of feedback from this type of program should make it easier to characterize this effect. 3. Police departments with well-functioning professional standards programs integrate many methods of overseeing officer performance, of which direct public feedback is only one element. For example, random audits of OBRD footage are typical (supervisor watches at least one randomly selected hour of body camera footage per supervised officer per month is an example policy). Negative public feedback, if handled as a complaint proper, will lead to a supervisor or full-time PS investigator reviewing body camera footage and potentially interviewing witnesses etc. in order to substantiate or dismiss the complaint. 4. Police officers in large departments receive a substantial amount of procedural criticism ranging from chain of command reprimands to being a subject of lawsuits. Police unions generally favor more direct feedback mechanisms because they allow for intervention in problems before they reach the stage of a lawsuit. From my experience working with direct feedback programs officer support for this concept is probably surprisingly high for that reason - better to have a contemporary, written negative review than a months after the fact IA investigation. 5. Officers in most departments are probably not going to be significantly more lenient due to this program, because their decisions to cite/not cite or arrest/not arrest is regularly reviewed by chain of command and in more serious cases outside professional standards as well. Officers are generally more likely to get in trouble for not citing than for citing, although there are a number of factors that can influence this (the situation can get complicated, e.g. blanket requirement to arrest on felony warrants is typical but may be waived in the case of e.g. DV victims). Like it or not, discretion is a well-established part of policing and departments are increasingly developing methods of monitoring and standardization in order to quantify and reduce e.g. racial bias. 6. Oversight, performance evaluation, and policy enforcement is a large function that typically involves multiple distinct commands in a police department (training, field training, performance, professional standards, etc). Most large departments are implementing some form of computer-based data system to surface trends and anomalies in officer performance measures, but particularly due to the significant power of police unions very few decisions are made based on actual data (zero in a lot of departments). Ultimately all of the collected feedback will be one of many inputs into the decision making process on advancement, discipline, etc. In practice, the subjective judgment of the chain of command virtually always wins, even in cases where it is difficult to square with objective data. Police union CBAs usually enshrine this concept in contract language (e.g. no discipline can be imposed without the subjective approval of a board of command staff based on a hearing, even in cases of clear and provable violation of policy that has a specified penalty, is a typical CBA term). 7. I like that this program seems intended to surface more subjective feedback on demeanor and professionalism, because these are huge problems in a lot of police departments that are extremely difficult to address because of the difficulty of establishing any evidence of a professionalism problem. Particularly, the lack of data on the issue makes it a bottom priority and something that the chain of command is encouraged to ignore rather than address, yet it is one of the biggest factors in public perception of police. 8. None of this program is actually new, just an effort to increase the response volume on existing complaint/commendation programs that have typically existed since WWII.
sc68cal 4y ago
It doesn't matter how you "rate" cops if the police union goes to bat for bad cops and gets their jobs reinstated, or they just leave one department and move to another. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/us/police-unions-contracts-shielding-bad-cops-invs/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/us/police-unions-contracts-sh... We know who the bad cops are. There's a list of them in Philadelphia who the District Attorney (the current, and previous) will never call to the witness stand because they give unreliable testimony. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/crime/29-philly-officers-do-not-call-list-krasner-20180306.html https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/crime/29-philly-officer... There's no need for a new rating system. We need accountability for known bad cops.
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  Yeah. This is what we all want I think. I want to be in a world where when some story of a cop doing something ridiculous surfaces, we're all confident that justice will be done. Unfortunately for me it's usually a sad feeling that nothing will be done about it. We gotta be more willing to fire, ban, or prosecute cops.
- robonerd 4y ago
  If the DA really knows who the bad cops are, the DA should prosecute them. DAs blaming cops are hoping that the public don't realize the DAs themselves are dropping the ball and letting cops get away with it.
  - jcrawfordor 4y ago
    Unreliable testimony isn't a crime (in fact, on these lists, it often originates from officers having committed and been convicted of and served sentences for other crimes). Broadly speaking, protection of police officers from criminal prosecution is broad in such a way that it is difficult to prosecute police for even clear cut violations. For example, the Graham factors used to assess criminal culpability in the use of deadly force are appreciably more generous than most department policies and DoJ recommendations, meaning that there's a broad range of use of force that is in violation of department orders (including severe violations) but not criminal. Use of force on a fleeing individual is a common example. While there is definitely room for prosecutors to be more aggressive on police misconduct, the reality is that there is a huge spectrum of things for which officers ought to be fired but cannot be prosecuted for. Simple incompetence or lack of care is far from the least significant and common.
Melatonic 4y ago
What I do not understand is why police do not have a certification like Lawyers or Doctors do. If they really mess up they should lose that certification (just like a lawyer or doctor can) and then they can no longer work as a police officer. No moving a town or state over and continuing onward - license revoked.

128 points by danso 4y ago

cato_the_elder 4y ago

It's Black Mirror already.

jandrese 4y ago
I'm not sure I agree. If they are rating these public servants on their service to the public that would be within the scope of a job review. Or think of it as one of those "how was your service today" questionnaires you get sometimes. This isn't about policing someone's personal life. But on the other hand, Yelp reviews are already problematic and extending them to civil servants probably doesn't help the situation.
- tehlike 4y ago
  someone above commented: "Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?"
- aksss 4y ago
  I think the down-board view is that Uber’s rating works because the drivers also review the riders. Are police able to rate the people (I hate saying citizens because police are “just” citizens too.)? Will this still work “like Uber” with only one side of the transaction doing the rating? What happens when police rate people? Who views this score? Is it a precursor to dating someone? Hiring someone? This is where it starts to resemble black mirror.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  An interaction with police is usually an inherently negative experience. There are plenty of people that would rate an officer 0/5 for giving them a speeding ticket regardless of how pleasant and polite they were. In fact, a police officer giving a speeding ticket with a smile on their face would come off as extremely condescending and feel like they're doing it as a power move asserting their authority.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    There are others were you will appreciate the job the police officer is doing. Like if you get your bike stolen and they track it down and return it to you. Or you get mugged and they catch the mugger. Of course if your police are not doing this then you may not be inclined to rate them as highly.
linkingday 4y ago
no, a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia. and we already live in it. giving citizens a way to speak up about potential abuses is in no way harmful
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > a state where the police/government has a monopoly on violence is the dystopia “State“ or “government“ is just whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular (usually geographically bounded) context. So, apparently, dystopia is universal.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ameister14 4y ago
    > "Whoever, taken together, has a monopoly on legitimate violence in a particular context" Are you sure that's the definition of "state" or "government?" I don't think it is.
    - mellavora 4y ago
      I agree that the definition is problematic, though commonly accepted. The argument for goes back to Hobbes, and thus is in one sense foundational to western democracies. But it runs into problems when you look at the other aspect of western democracies, which is that power resides in the people and is only conditional granted to authority figures (i.e the "king" rules by consent of the governed, not by divine right). Thus the people have the ultimate right to legitimate violence. Also remembering that Hobbes was arguing for a king, not an elected representative...
      - ameister14 4y ago
        That argument might come from Hobbes but it wasn't his definition of a government either. Absolute authority as he saw it was simply a requirement for effective government. Boxers have something of a monopoly on legitimate violence in the context of a boxing ring, but that doesn't make them a government.

derac 4y ago

Gave me a ticket 1/5

nxm 4y ago
This^. The rating system puts the public in danger as a result if the right punishment (proper fine) is not given.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Fines are stupid to begin with. If they are too low nobody will care and the sheer number of people breaking the law makes enforcement pointless. If they are too high, they can send the average person into financial ruin, and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble. Even a ticket of a couple hundred dollars insane to the average American. In either case, without any proper oversight, this money just ends up going towards the funding of police departments, who are then incentivized to give out more tickets. Ultimately they act as tax collectors rather than protection for those living in their jurisdiction. Our people used to run bad cops out of town, now we can't even be bothered to fire them.
  - derac 4y ago
    Where I am from, if you get enough strikes on your record you can lose your license.
  - clairity 4y ago
    > "...and the wealthy can continue paying their way around trouble." this is why tickets should be income-contingent, if not wealth-contingent (much trickier and more invasive, so unlikely).
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      In Finland, it's apparently the case, and Switzerland as well. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-tickets-are-linked-to-your-income https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-t... However, improving traffic infrastructure (separating bicycles and pedestrians from cars and trucks with physical barriers, reducing the flow of traffic through city centers, etc.) is a much more effective way of reducing traffic-related injuries and fatalies, which is what the fines are supposed to encourage.

floren 4y ago

It's a worthwhile experiment but the first thing that came to my mind was: oh, everybody exchange cards in the locker room and give each other good reviews--it's anonymous, after all.

theonlybutlet 4y ago

Hmmm should I let an unroadworthy car endanger someone's life or turn a blind eye. What about my impeccable 5 star rating?

derac 4y ago
Exactly my thought and this is what happens at the end of the article.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
If the townsfolk (who pressure the politicians who pressure the chief who pressure the officers) would prefer that to you hassling them over those kinds of transgressions then yes. Weed, fireworks on the 4th of July, teenagers fishing without licenses, there's all manner of things that are illegal at the state level yet locally accepted when done tastefully that the cops should not be ticketing people for because they people they serve generally do not support that.
- daenz 4y ago
  It's not "the townsfolk" who would give the officer a rating in that situation, it's the person getting pulled over for a dangerous vehicle. "The townsfolk" very likely want dangerous cars stopped, but that likely won't be reflected in any ratings by the people pulled over for dangerous vehicles, so it's biased. It's naive to assume the thought process is "well, I was breaking the law, but the officer was professional, so 5/5"
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Why do you think people driving shitboxes (or any other crime) will give unfavorable ratings at a higher rate than people who get cited for other crimes? If Officer Karen has a terrible rating because he's constantly enforcing unpopular laws nobody cares about to an extent people deem unreasonable resulting in "man, that's bullshit" reactions from the people being ticketed then it will show in the aggregate stats and the chief will hopefully say tell him to knock it off and do something that has a higher ratio of public safety to pissing people off. Literally every trade where customers rate performance has had to grapple with this. It's a solved problem. The real value add is using the ratings to compare members of the team, different types of interactions, etc, etc. Anyone who's ever managed or worked from a ticketing system should be familiar with this.

daenz 4y ago

I think their heart is in the right place (officers should have direct and transparent reputations to people). But in order to implement this "correctly", you need to go one step further into a dangerous territory: the ratings that an officer receives should be weighted by the rating of the person who rated them. Absolute scumbags shouldn't be able to hurt reputations in quite the same way as upstanding people. If you have 5/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1.0. If you have a 1/5 rating, your rating is weighted by 1/5.

redsid 4y ago
Hah. So, China's social rating approach on all citizens as the starting point
ct0 4y ago
The "scumbags" most likely know the cops at their best and worst. Rating a cop is relative as they provides a wide ranges of services. It's all relative.
- daenz 4y ago
  Which is why their rating is still counted, but its biased by what society thinks of the person doing the rating. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of better here. If ratings are something people want to do, you have to bias ratings with additional context, otherwise there is no mechanism to help separate ratings from honest and dishonest people.
  - throwaway787544 4y ago
    But this is also a premature optimization and potentially YAGNI. Yes, you want down-weighting because of one potential complication. But you haven't even built and operated this system yet, so you don't know if this workaround you're applying will even be necessary or will end up causing larger issues. One example of this is "voter fraud". It is possible to commit voter fraud, and so certain parties want strong identity guarantees to vote. But voter fraud isn't happening in practice, and stringent ID requirements actually suppress minority votes. It is better to implement the simplest possible system first, observe it, and fix problems later as needed, after careful analysis of the running system.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Ratings systems suffer from an 'outlier syndrome', where most ratings are from folks at the ends of the bell-curve. Even averaging such data doesn't come close to any kind of true measure. One can imagine Police work would be subject to such effects even more strongly, as they deal often with people at their worst. It's the job after all.

havblue 4y ago

If this system is anonymous, why can't the officers simply not give cards to people who already hate them and maybe file some fake reviews as needed to boost their metrics?

peanut_worm 4y ago

I can think of so many issues with this it could fill a book. How about just holding police accountable if they commit a crime?

rootusrootus 4y ago
Easier said than done. Aside from some headline incidents, cops do things regularly that would be considered a crime if done by anyone else. It's part of the job. It's also the fundamental premise for qualified immunity. It's largely why we have so much trouble holding obvious bad cops accountable.

nxm 4y ago

I’ll take an officer that actually enforces laws who is less cordial over one who allows crime/violations to go u punished with a smile just to get a good rating

throwntoday 4y ago

I used to live in Warrenton, the police there and in all of Virginia are absolute bottom of the barrel trash. I have never come across a more hostile, self-involved, power tripping force anywhere in the world with the exception of China. Virginia's police departments make California look good.

AlexandrB 4y ago

These rating systems are a generally poor representation of reality and don't solve the problem they're trying to address. With Uber/Lyft/DoorDash ratings, people one might consider "woke" will almost always give a 5 star rating unless something goes horribly wrong (i.e. an actual crime is committed) because they understand that the worker's livelihood depends on their rating. Other people will use the rating as leverage to extract special treatment (similar as what happens with tipping). Finally, there's some number of people who will give "genuine" ratings, but even these are often bimodal (5-star or 1-star). Applying the same system to police will probably change which group does what, but won't change the outcome: the ratings will be gamed and largely useless. Arguably it's even worse because of how politicized the subject of law enforcement has become. I don't understand why this broken model of crowdsourcing ratings is being applied over and over again to different aspects of society. It's as if the managers and MBAs of the world have given up even trying to manage people and want to outsource the task to a howling mob of strangers.

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robonerd 4y ago
> I don't understand why this broken model of crowdsourcing ratings is being applied over and over again to different aspects of society. It's as if the managers and MBAs of the world have given up even trying to manage people and want to outsource the task to a howling mob of strangers. I think it's a manifestation of McNamara's Fallacy. Soliciting ratings is just one method of quantifying things, putting problems in terms of numbers so we can do math with those numbers and generally feel like we're being objective and scientific about the matter. It liberates people from having to get into the weeds of making subjective qualitative judgements. There are obvious problems with it; McNamara's fallacy was being willfully blind to qualitative considerations which turned out to be very important to the war. Furthermore, by picking and choosing what you want to measure, and which metrics to value or ignore, you often end up with a process that although ostensibly objective, is effectively subjective.
runako 4y ago
And yet, the fact that there are ratings appears to result in higher-quality ride services than taxis. Anecdata, but in my experience rideshares (which have ratings) are cleaner, more punctual, have fewer no-shows, and let's zero incidences of refusal to carry than taxis. Obviously there are likely a number of confounders involved, but I would be surprised if ratings were not an important factor.

djyaz1200 4y ago

This is clever and I agree with the comments regarding their heart being in the right place but this is a flawed approach. The customer service experience of criminals isn't the right thing to optimize and probably has nothing to do with outcomes if not inversely correlated with crime reduction. The very idea that we can view and treat police officers like we do customer service people at say the mall I would argue is causing issues between community and police. If you're ever talking to a police officer you're obligated to follow their lawful commands, and if you have any issue with them the forum to litigate that is court not with the police or through something like a net promoter score. If anything the experience of the people not interacting with the police aka the broader community IS the thing to optimize for. Maybe mail out surveys and ask people where the police are doing well and where they could be more helpful.

garyfirestorm 4y ago
the customer service experience of citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries - to whom the police serve!
- tifik 4y ago
  > citizens - ummm the folks who actually pay for police salaries I was always curious about how true this statement actually is. I understand that the state runs primarily on money from taxes, but what part of that is actually coming from local citizens pockets? I imagine there are places where most money comes from tourism or goods exports.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    You don't typically pay your money on a tour to the state. You pay it to a hotel, an amusement park, etc who then pays it to the state instead of employees.
    - tifik 4y ago
      Yes, but my point still stands. The money that ends up with the state didn't originate from a local.

karmelapple 4y ago

I've always found it interesting that when I'm pulled over for a traffic violation, a police officer can use their discretion on whether to punish me. I've been pulled over a few times for speeding, and a couple times I simply got a warning, and other times I got a ticket and had to pay a fine. If I committed a crime, why should an officer have that leeway? They caught me, I should have to pay the consequences... right? I've wondered if part of the reason for that discretion is a tacit admission that the fines / consequences for these tickets are simply too high.

0des 4y ago
The purpose of a traffic stop is seldom due to traffic infractions. Traffic stops are an access vector, or as police call it, a point of contact.
- bostonsre 4y ago
  Are there any numbers to back that up? I'm sure there are some bad apples out there that make up excuses because they think someone looks suspicious tho. But it also seems like there are a huge number of bad drivers out there that do dangerous things and having traffic laws that are sometimes enforced seems like it has to curtail some of that behavior.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Just talk to any cop. If they are honest, they'll tell you this very thing. In fewer degrees than it takes to get to Kevin Bacon, I was witness to an investigation where one individual was thrown the book to convince them to work off the charges being filed by rolling up. A traffic stop is precisely how they made first contact with people up the chain. It's like criminal investigation 101. So much so, it is part of every cop drama
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dylan604 4y ago

I had an incident involving someone forcibly entering my home that required police assistance. The two responding officers would have absolutely received a 5/5 rating from me. The next day the same asshat decided in his short time in my home that I was woefully short of canned vegetables, and graciously delivered a can of peas through my front window. This required a second visit from the police, and the two responding officers that morning would have received 1/5 rating from their rudeness and absolute lack of caring accusing me of "maybe smoking a little something and being just a bit paranoid". Then accused my house of being a grow house because I had a couple of Kino lamps from doing product photography. Absolute joke of a uniform and prime examples of why police have such low appreciation with the citizens.

nineplay 4y ago

Based on some recent experiences I've been thinking that police forces need something that is almost like a JIRA taskboard. Incidence type, officer name, data, upload picture/videos etc. It wouldn't just be for police positive/negative interaction. Any crime could be entered, any criminal behavior. We have an incident in our school district with an individual who has shouted at children and parents and on a few occasions has tried to enter the school. Obviously bad stuff, obviously particularly concerning given recent events. During a school board meeting it came out that the police only knew of 3 incidents out of probably dozens. There's not a clear path from seeing the behavior, reporting it to the school, reporting it to the police, and being able to put all this information in one place. It's probably a pipe dream to think that someday we could have a dashboard where everyone could monitor these issues, but it might address a lot of problems.

jcrawfordor 4y ago

I feel that there are a lot of concerns in these comments that come mostly out of misconceptions about the broader complexity of police oversight and professional standards and the way this kind of system integrates into it. I serve as part of the police oversight system in a major city and would love to consider a program like this, which I think would tend to actually mitigate many of the problems people are raising here, rather than make them worse. 1. Virtually all police departments already solicit direct feedback, both positive and negative, from citizens. This is just an effort to significantly increase the amount of feedback received through lower friction (phone based experience encouraged by officers rather than a paper form you ask the officer for or a website you go to later). For departments under supervision, DOJ generally requires that police departments or their oversight agencies accept positive and negative feedback, including anonymously, from the public. Part of the motivation of this kind of program is explicitly to increase the amount of positive feedback, because as a rule of thumb higher friction feedback processes result in more negative average feedback in this kind of situation (only people who are really pissed off go to the effort), but less friction to feedback also results in a better cross section of the population responding (traditional methods like paper forms tend to bias towards proficient English speakers, individuals with more free time, etc). Currently, even very busy police officers typically receive only a small handful of citizen comments and they are virtually always negative and resulting from a complex or extreme situation. This makes all sorts of biases and edge cases a major part of the data - in fact the majority of it. Significantly increasing the number of "reviews" will make them far more positive on average, and more related to actual officer conduct and not unusual interactions. 2. The fact that certain people give more consistently negative feedback and that certain officers, due to their assignments, interact with these people more frequently is well understood and already significantly influences police department metrics. For example, officers with advanced training in crisis intervention can be expected to receive more complaints, rather than less, because they are dispatched to interact with a community that is more likely to complain. The increase in overall volume of feedback from this type of program should make it easier to characterize this effect. 3. Police departments with well-functioning professional standards programs integrate many methods of overseeing officer performance, of which direct public feedback is only one element. For example, random audits of OBRD footage are typical (supervisor watches at least one randomly selected hour of body camera footage per supervised officer per month is an example policy). Negative public feedback, if handled as a complaint proper, will lead to a supervisor or full-time PS investigator reviewing body camera footage and potentially interviewing witnesses etc. in order to substantiate or dismiss the complaint. 4. Police officers in large departments receive a substantial amount of procedural criticism ranging from chain of command reprimands to being a subject of lawsuits. Police unions generally favor more direct feedback mechanisms because they allow for intervention in problems before they reach the stage of a lawsuit. From my experience working with direct feedback programs officer support for this concept is probably surprisingly high for that reason - better to have a contemporary, written negative review than a months after the fact IA investigation. 5. Officers in most departments are probably not going to be significantly more lenient due to this program, because their decisions to cite/not cite or arrest/not arrest is regularly reviewed by chain of command and in more serious cases outside professional standards as well. Officers are generally more likely to get in trouble for not citing than for citing, although there are a number of factors that can influence this (the situation can get complicated, e.g. blanket requirement to arrest on felony warrants is typical but may be waived in the case of e.g. DV victims). Like it or not, discretion is a well-established part of policing and departments are increasingly developing methods of monitoring and standardization in order to quantify and reduce e.g. racial bias. 6. Oversight, performance evaluation, and policy enforcement is a large function that typically involves multiple distinct commands in a police department (training, field training, performance, professional standards, etc). Most large departments are implementing some form of computer-based data system to surface trends and anomalies in officer performance measures, but particularly due to the significant power of police unions very few decisions are made based on actual data (zero in a lot of departments). Ultimately all of the collected feedback will be one of many inputs into the decision making process on advancement, discipline, etc. In practice, the subjective judgment of the chain of command virtually always wins, even in cases where it is difficult to square with objective data. Police union CBAs usually enshrine this concept in contract language (e.g. no discipline can be imposed without the subjective approval of a board of command staff based on a hearing, even in cases of clear and provable violation of policy that has a specified penalty, is a typical CBA term). 7. I like that this program seems intended to surface more subjective feedback on demeanor and professionalism, because these are huge problems in a lot of police departments that are extremely difficult to address because of the difficulty of establishing any evidence of a professionalism problem. Particularly, the lack of data on the issue makes it a bottom priority and something that the chain of command is encouraged to ignore rather than address, yet it is one of the biggest factors in public perception of police. 8. None of this program is actually new, just an effort to increase the response volume on existing complaint/commendation programs that have typically existed since WWII.

sc68cal 4y ago

It doesn't matter how you "rate" cops if the police union goes to bat for bad cops and gets their jobs reinstated, or they just leave one department and move to another. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/us/police-unions-contracts-shielding-bad-cops-invs/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/us/police-unions-contracts-sh... We know who the bad cops are. There's a list of them in Philadelphia who the District Attorney (the current, and previous) will never call to the witness stand because they give unreliable testimony. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/crime/29-philly-officers-do-not-call-list-krasner-20180306.html https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/crime/29-philly-officer... There's no need for a new rating system. We need accountability for known bad cops.

wollsmoth 4y ago
Yeah. This is what we all want I think. I want to be in a world where when some story of a cop doing something ridiculous surfaces, we're all confident that justice will be done. Unfortunately for me it's usually a sad feeling that nothing will be done about it. We gotta be more willing to fire, ban, or prosecute cops.
robonerd 4y ago
If the DA really knows who the bad cops are, the DA should prosecute them. DAs blaming cops are hoping that the public don't realize the DAs themselves are dropping the ball and letting cops get away with it.
- jcrawfordor 4y ago
  Unreliable testimony isn't a crime (in fact, on these lists, it often originates from officers having committed and been convicted of and served sentences for other crimes). Broadly speaking, protection of police officers from criminal prosecution is broad in such a way that it is difficult to prosecute police for even clear cut violations. For example, the Graham factors used to assess criminal culpability in the use of deadly force are appreciably more generous than most department policies and DoJ recommendations, meaning that there's a broad range of use of force that is in violation of department orders (including severe violations) but not criminal. Use of force on a fleeing individual is a common example. While there is definitely room for prosecutors to be more aggressive on police misconduct, the reality is that there is a huge spectrum of things for which officers ought to be fired but cannot be prosecuted for. Simple incompetence or lack of care is far from the least significant and common.

Melatonic 4y ago

What I do not understand is why police do not have a certification like Lawyers or Doctors do. If they really mess up they should lose that certification (just like a lawyer or doctor can) and then they can no longer work as a police officer. No moving a town or state over and continuing onward - license revoked.