6 ms·

The goal of police is public safety, and nothing to do with preventing reinforcing biases. If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from be

The goal of police is public safety, and nothing to do with preventing reinforcing biases. If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness, even though there are no polar bear attacks there?

RHSeeger 4y ago
> The goal of police is public safety To be clear... the goal of the police _force_ is to enforce the law. The goal of (some) individual police officers is public safety, but certainly not all of them (and some days, it seems like not many of them... but you generally only hear about the bad stuff in the news, so take that with a grain of salt).
- Quinner 4y ago
  The goal of the police is to have secure jobs with a decent salary and benefits, and ideally be meaningful in some way (could be promoting public safety... could be exerting power over others). Often enforcing the law helps secure budgets (especially when it comes to enforcing drug laws with lucrative civil forfeiture seizures), but more recently many police departments have tried a different tactic when budgets have been threatened: actively refusing to enforce the law, in order to increase crime and prompt political change.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    The police increase crime?
BryantD 4y ago
I’d like the public to be safe from the public servants who carry guns as part of their day to day work. If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is, they’re more likely to use force when it isn’t warranted. Thus, I’m not as safe. I conclude that it is a matter of public safety to avoid reinforcing biases. Since the article this thread is about shows that some portion of police are willing to believe any damn thing, I think my concerns are reasonable.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  > If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is Could it be "bias" to look at crime statistics? Maybe it's less safe than you think it is.
  - BryantD 4y ago
    Indeed! Seems like the simple answer is "if you're going to install sensors, better to just install them everywhere to avoid bias in any direction."
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      So you think that putting them in high crime areas is "bias?"
      - 8note 4y ago
        The bias is assuming that there's no crime because the sensors weren't there to pick it up. A low crime statistic can either mean crime didn't happen, or the statistic didn't count the crimes that did
        AlbertCory 4y ago
        So you think only gunshot sensors measure crime?
        BryantD 4y ago
        Can I very gently ask you to go back and read the topic of this post? If, after you’ve done that, you still want to argue that police departments are universally good at avoiding bias, we can probably conclude that this isn’t a useful conversation for either of us.
cratermoon 4y ago
> If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness This is already reinforcing bias, because your question presumes that the places law enforcement deploys this tech are where it needs to be. To use your analogy, cops like deploying polar bear detectors based on how much snow falls in a place, because "everyone" knows that polar bears live in snowy places.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  This system is not designed to find out where shootings happen. We know that already. It's just designed to detect them faster.
  - 20after4 4y ago
    No it's designed to manufacture evidence that they can use to help them get arrest warrants and eventually convictions.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    > We know that already No, we don't. We know where law enforcement, which we already know is biased, reports shootings happening.Those are two completely different things.
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      There is no organized conspiracy among law enforcement to hide the location of shootings.
      - 8note 4y ago
        There doesn't have to be. That's why it's bias. For a really contrived example, in a police department of one for the whole world, put the only officer in Antarctica. You'll find there's only officially shootings in Antarctica
alasdair_ 4y ago
The problem is that ShotSpotter doesn’t actually work very well at all. I mean, if I make a magic box that has a 1% chance per day of calling the police and telling them a crime happened nearby and then only stick that box in areas where poor people live, you could see how that would lead to a whole lot of calls for police in those areas. You can also see how, by having a vastly higher police presence in those areas, more crimes will be detected in those areas, even if the base crime rate is the same as in a different area. In the past, ShotSpotter employees have gone into the system and changed things after the fact to claim that their system detected shots in a specific area that it never detected. They did this while working with the police to come up with probable cause for an arrest after the arrest happened. This kind of thing makes it easy for the cops to arrest people they want to arrest without any actual evidence of a crime. This is generally considered a bad thing in the USA.
- Kye 4y ago
  I still encounter people who think a map of crime is an actual map of crime, like SimCity, and not a map of policing. They really do believe it reflects reality. Most times they snap out of it when you point out it's impossible to map crime without collected data, and then it's a short hop to realize policing is how you get that data. And any intellectually honest person will recognize the biases inherent to that data.
- subradios 4y ago
  These biases are also present in murder convictions, widely used to benchmark crime rates over time and geography due to the inability of police to ignore dead bodies selectively. It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is. Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities. Black communities are majority-support of the same or more police per Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r... Removing police from poorer areas hurts poor people more than edge case concerns about individual prosecutors playing fast and loose.
nisegami 4y ago
The goal of the police is to maintain the status quo.

RHSeeger 4y ago

> The goal of police is public safety To be clear... the goal of the police _force_ is to enforce the law. The goal of (some) individual police officers is public safety, but certainly not all of them (and some days, it seems like not many of them... but you generally only hear about the bad stuff in the news, so take that with a grain of salt).

Quinner 4y ago
The goal of the police is to have secure jobs with a decent salary and benefits, and ideally be meaningful in some way (could be promoting public safety... could be exerting power over others). Often enforcing the law helps secure budgets (especially when it comes to enforcing drug laws with lucrative civil forfeiture seizures), but more recently many police departments have tried a different tactic when budgets have been threatened: actively refusing to enforce the law, in order to increase crime and prompt political change.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  The police increase crime?

BryantD 4y ago

I’d like the public to be safe from the public servants who carry guns as part of their day to day work. If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is, they’re more likely to use force when it isn’t warranted. Thus, I’m not as safe. I conclude that it is a matter of public safety to avoid reinforcing biases. Since the article this thread is about shows that some portion of police are willing to believe any damn thing, I think my concerns are reasonable.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
AlbertCory 4y ago
> If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is Could it be "bias" to look at crime statistics? Maybe it's less safe than you think it is.
- BryantD 4y ago
  Indeed! Seems like the simple answer is "if you're going to install sensors, better to just install them everywhere to avoid bias in any direction."
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    So you think that putting them in high crime areas is "bias?"
    - 8note 4y ago
      The bias is assuming that there's no crime because the sensors weren't there to pick it up. A low crime statistic can either mean crime didn't happen, or the statistic didn't count the crimes that did
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        So you think only gunshot sensors measure crime?
        BryantD 4y ago
        Can I very gently ask you to go back and read the topic of this post? If, after you’ve done that, you still want to argue that police departments are universally good at avoiding bias, we can probably conclude that this isn’t a useful conversation for either of us.

cratermoon 4y ago

> If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness This is already reinforcing bias, because your question presumes that the places law enforcement deploys this tech are where it needs to be. To use your analogy, cops like deploying polar bear detectors based on how much snow falls in a place, because "everyone" knows that polar bears live in snowy places.

fallingknife 4y ago
This system is not designed to find out where shootings happen. We know that already. It's just designed to detect them faster.
- 20after4 4y ago
  No it's designed to manufacture evidence that they can use to help them get arrest warrants and eventually convictions.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > We know that already No, we don't. We know where law enforcement, which we already know is biased, reports shootings happening.Those are two completely different things.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    There is no organized conspiracy among law enforcement to hide the location of shootings.
    - 8note 4y ago
      There doesn't have to be. That's why it's bias. For a really contrived example, in a police department of one for the whole world, put the only officer in Antarctica. You'll find there's only officially shootings in Antarctica

alasdair_ 4y ago

The problem is that ShotSpotter doesn’t actually work very well at all. I mean, if I make a magic box that has a 1% chance per day of calling the police and telling them a crime happened nearby and then only stick that box in areas where poor people live, you could see how that would lead to a whole lot of calls for police in those areas. You can also see how, by having a vastly higher police presence in those areas, more crimes will be detected in those areas, even if the base crime rate is the same as in a different area. In the past, ShotSpotter employees have gone into the system and changed things after the fact to claim that their system detected shots in a specific area that it never detected. They did this while working with the police to come up with probable cause for an arrest after the arrest happened. This kind of thing makes it easy for the cops to arrest people they want to arrest without any actual evidence of a crime. This is generally considered a bad thing in the USA.

Kye 4y ago
I still encounter people who think a map of crime is an actual map of crime, like SimCity, and not a map of policing. They really do believe it reflects reality. Most times they snap out of it when you point out it's impossible to map crime without collected data, and then it's a short hop to realize policing is how you get that data. And any intellectually honest person will recognize the biases inherent to that data.
subradios 4y ago
These biases are also present in murder convictions, widely used to benchmark crime rates over time and geography due to the inability of police to ignore dead bodies selectively. It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is. Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities. Black communities are majority-support of the same or more police per Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r... Removing police from poorer areas hurts poor people more than edge case concerns about individual prosecutors playing fast and loose.

nisegami 4y ago

The goal of the police is to maintain the status quo.