10 ms·

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 n

by 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.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      >YAGNI But not the ordinary YAGNI. You're Absolutely going to need some way of dealing with low-quality input.
      - throwaway787544 4y ago
        Why? What's the worst thing that could happen from poor quality input? Unreliable scores? These reviews don't mean or do anything in the real world, and it's much less serious than an actual IA complaint. There's also no evidence that there would be enough poor quality inputs to make a meaningful impact on scores. You really should wait and see before you invest a ton of time and money into solving problems that end up not being problems.
        thfuran 4y ago
        >Why? What's the worst thing that could happen from poor quality input? Unreliable scores? These reviews don't mean or do anything in the real world If you are actually operating under the assumption that the output doesn't matter at all, then implementing the review system in the first place is a waste of effort, let alone any features thereof. But assuming that we do care about the output, its quality does matter. >There's also no evidence that there would be enough poor quality inputs to make a meaningful impact on scores. In pretty much the same way that there's no evidence that any given new website needs to worry about sql injection.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    This encourages an undesirable outcome: Police now know that Group A's ratings will be more heavily weighted and Group B's ratings will not be heavily weighted. They will then be incentivized to treat Group A with kid gloves and mistreat Group B, regardless of what caused the police interaction. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider what the police might use as a proxy/heuristic to figure out what group a suspect is in.
    - daenz 4y ago
      I think you meant they would mistreat Group A more, if they are more heavily weighted, but I do see your point. I agree that this is a danger. Fortunately, with additional data available, data scientists will be able to show any biases more clearly. If it happens with a rating system, it was happening before the rating system, except now there is the benefit of more data. Similarly, you could also show if people from Group A (the more weighted group) also rate the police lower, despite similar treatment as those of Group B. The data will cut both ways. EDIT>> Nvm, you were using "weighted" to mean "the weight of their vote", not "the weight applied to their vote."
giraffe_lady 4y ago
Other way around imo. How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people." I don't think the system described in the article is good either, but this isn't why. A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. "Upstanding" is as good a euphemism for it as any I guess but we should eliminate that not formalize it.
- daenz 4y ago
  My suggestion has nothing to do with how the officer views the person they're interacting with for a given interaction. Whether the officer thinks they're a "scumbag" or an "upstanding" person is completely independent of that person's rating for a given interaction. If you are a scumbag, it's likely reflected by your rating.
- rayiner 4y ago
  > How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people." Why? > A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. And what are those groups?
  - matthewmacleod 4y ago
    Why? It’s kind like human rights - the majority of people who are at risk of having them infringed are unpleasant or unsympathetic characters. I’d argue a cliché “upstanding law-abiding citizen” type doesn’t generally have that much to fear from a police interaction. They are generally being dealt with on a presumption of good faith, and have at least some access to leverage and ability to push back against unfair treatment. Someone who’s already been identified as a “scumbag” doesn’t, and that is why their treatment is more illuminating. And what are those groups? There are many of them and they vary by region. Police very observably interact differently with richer versus poorer groups, for example, or with groups from different ethnic backgrounds.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
Lucky us. Now that the PageRank patent has expired, we can apply it to policing and to social credit scores.
not2b 4y ago
Who is a scumbag? Some police officers decide that some people are reputable citizens and others are scumbags based on prejudice, and arguments like yours are a great way to dismiss any criticism of them.
- stirbot 4y ago
  clearly we need a social credit system where citizens are scored based on their financial history, trustworthiness, charitable efforts, and praising the government on social media.
- daenz 4y ago
  The very same argument could be made about rating police officers. Also, we shouldn't pretend that scumbags don't exist, they do, as both citizens and police. If you're going to cast doubt on the existence of scumbags in citizens, but not police, you're showing your own prejudice.
  - sureglymop 4y ago
    The actual problem is that police are above the law. What I mean by that is, unlike citizens they are in a position where they might break a law without any repercussions or abuse their position of power. The only real way to deal with this would be to police the police in a realistic manner. Bodycam and location data of their every move would need to be available for that. Currently, police can simply turn these off. Yes, there are scumbags in both ordinary citizens and in police but one of these groups of scumbags already gets "policed". (Disclaimer: I do think that this idea is not the right way to deal with this problem.)
    - daenz 4y ago
      You make a good point. I believe the idea with a rating system of police is that you tie the departments funding to the average rating of your officers. So while officers can abuse their power, if there is a reliable signal of this (reflected by their rating), they get canned to raise the overall rating of the department.
Teever 4y ago
I think that is definitely something that we could look to address in the future but I think that the priority right now should be to crack down on police malfeasance. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
e40 4y ago
I agree, in larger populations there will be trolls that just hate all cops.
lukev 4y ago
This is the premise of Nosedive, Black Mirror S3E1. Spoiler: it does... not end well.
- emaginniss 4y ago
  And the "meowmeowbeenz" episode of Community. Also does not end well, but is very funny.
richiebful1 4y ago
Given the very low number of negative reviews in the pilot programs (only one negative review at Virginia Commonwealth Univ.), I think these can be reviewed on a case by case basis. As the supervisor mentioned, he went over the body cam footage with the officer. Seems like a great learning tool on how to be a better public servant.
_jal 4y ago
So who rates the raters? We don't have some infinite-regress rating system to qualify people to vote. Or to voice their opinions verbally. Or, really, for nearly anything. And for good reason - there is no objective point from which to judge. You accept that humans are flawed, and that rating systems created by them reflect human judgement.
karaterobot 4y ago
Because it's related to your comment, this is a good a place to ask something I've been wondering for a long time: Is there a word or concept (in English, or in any language) for an ostensibly straightforward and common sense solution to a real problem, whose implementation entails creating a solution which is far larger in scale than the original problem ever was? I mean something distinct from concepts like perverse incentives (the cobra effect, for example). I mean something like what you're talking about above. But a more illustrative, completely made-up example might be a law that was meant to make people pay their traffic tickets. Imagine that, through a series of steps which each seemed reasonable at the time, implementing this law ended up creating a global, keyhole satellite surveillance network over the entire surface of the country, with massive bunkers of computers monitoring for traffic micro-violations (".02 kmh over the speed limit, that'll be 2 cents") in real time, then notifying people with a tracking bracelet that everyone was legally required to wear, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to enforce the law we all agreed made sense at the time. And, to ensure the tickets could be delivered in a timely manner, the banks and communications companies had to support a bunch of government technology and oversight, and car companies had to build some tech into their automobiles to shut the off if you didn't pay. It becomes dystopian really quickly, but I don't think it has to. This silly example is just meant to illustrate what I mean: is there a name for decisions whose implementation seems straightforward, but which, step by step, create a much bigger apparatus than you originally intended? I don't think this is entirely theoretical: there are plenty of real world examples, but I won't name them because they would probably distract from the question. Even in software development, you probably run into a situation where some product person says "can't we show this property over here?" and you say "sure, but we'd have to spend a year rewriting our entire architecture first".
- scythe 4y ago
  >Is there a word or concept (in English, or in any language) for an ostensibly straightforward and common sense solution to a real problem, whose implementation entails creating a solution which is far larger in scale than the original problem ever was? You're thinking of the phrase "nuking a housefly", or some similar metaphors that fit the pattern "[large weapon] a [small animal]"
- 4y ago
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
There's also a lot of bias here, since most people don't have a lot of contact with police, unless they did some bad stuff.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  That itself is a problem that should be fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing
keybored 4y ago
Surely this is some Black Mirror joke or a rhetorical question which is meant to (by inference) dismiss the original idea of rating cops as too intrusive.
kingkawn 4y ago
Out here moralizing about policing while reinforcing class-tinged generalizations like “scumbags”

by daenz 4y ago

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.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    >YAGNI But not the ordinary YAGNI. You're Absolutely going to need some way of dealing with low-quality input.
    - throwaway787544 4y ago
      Why? What's the worst thing that could happen from poor quality input? Unreliable scores? These reviews don't mean or do anything in the real world, and it's much less serious than an actual IA complaint. There's also no evidence that there would be enough poor quality inputs to make a meaningful impact on scores. You really should wait and see before you invest a ton of time and money into solving problems that end up not being problems.
      - thfuran 4y ago
        >Why? What's the worst thing that could happen from poor quality input? Unreliable scores? These reviews don't mean or do anything in the real world If you are actually operating under the assumption that the output doesn't matter at all, then implementing the review system in the first place is a waste of effort, let alone any features thereof. But assuming that we do care about the output, its quality does matter. >There's also no evidence that there would be enough poor quality inputs to make a meaningful impact on scores. In pretty much the same way that there's no evidence that any given new website needs to worry about sql injection.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  This encourages an undesirable outcome: Police now know that Group A's ratings will be more heavily weighted and Group B's ratings will not be heavily weighted. They will then be incentivized to treat Group A with kid gloves and mistreat Group B, regardless of what caused the police interaction. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider what the police might use as a proxy/heuristic to figure out what group a suspect is in.
  - daenz 4y ago
    I think you meant they would mistreat Group A more, if they are more heavily weighted, but I do see your point. I agree that this is a danger. Fortunately, with additional data available, data scientists will be able to show any biases more clearly. If it happens with a rating system, it was happening before the rating system, except now there is the benefit of more data. Similarly, you could also show if people from Group A (the more weighted group) also rate the police lower, despite similar treatment as those of Group B. The data will cut both ways. EDIT>> Nvm, you were using "weighted" to mean "the weight of their vote", not "the weight applied to their vote."

giraffe_lady 4y ago

Other way around imo. How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people." I don't think the system described in the article is good either, but this isn't why. A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. "Upstanding" is as good a euphemism for it as any I guess but we should eliminate that not formalize it.

daenz 4y ago
My suggestion has nothing to do with how the officer views the person they're interacting with for a given interaction. Whether the officer thinks they're a "scumbag" or an "upstanding" person is completely independent of that person's rating for a given interaction. If you are a scumbag, it's likely reflected by your rating.
rayiner 4y ago
> How a cop treats someone they view as a "scumbag" is a lot more illustrative and important than how they treat those they view as "upstanding people." Why? > A big part of the problem with the current policing system is that cops treat some groups completely differently from how they treat others. And what are those groups?
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  Why? It’s kind like human rights - the majority of people who are at risk of having them infringed are unpleasant or unsympathetic characters. I’d argue a cliché “upstanding law-abiding citizen” type doesn’t generally have that much to fear from a police interaction. They are generally being dealt with on a presumption of good faith, and have at least some access to leverage and ability to push back against unfair treatment. Someone who’s already been identified as a “scumbag” doesn’t, and that is why their treatment is more illuminating. And what are those groups? There are many of them and they vary by region. Police very observably interact differently with richer versus poorer groups, for example, or with groups from different ethnic backgrounds.

kelseyfrog 4y ago

Lucky us. Now that the PageRank patent has expired, we can apply it to policing and to social credit scores.

not2b 4y ago

Who is a scumbag? Some police officers decide that some people are reputable citizens and others are scumbags based on prejudice, and arguments like yours are a great way to dismiss any criticism of them.

stirbot 4y ago
clearly we need a social credit system where citizens are scored based on their financial history, trustworthiness, charitable efforts, and praising the government on social media.
daenz 4y ago
The very same argument could be made about rating police officers. Also, we shouldn't pretend that scumbags don't exist, they do, as both citizens and police. If you're going to cast doubt on the existence of scumbags in citizens, but not police, you're showing your own prejudice.
- sureglymop 4y ago
  The actual problem is that police are above the law. What I mean by that is, unlike citizens they are in a position where they might break a law without any repercussions or abuse their position of power. The only real way to deal with this would be to police the police in a realistic manner. Bodycam and location data of their every move would need to be available for that. Currently, police can simply turn these off. Yes, there are scumbags in both ordinary citizens and in police but one of these groups of scumbags already gets "policed". (Disclaimer: I do think that this idea is not the right way to deal with this problem.)
  - daenz 4y ago
    You make a good point. I believe the idea with a rating system of police is that you tie the departments funding to the average rating of your officers. So while officers can abuse their power, if there is a reliable signal of this (reflected by their rating), they get canned to raise the overall rating of the department.

Teever 4y ago

I think that is definitely something that we could look to address in the future but I think that the priority right now should be to crack down on police malfeasance. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

e40 4y ago

I agree, in larger populations there will be trolls that just hate all cops.

lukev 4y ago

This is the premise of Nosedive, Black Mirror S3E1. Spoiler: it does... not end well.

emaginniss 4y ago
And the "meowmeowbeenz" episode of Community. Also does not end well, but is very funny.

richiebful1 4y ago

Given the very low number of negative reviews in the pilot programs (only one negative review at Virginia Commonwealth Univ.), I think these can be reviewed on a case by case basis. As the supervisor mentioned, he went over the body cam footage with the officer. Seems like a great learning tool on how to be a better public servant.

_jal 4y ago

So who rates the raters? We don't have some infinite-regress rating system to qualify people to vote. Or to voice their opinions verbally. Or, really, for nearly anything. And for good reason - there is no objective point from which to judge. You accept that humans are flawed, and that rating systems created by them reflect human judgement.

karaterobot 4y ago

Because it's related to your comment, this is a good a place to ask something I've been wondering for a long time: Is there a word or concept (in English, or in any language) for an ostensibly straightforward and common sense solution to a real problem, whose implementation entails creating a solution which is far larger in scale than the original problem ever was? I mean something distinct from concepts like perverse incentives (the cobra effect, for example). I mean something like what you're talking about above. But a more illustrative, completely made-up example might be a law that was meant to make people pay their traffic tickets. Imagine that, through a series of steps which each seemed reasonable at the time, implementing this law ended up creating a global, keyhole satellite surveillance network over the entire surface of the country, with massive bunkers of computers monitoring for traffic micro-violations (".02 kmh over the speed limit, that'll be 2 cents") in real time, then notifying people with a tracking bracelet that everyone was legally required to wear, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to enforce the law we all agreed made sense at the time. And, to ensure the tickets could be delivered in a timely manner, the banks and communications companies had to support a bunch of government technology and oversight, and car companies had to build some tech into their automobiles to shut the off if you didn't pay. It becomes dystopian really quickly, but I don't think it has to. This silly example is just meant to illustrate what I mean: is there a name for decisions whose implementation seems straightforward, but which, step by step, create a much bigger apparatus than you originally intended? I don't think this is entirely theoretical: there are plenty of real world examples, but I won't name them because they would probably distract from the question. Even in software development, you probably run into a situation where some product person says "can't we show this property over here?" and you say "sure, but we'd have to spend a year rewriting our entire architecture first".

scythe 4y ago
>Is there a word or concept (in English, or in any language) for an ostensibly straightforward and common sense solution to a real problem, whose implementation entails creating a solution which is far larger in scale than the original problem ever was? You're thinking of the phrase "nuking a housefly", or some similar metaphors that fit the pattern "[large weapon] a [small animal]"
4y ago

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

There's also a lot of bias here, since most people don't have a lot of contact with police, unless they did some bad stuff.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago
That itself is a problem that should be fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing

keybored 4y ago

Surely this is some Black Mirror joke or a rhetorical question which is meant to (by inference) dismiss the original idea of rating cops as too intrusive.

kingkawn 4y ago

Out here moralizing about policing while reinforcing class-tinged generalizations like “scumbags”