9 ms·

Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a enforcement bias in US cities

59 points by darkscape 4y ago

point_blank 4y ago
Locked to the public. Sci-hub does not have the document either.
- mastercheif 4y ago
  Found it here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349228599_Precise_Event-level_Prediction_of_Urban_Crime_Reveals_Signature_of_Enforcement_Bias/fulltext/602638d4299bf1cc26bcf2b7/Precise-Event-level-Prediction-of-Urban-Crime-Reveals-Signature-of-Enforcement-Bias.pdf?origin=publication_detail https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349228599_Precise_E...
  - balderdash 4y ago
    Wow this thing is impossible to decipher
    - samatman 4y ago
      That's because the product of value to the 'researchers' is the title.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Sci-hub is useless these days. Ingestion is a manual process, and only happens when someone comes to them with a large amount of papers.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    You are misinformed. Sci-hub uses an automated process. However that process has been halted for a while since the ongoing legal drama in India.
abduhl 4y ago
“ These precise predictions enable equally precise evaluation of inequities in law enforcement, discovering that response to increased crime rates is biased by the socio-economic status of neighborhoods, draining policy resources to wealthy areas with disproportionately negative impacts for the inner city, as demonstrated in Chicago and six other major U.S. metropolitan areas.” In other words, cops abandon poor neighborhoods when crime goes up there and mobilize to rich neighborhoods when crime goes up there. I’d be interested to know the other 6 metro areas, although I have a suspicion of which ones they are and their flavor of DA.
- wallfacer120 4y ago
  "The reason why people in run down neighborhoods get arrested more is because the cops are biased. Also they don't police run down neighborhoods enough."
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    that's not really as contradictory as it sounds. I wouldn't be surprised if policing in rough areas is both irregular but also harsher when it happens, and that it potentially attracts not the best people and not the best cops.
    - lr4444lr 4y ago
      When the police start enforcing minor infractions, they get called out for bias too, because the fines and lost work hours to misdemeanor jail time hit the people in those communities "disproportionately". Then there is the revolving door issue we are seeing when DAs are soft on minor infractions, or law makers don't want to spend the money on them in the criminal justice system, so it doesn't make sense for the cops to go after lower level issues when they're budding. They can't win.
      - KennyBlanken 4y ago
        They do hit disproportionately. If you work a low-end shift job and miss a shift, you're likely to get fired almost immediately, or put on some sort of suspension, or otherwise punished via poor shift assignments and the like. At the very least, you lose income for the shift, and that is likely a substantial amount of money for you. The "court fee" is a substantial amount of money to you. You end up with a public defender who has little influence with the other officers of the court - the judge, the DA, etc. They have a docket a mile long for that day and needs to triage their time and resources, so they push you to plea out so they have time for the guy who is facing a felony or even capitol charge. If convicted your choices are jail or fines, and the fines might be days or weeks of pay you don't have. If you work a professional job, you have "personal days" you can cash in, your employer provides you with things like free legal assistance via EAPs - or you probably already have established professional relationships with at least some sort of attorney, who you can afford, and who knows someone who knows the judges and DAs in the district you're going to be appearing in, and maybe the whole thing just goes away. The court fees are a rounding error in your weekly pay. And the laws are all "jail time or X dollar fine." So even if you're found guilty - the fine is a rounding error to you.
mdp2021 4y ago
We discussed this same article one day ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31941781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31941781
s1artibartfast 4y ago
In other fields, this is called triage. Some communities are bleeding profusely and police can only temporarily stem the symptoms because the root cause is much deeper. In other communities, quick intervention can stabilize the situation
civilized 4y ago
So, they fit a fancy model, played with it, and claim the result says something about the real world? I have never seen a valid social science result derived by this method. This is just fancy model lovers dabbling. If the patterns they claim are real, they can be exposed with much simpler and direct methods. Let's talk after that's been done.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Is fancy supposed to be derogatory in this statement?
  - civilized 4y ago
    Too fancy for anyone to be confident in what it's doing or whether it reflects real patterns. 0.90 AUC doesn't mean everything you can get this model to tell you is real, especially if you are trying to tell a causal story. Now, show me a plot of your data with a trend line and I'll often be able to tell you if there's a real pattern in your data.
    - w-j-w 4y ago
      Are you trying to claim that the model would better understand the complicated, real world of law enforcement if it were MORE reductionist?
      - civilized 4y ago
        No, I'm not talking about how best to set up the model. I'm saying that complicated neural network models have no track record of yielding reliable insights about social phenomena. They are untested. Any insights they supposedly provide must be verified by a human analyst checking the data to see if it really looks like the model says. This isn't a new or surprising principle, and it also applies to much simpler models. Any scientist knows that, if you fit a line to data, you better plot the data with the line before you make any big claims about what that line tells you about the world, because the data underlying that fit could look lots of completely different ways with different implications [1]. These authors did the equivalent of fitting the line and telling us all about its formula and the big implications of the formula without ever plotting it with the data. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet
scarmig 4y ago
It seems likely that police have divested from minority communities, which I agree is a genuinely racist outcome. There are complications, though. In the 90s, leadership figures in minority communities rightly called out under policing as a serious issue that hurt their communities and needed addressing. Nowadays enforcement actions, although increasing overall quality of life and decreasing violence and premature death, are highly politically sensitive, and police in those communities can expect lots of push back and legal actions without the support of political leadership. It's simple enough to say "well police officers should enforce perfectly," and that would of course be ideal. But in a world where perfect solutions are the enemy of the good, what's the best course of action? There are always tradeoffs, and activists need to recognize them.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  There's a difference between not providing enough patrol coverage and poor response time to calls, not taking reports, not devoting sufficient investigatory resources to reported crimes... ...and stopping people for random pat-downs, pulling people over for the slightest traffic infraction or "smell of pot" and then emptying everyone out of the car because someone acted "suspiciously" and searching the car. That's what activists and leaders in minority communities are referring to when they talk about under and over policing. You can have a community that is both under and over policed. The typical pattern is: little focus on enforcement around crimes that affect people's lives, and lots of enforcement on "harming society / law and order" type crimes. Another example of over-policing: SWAT teams showing up with door-busters and sub machine guns and stun grenades to serve no-knock warrants on suspects with no history of violence, over non-violent drug crimes.
- standardUser 4y ago
  When so many common, consensual and mostly-harmless activities are criminalized, especially in communities with less resources to keep things in private homes, "perfect enforcement" becomes impossible by design. Instead, law enforcement have a vast catalog of infractions and suspicions they can use to target people at their discretion. Before we can ever hope to have equitable law enforcement, we need to reform this culture of criminalization. And vastly increasing privacy rights, the same ones being gutted by the current Supreme Court, wouldn't hurt either.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
mbrodersen 4y ago
The Police seems to be in an impossible situation: if they don’t try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are “racist” (focusing on the rich neighbourhoods). If they do try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are also “racist” (for “targeting” specific races/cultures). It is especially difficult if they try to fight crime in a violent dangerous minority neighbourhood where every routine check/stop can turn into a deadly gunfight in seconds. There are minority neighbourhoods where 97% of violent crime/murders are committed by people of the same race/culture living in that neighbourhood. And yet a single Police incident gone wrong will completely overshadow the reality of this. Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day. Knowing that the next person you stop might try to do his/her best to kill you. While also knowing that any mistake you make will be headline news around the world. It’s an impossible situation.
- inetknght 4y ago
  The problem isn't policing and racism. Racism is the symptom. The problem is all of the other problems that lead to the increase of violent crime in the first place. Police are put into an impossible situation indeed.
  - feet 4y ago
    Police are also part of the problem. They enforce the systemic violence enacted by shitty policy. Which is weird, because during the pandemic a whole bunch of police were super vocal about not wanted to enforce 'unjust mask mandates' yet they'll go and terrorize minority communities with glee They are definitely part of the problem, but you're right that it extends far beyond just them
- scotty79 4y ago
  Admit only minority people into the Police force. Problem solved. If a Policeman kills minority unlawfully then it's just minority on minority crime so nobody will care.
  - anon291 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
samhyde69 4y ago
Reading these comments I realize now that despite Boudin's recall, places like SF -- dominated by leftist ideology -- still have a long, long way to go before bottoming out and smelling the coffee.

59 points by darkscape 4y ago

point_blank 4y ago

Locked to the public. Sci-hub does not have the document either.

mastercheif 4y ago
Found it here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349228599_Precise_Event-level_Prediction_of_Urban_Crime_Reveals_Signature_of_Enforcement_Bias/fulltext/602638d4299bf1cc26bcf2b7/Precise-Event-level-Prediction-of-Urban-Crime-Reveals-Signature-of-Enforcement-Bias.pdf?origin=publication_detail https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349228599_Precise_E...
- balderdash 4y ago
  Wow this thing is impossible to decipher
  - samatman 4y ago
    That's because the product of value to the 'researchers' is the title.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
Sci-hub is useless these days. Ingestion is a manual process, and only happens when someone comes to them with a large amount of papers.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  You are misinformed. Sci-hub uses an automated process. However that process has been halted for a while since the ongoing legal drama in India.

abduhl 4y ago

“ These precise predictions enable equally precise evaluation of inequities in law enforcement, discovering that response to increased crime rates is biased by the socio-economic status of neighborhoods, draining policy resources to wealthy areas with disproportionately negative impacts for the inner city, as demonstrated in Chicago and six other major U.S. metropolitan areas.” In other words, cops abandon poor neighborhoods when crime goes up there and mobilize to rich neighborhoods when crime goes up there. I’d be interested to know the other 6 metro areas, although I have a suspicion of which ones they are and their flavor of DA.

wallfacer120 4y ago
"The reason why people in run down neighborhoods get arrested more is because the cops are biased. Also they don't police run down neighborhoods enough."
- Barrin92 4y ago
  that's not really as contradictory as it sounds. I wouldn't be surprised if policing in rough areas is both irregular but also harsher when it happens, and that it potentially attracts not the best people and not the best cops.
  - lr4444lr 4y ago
    When the police start enforcing minor infractions, they get called out for bias too, because the fines and lost work hours to misdemeanor jail time hit the people in those communities "disproportionately". Then there is the revolving door issue we are seeing when DAs are soft on minor infractions, or law makers don't want to spend the money on them in the criminal justice system, so it doesn't make sense for the cops to go after lower level issues when they're budding. They can't win.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      They do hit disproportionately. If you work a low-end shift job and miss a shift, you're likely to get fired almost immediately, or put on some sort of suspension, or otherwise punished via poor shift assignments and the like. At the very least, you lose income for the shift, and that is likely a substantial amount of money for you. The "court fee" is a substantial amount of money to you. You end up with a public defender who has little influence with the other officers of the court - the judge, the DA, etc. They have a docket a mile long for that day and needs to triage their time and resources, so they push you to plea out so they have time for the guy who is facing a felony or even capitol charge. If convicted your choices are jail or fines, and the fines might be days or weeks of pay you don't have. If you work a professional job, you have "personal days" you can cash in, your employer provides you with things like free legal assistance via EAPs - or you probably already have established professional relationships with at least some sort of attorney, who you can afford, and who knows someone who knows the judges and DAs in the district you're going to be appearing in, and maybe the whole thing just goes away. The court fees are a rounding error in your weekly pay. And the laws are all "jail time or X dollar fine." So even if you're found guilty - the fine is a rounding error to you.

mdp2021 4y ago

We discussed this same article one day ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31941781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31941781

s1artibartfast 4y ago

In other fields, this is called triage. Some communities are bleeding profusely and police can only temporarily stem the symptoms because the root cause is much deeper. In other communities, quick intervention can stabilize the situation

civilized 4y ago

So, they fit a fancy model, played with it, and claim the result says something about the real world? I have never seen a valid social science result derived by this method. This is just fancy model lovers dabbling. If the patterns they claim are real, they can be exposed with much simpler and direct methods. Let's talk after that's been done.

bergenty 4y ago
Is fancy supposed to be derogatory in this statement?
- civilized 4y ago
  Too fancy for anyone to be confident in what it's doing or whether it reflects real patterns. 0.90 AUC doesn't mean everything you can get this model to tell you is real, especially if you are trying to tell a causal story. Now, show me a plot of your data with a trend line and I'll often be able to tell you if there's a real pattern in your data.
  - w-j-w 4y ago
    Are you trying to claim that the model would better understand the complicated, real world of law enforcement if it were MORE reductionist?
    - civilized 4y ago
      No, I'm not talking about how best to set up the model. I'm saying that complicated neural network models have no track record of yielding reliable insights about social phenomena. They are untested. Any insights they supposedly provide must be verified by a human analyst checking the data to see if it really looks like the model says. This isn't a new or surprising principle, and it also applies to much simpler models. Any scientist knows that, if you fit a line to data, you better plot the data with the line before you make any big claims about what that line tells you about the world, because the data underlying that fit could look lots of completely different ways with different implications [1]. These authors did the equivalent of fitting the line and telling us all about its formula and the big implications of the formula without ever plotting it with the data. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet

scarmig 4y ago

It seems likely that police have divested from minority communities, which I agree is a genuinely racist outcome. There are complications, though. In the 90s, leadership figures in minority communities rightly called out under policing as a serious issue that hurt their communities and needed addressing. Nowadays enforcement actions, although increasing overall quality of life and decreasing violence and premature death, are highly politically sensitive, and police in those communities can expect lots of push back and legal actions without the support of political leadership. It's simple enough to say "well police officers should enforce perfectly," and that would of course be ideal. But in a world where perfect solutions are the enemy of the good, what's the best course of action? There are always tradeoffs, and activists need to recognize them.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
There's a difference between not providing enough patrol coverage and poor response time to calls, not taking reports, not devoting sufficient investigatory resources to reported crimes... ...and stopping people for random pat-downs, pulling people over for the slightest traffic infraction or "smell of pot" and then emptying everyone out of the car because someone acted "suspiciously" and searching the car. That's what activists and leaders in minority communities are referring to when they talk about under and over policing. You can have a community that is both under and over policed. The typical pattern is: little focus on enforcement around crimes that affect people's lives, and lots of enforcement on "harming society / law and order" type crimes. Another example of over-policing: SWAT teams showing up with door-busters and sub machine guns and stun grenades to serve no-knock warrants on suspects with no history of violence, over non-violent drug crimes.
standardUser 4y ago
When so many common, consensual and mostly-harmless activities are criminalized, especially in communities with less resources to keep things in private homes, "perfect enforcement" becomes impossible by design. Instead, law enforcement have a vast catalog of infractions and suspicions they can use to target people at their discretion. Before we can ever hope to have equitable law enforcement, we need to reform this culture of criminalization. And vastly increasing privacy rights, the same ones being gutted by the current Supreme Court, wouldn't hurt either.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

mbrodersen 4y ago

The Police seems to be in an impossible situation: if they don’t try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are “racist” (focusing on the rich neighbourhoods). If they do try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are also “racist” (for “targeting” specific races/cultures). It is especially difficult if they try to fight crime in a violent dangerous minority neighbourhood where every routine check/stop can turn into a deadly gunfight in seconds. There are minority neighbourhoods where 97% of violent crime/murders are committed by people of the same race/culture living in that neighbourhood. And yet a single Police incident gone wrong will completely overshadow the reality of this. Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day. Knowing that the next person you stop might try to do his/her best to kill you. While also knowing that any mistake you make will be headline news around the world. It’s an impossible situation.

inetknght 4y ago
The problem isn't policing and racism. Racism is the symptom. The problem is all of the other problems that lead to the increase of violent crime in the first place. Police are put into an impossible situation indeed.
- feet 4y ago
  Police are also part of the problem. They enforce the systemic violence enacted by shitty policy. Which is weird, because during the pandemic a whole bunch of police were super vocal about not wanted to enforce 'unjust mask mandates' yet they'll go and terrorize minority communities with glee They are definitely part of the problem, but you're right that it extends far beyond just them
scotty79 4y ago
Admit only minority people into the Police force. Problem solved. If a Policeman kills minority unlawfully then it's just minority on minority crime so nobody will care.
- anon291 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

samhyde69 4y ago

Reading these comments I realize now that despite Boudin's recall, places like SF -- dominated by leftist ideology -- still have a long, long way to go before bottoming out and smelling the coffee.