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>Areas with more police vehicle images included wealthy commercial zones and low-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents. Do

• jareklupinski 3y ago
  > Among the researchers’ findings: Gramercy Park, in Midtown Manhattan, had the most police vehicles visible in dashcam images -- almost 20 times more than Arden Heights/Rossville, in southern Staten Island, which had the fewest. the residential neighborhood with a quarter mil average income and a literal private garden has the most visible police presence in the city
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• dr_petes 3y ago
  You could argue that those areas have more crime because they have a disproportionate amount of cops to observe crime.
  • protonbob 3y ago
    And that would be a poor argument. Common sense would say otherwise.
    • kelseyfrog 3y ago
      It's important to note that common sense itself is a bias. It's a bias towards what we already think. Don't mistake that as trying to say that for "we should avoid priors" - that's not possible. What would it take for you to soften (not move) your priors on the common sense that "police aren't co-creators in crime through the act of observation"?
      • chongli 3y ago
        police aren't co-creators in crime Police aren’t co-creators of crime, they’re co-creators of crime statistics. Crimes that go unreported, with no arrest made, are invisible to crime statistics. When the police arrest someone and charge them with a crime, it counts as both an arrest and a reported crime. So even if crime were uniformly distributed across the city, if police spent the majority of their time in one neighbourhood they’d make more arrests there and so it follows that the statistics would show higher crime in that neighbourhood.
        • kelseyfrog 3y ago
          Instead of reacting, why don't you get curious instead? I stand by my claim. Crimes are social facts. They exist within a reality supported by whichever laws those with the monopoly of violence believe in. Crimes exist within the symbol register of thought. I'll ask you a question in return, why did you choose your ontology of crime among all those that could possibly exist?
        • danaris 3y ago
          Police are also demonstrably co-creators of crime. We know very well that police injure and kill people—disproportionately people of color—at a much higher rate than the general population. We also know that they (technically legally, but c'mon, it's theft) steal large amounts of money and other property from people through civil asset forfeiture.
    • Dah00n 3y ago
      Are you arguing that more police does help against crime, but does not raise the amount of crime discovered by the police?
    • ambicapter 3y ago
      How is it a poor argument? If a crime is committed but there's no relevant reporter to observe it, it won't get counted as "crime", correct?
    • IE6 3y ago
      I think it also depends on your definition of crime or the type of crime that is being committed as outside of the scope of truly violent crimes or crime where there is a clear victim there are a lot of crimes that really should not be a crime in the first place (like possession of certain plants) and there may be many instances of truly victimless crimes that would go "uncaught" and thus untracked if an authority figure was not observing them.
    • banannaise 3y ago
      Common sense is a poor argument. "Crime" has multiple elements: the law, the act, the observation, and the prosecution. We disproportionately outlaw things that poor people do. ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.") We disproportionately observe poor people, as shown by this article. We disproportionately convict poor people, who can't afford bail or good legal representation. Yet people always want to jump to that other element. The disproportionate crime rates can't be due to all those other things, it must be due to them committing more crimes. The only thing we can say for sure is that poor people commit different crimes. They use different drugs and in different settings; they are more likely to commit theft than embezzlement; they are more likely to cause property damage than violate building codes. The rest is made murky by an unfair legal system and a societal tendency to treat crimes of poverty as individual in nature and crimes of wealth as systemic failures.
  • konschubert 3y ago
    You could say that, but you would look quite silly.
    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      Not in every case. https://www.livescience.com/59329-drug-alcohol-addiction-wealthy-students.html https://www.livescience.com/59329-drug-alcohol-addiction-wea... > By age 22, lifetime rates of addiction to drugs or alcohol were 11 to 16 percent among women from affluent families, which is similar to the national norms; the rates were 19 to 27 percent among men from affluent families, twice the national norms, according to the study. > But a more troubling trend emerged by age 26: Lifetime rates of addiction to drugs or alcohol were 19 to 24 percent among women from wealthier upbringings and 23 to 40 percent among men from those families. These rates were three times higher than the national average for women, and two times higher in men. This does't match up with drug arrest rates.
  • verteu 3y ago
    They have a much higher murder rate too. Murder is not caused by "cops observing crime."
    • dr_petes 3y ago
      Murder is just one crime. Take for example Wage Theft. Which accounts for as much as $50 billion a year ^1 (more than robberies). And yet, you won’t see cops arresting a manager at a store for stealing from their workers. [1](https://inthesetimes.com/article/wage-theft-union-labor-biden-iupat#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Economic%20Policy,and%20motor%20vehicle%20thefts%20combined https://inthesetimes.com/article/wage-theft-union-labor-bide...)
      • dgrin91 3y ago
        Wage theft is also not the type of crime that is caught by police on patrol. Having more cops in a neighborhood wont stop wage theft. Wage theft requires reports of misconduct and an investigation. You're comparing apples to oranges.
        • ceejayoz 3y ago
          That's the point, though. That "these are where police arrest a lot of people" isn't necessarily "these are where the most crimes or the most criminal damage happen".
        • banannaise 3y ago
          Police could absolutely patrol for wage theft. It would look somewhat different from how police patrol for other crimes, but we know where it happens and how it is committed. In fact, because wage theft can only happen in specific places and only be committed by a small subset of people, it would be much easier to prevent wage theft via patrol than almost any other crime. Yet we treat it as a report-only crime, to be prosecuted after the fact rather than prevented by policing. It seems like that's mostly a matter of police priorities.
• fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
  Perhaps they are saying that it's not universal to low income areas, and that low income areas that don't have a higher proportion of Black and Latino residents don't have the increased police vehicle presence? Hard to tell based on the wording there alone.
  • verteu 3y ago
    No -- from the paper: "we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates." [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020
• policepost 3y ago
  Presumably because low income white neighborhoods did not receive the same treatment. At least that's the inference I drew.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • verteu 3y ago
    You inferred wrong. From the paper: "we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates." [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020
    • policepost 3y ago
      Interestingly, you are correct, but you omitted the rest of the paragraph where they articulate why, emphasizing that across booth residential and commercial neighborhoods there is a striking difference in policing. > We note that we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates for two reasons. First, if New York City residents of different races face different levels of police deployments, that disparate impact is itself important; it can also bias algorithms trained on downstream policing data irrespective of the true causal mechanism. Second, controlling for other factors in policing data can be difficult to interpret, introducing concerns about omitted variable bias and model misspecification which make it difficult to identify which factor is truly the “cause” of higher police deployments. For the sake of transparency and simplicity, therefore, we report results by stratifying each variable separately, noting that these disparities are themselves important but that multiple causal mechanisms may underlie them.
• markhnthoraway 3y ago
  It depends how you read that sentence. Race doesn't matter if "low-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents" is simply stating that all low income neighborhoods have higher proportions of Black and Latino residents. Although it's kind of relevant if all downstream bias in arrests etc, say, goes away when you control for income. But I read it as "of all low income neighborhoods, ones with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents had more police vehicle images". In which case, the question is: Why would similar-income neighborhoods (which you theorize should have similar crime levels regardless of race) be policed differently based on the race of the population?
  • verteu 3y ago
    You were misled. From the paper: "we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates." [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020
    • policepost 3y ago
      Misled implies a degree of intent, the wording is ambiguous but I don't assume ill intent by the author, especially when they later spend a paragraph explaining why they did not slice by covariates.
      • LudwigNagasena 3y ago
        It is either purposefully misleading or unreasonably reckless. It is obviously ambiguous and screams of ragebait. I wanted to punch my monitor and fire the author of article when I read this sentence because it is just inflammatory racebait.
        • policepost 3y ago
          You should consider checking your humors or mediate or something, because wanting to do violence because of some Internet text is not healthy human behavior.
• Latty 3y ago
  I see a viscious cycle if being policed aggressively, producing further poverty, increasing crime, encouraging more aggressive policing. The evidence I have seen is that more aggressive policing fundamentally fails at changing systemic poverty that is the root of the issue, and the funding that is funnelled into it would be better put into things like drug programmes to rehabilitate people, social programmes to help people keep in education/work, funding for safe and legal opportunities for kids, support for education and public facilities so people get opportunity to improve their situations generationally, etc... Race is a factor becuase slavery and post-slavery racism have created a huge wealth gap, and redlining pushed black people into these areas. Yes, of course crime is more prevelant in these areas, but that doesn't mean race isn't a factor. It doesn't have to be police officers thinking "I'm going to be racist today" for it to unfairly hurt people based on race.
• jwestbury 3y ago
  Because even after controlling for income, American police still disproportionately mistreat Black people. I'm struggling to find the data right now, but I believe the source was Phillip Atiba Goff. The tl;dr is that Black people are treated violently by police at a rate of several times that of white people, even once you control for socioeconomic status.
  • ceejayoz 3y ago
    One of the best illustrations of this is a fascinating study about police stops and sunset time. They were able to demonstrate that when the sun is up (i.e. the driver can be seen), black drivers are more likely to be pulled over, but when the sun goes down, it equalizes. As a bonus, they controlled for other factors by looking at these stats around when daylight savings switches. https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/black-drivers-are-less-likely-be-stopped-police-after-sunset https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/black-driv... > First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day — around 7 p.m. — when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time. > This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables — the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
    • kaitai 3y ago
      Hah, just linked to the Minneapolis counterpart study above. Yes, this is an elegant natural data experiment, thanks for sharing this version that touches a larger dataset.
  • verteu 3y ago
    I'd be interested to see the source. I found several studies by Phillip Atiba Goff that did NOT control for SES. (Easy to find a statistically significant result when you ignore confounding variables!) But none that did. [1] https://sci-hub.ee/10.1177/1948550616633505 https://sci-hub.ee/10.1177/1948550616633505 [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101518-042633#_i3 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lawso... [3] https://sci-hub.ee/10.1007/s10940-020-09471-9 https://sci-hub.ee/10.1007/s10940-020-09471-9
• throwaway743 3y ago
  > Deployment disparities, the researchers wrote, can result in downstream biases like increased arrests: A neighborhood that’s more heavily policed than another might not necessarily have more crime, just more people arrested for it. The discussion section of the paper also speaks to higher police presence being correlated with areas that are being gentrified.