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I saw a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back that I think made this case far more effectively. Her point was somewhat limited to drug crimes, but sh

I saw a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back that I think made this case far more effectively. Her point was somewhat limited to drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. Therefore, when the cops went to a location to make drug arrests they typically succeeded, because it's not hard to find drug crimes in the Bay Area. The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again, despite the fact that drug crime was prevalent everywhere. In effect it was an insufficiently explorative learning strategy, just hitting the same lever over and over. Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions. Crime and criminology is complicated, but at the end of the day not that complicated. On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. A lot of this depends if you are targeting drug users or drug dealers. While I agree that drug users are spread throughout the city, I would be very surprised if drug dealers are spread throughout the city. I would guess that drug dealers are far more clustered than drug users. So while it is useless if you are trying to target drug users, it is probably helpful for targeting drug dealers.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  Rich people abusing drugs have to get them somewhere, and they're probably not traveling to skid row to get them. I agree that drug dealers and drug users probably have different dynamics, but the reality is that police prosecute both, and in the case of the latter the above described dynamic clearly exists.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    We had a problem with high school kids buying drugs from homeless encampments near bus stops...which is why we no longer allow homeless encampments near bus stops...because fent kills these kids (which even the most "drugs are harmless" advocate doesn't want happening).
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      All the kids who bought drugs in my small town bought them from a cop's kid or a teacher.
  - ChadNauseam 3y ago
    Most people don't care at all if someone is injecting fentanyl in the privacy of their own home, but you shouldn't do it right next to an elementary school. Clearly the police will have a priority in which one of these to prosecute.
deleted 3y ago
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AlbertCory 3y ago
we've heard about the "root causes of crime" for 50 years. Ditto "facing the sickness." Crime rises and falls independent of the social spending on this. "why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and they seek out opportunity? How about that? Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities. https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ I would not call this the profile of an objective scientist. Rather, she's an advocate. > pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  What do find to be the key difference between smoking crack and insufflating cocaine? Because "upscale people" include plenty enjoyers of the latter.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > "why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and they seek out opportunity? How about that? "Criminals" are not some kind of universal entity that exists by default. They are people engaging in different patterns of behavior. They act this way for understandable, and often rational reasons. You're welcome to whatever mental model of the world you want, but in my view you're being unhelpfully reductionist. > I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it. No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion. The type of drug used clearly matters in some contexts (eg. public health), but in the context of arresting "criminals" I don't really care whether its fent or their grandma's oxy. The point is that abusing both are crimes, and that type of crime is everywhere. > Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities. I agree! Have a nice day :)
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    > unhelpfully reductionist Is that some new curse word? Reducing a problem to its root causes is another term for "science." > No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion. "Obtuse"? you're the one who said "drugs are everywhere." You're the one making obtuse statements you can't support. No one's upset about rich people doing drugs, because they're not the ones smashing car windows.
pyuser583 3y ago
> why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) This is not my understanding at all. Crime seems to have fallen during the Great Depression. Murders, which are almost always reported, fell. Things get complicated once mass surveys replace crime reports. Rape almost certainly increased when marital rape was outlawed. Embezzlement almost certainly decreased when cash registers were implemented. One common way to “get rid of crime” is to gentrify, which inevitably lowers crime in a specific geographic area. Another way to “get rid of crime” is to send criminals to prisons, where it’s extremely difficult to report crimes, and surveys of victimhood are never conducted. I’m open to being convinced on this, but I don’t think the “mainly” cause of crime is poverty.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  I mean nothing social has a completely deterministic behavior. There are lots of higher-order effects that act differently on different types of crime. Nevertheless it's not hard to find studies documenting the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0]. For sure few people in poverty are committing insider trading, but when it comes to property or violent crimes the stress and desperation of poverty are clearly huge motivators. [0] Here's one example: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-rates-and-poverty-reexamination https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-ra...
  - scythe 3y ago
    >the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0]. "Very strong" is not a very useful description. Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately, your linked paper is not available. This one is: https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Cullen_2005_Crime___Justice.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Cullen_200... Poverty is listed, but it is not a stronger effect than religiosity, family disruption, or firearms ownership. The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment (length considered)". It is always a little frustrating to hear from a certain kind of politically motivated poster who is very interested in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime except their own conviction that poverty is the sine qua non of theft and violence. The evidence does not support this view.
futuretaint 3y ago
drug dealers will continue to sell drugs irregardless of financial stability. when law enforcement defers arrest/prosecution the drug dealing doesn't become less harmful to communities, the opposite is true. look at SF/Oakland. organized rings maximizing profits in retail theft and property crimes. if this is the alternative to broken windows theory of policing then good luck w/ that.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  Okay sure but most people with a steady 9 to 5 aren't buying industrial volumes of crack. Poverty creates big demand for the worst of the drug trade. Moreover, the drug dealers who are earning big exploiting this aren't going to be found in the worst parts of the city. The police are at best picking up the low- to mid-level distributors. "Broken Windows" has failed to win the drug war for decades; if you want to keep backing a failed experiment you're welcome to it, but I'm going to seek an improvement.
badlucklottery 3y ago
> Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions. I think the sad part is: that's the point. Departments were coming under fire for bad policing and needed to offload the blame. So they pay millions to some vendor to launder their bad policing through an algorithm and give them a scapegoat when they need it.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
You'd think that people would eventually wisen up to where the police are going to go to look for drug crimes. This isn't a smart game of whacka mole being played, the moles are just stuck in the up position. These days, in places like SF and Seattle, people just freely use their drugs on the street while cops just look on. But it is just one segment of the population that is doing it out in the open (unhoused), and cracking down on them would be considered racist (well, most of them are white, the argument is confusing). > mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class As far as crime goes, shoplifting rings, at least in our area, is mostly about drugs. You shoplift a lego set from Target, and get some fent in return from your ring leader. But ya, social norms are completely out the window at that point, and we are just seeing the end of that path.
- bluepod4 3y ago
  > and cracking down on them would be considered racist (well, most of them are white, the argument is confusing). Most of the shoplifters are too lol!
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Yep.
    - bluepod4 3y ago
      It’s like that in Boston too, according to my CVS manager friend from years ago.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Used properly, to intervene in the system using negative feedback loops "predictive policing software" seems a wonderful tool for reducing crime. If it accurately identifies areas of high crime then that's a sign of poverty, the root cause of crime, and helps identify neighbourhoods where we should hand out money - handing out money being the most direct way of tackling poverty. Of course some people might disagree with this intervention as "simplistic". And they'd be at least a little right. For those people who may not have read "Leverage points: Where to intervene in a system" by Dana Meadows, I highly recommend it to see why. Turns out that messing with parameters like money, and feedback loops that constitute a "criminal justice system" are the least effective of all actions. The fundamental values of the system must be addressed. One of those is itself the error that "cybernetic governance" based on software can do anything more than enrich a few software companies.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > If it accurately identifies areas of high crime You don’t need predictive policing to identify areas of high crime (in fact, identification of areas of high crime is an input to predictive policing.) > then that’s a sign of poverty, Poverty information is also an input to predictive policing, not something it provides you information about that you didn't already have, even in the fantasy world where it works well. > the root cause of crime Poverty is not the root cause of crime. It may be a root cause of some crime.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    You noticed that the analysis was simplistic despite my attempts to hide that. :) I'd be curious to know what the root cause of crime is. Laws? /s edit: Sarcasm aside... My serious point is; just what exactly is this software trying to achieve? Isn't this whole caper a solution looking for a problem dreamed up by people who have tech and nothing to do with it, and no grounding in basic human values?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
HPsquared 3y ago
People who interact with the medical system (especially young people) are not representative of the population as a whole. Especially in the US where people have to pay for medical treatment. All sorts of factors. A typical healthy 25 year-old does not go to the doctor, like, ever. On the other hand the population of 25 year-old drug users will have a higher rate of interaction with the medical system.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  That’s an interesting point, I can’t say I recall what type of analysis if any was performed to address something like this. With that said, while these types of selection biases probably make it challenging to reliably estimate absolute drug usage rates, I would imagine they are less impactful on the relative rates between demos of geographical areas, which is the quantity of interest here.
jncfhnb 3y ago
> Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions. Anyone can lie with statistics, but this isn’t really how ML works. Such a model would not appear to perform well, in addition to not performing well. If you had a model that predicted the probability of getting a drug arrest it should work just fine even if you give it an abundance of examples of going to the same area if it as still the same rate as other places. That is to say it should not learn these areas are different
- tech_ken 3y ago
  I’m not sure I understand your point. If the model is predicting the probability that police will make an arrest in a location then I think it could perform well on rudimentary classifier metrics without working well in the more general sense of resolving crime. If police could make drug arrests in a location, but tend to do it in ZIP codes with low socioeconomic indices then the model will predict more arrests where socioeconomic indices are low. Police acting on this intel will turn up true positives, and the classifier will get high marks. But because you’re not able to assess the false negative rate properly (the volume of crimes that police didn’t make arrests for) you’re unable to holistically evaluate its performance. I guess in that second sense the model isn’t actually performing well, but because it can’t be measured it doesn’t really get monitored.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    You would have to go out of your way, imo, to build a model this stupid. If the claim is that all areas have equal arrest potential, then this should be easily detected in the model. If the modelers were so stupid that they failed to account for the presence of police when estimating the rate of/probability of/total quantity of arrests then sure, they’re just stupid people making stupid models. Or intentionally making stupid models. But it would be very easy to do something like to predict the probability that a cop makes an arrest given they went to each area. And if there’s no difference in the areas, it should not matter how many times they went there. The rates should be the same. It seems likely that the models were right and that it’s way easier to make drug arrests in these areas, which was kind of baked into the original premise. So it’s not clear why blaming the modeling is an issue here. The problem is the externalities of the policy. Not some mode overfitting. Like would you blink if I told you the probability of being able to make a drug arrest in a poor area was 20% higher? Probably not. Does that need to mean that you only go to the poor area? No.
charcircuit 3y ago
>This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again One would except drug usage to go down in neighborhoods where it is slightly enforced meaning that they should move on to another location. If there is a problem population which never gets better then permanently having increased coverage would make sense.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  >they should move on to another location I don’t think that follows at all. People like to be intoxicated in/near their homes.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    They as in law enforcement. If law enforcement improves the worst area then it will no longer be the worst area.
standardUser 3y ago
"On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate" Great comment, but this line demands a response. When so many consensual acts are considered crimes, we end up with a situation where most people are commiting crimes because... they want to. They aren't "desperate" to snort coke, or pay for a blowjob, or play an illegal card game, but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act. The only way that changes is by using extreme state violence under an authoritarian regime or, my preferred option, by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't committing a crime simply by living their lives.
- ziddoap 3y ago
  >but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate? Edit: was attempting to be pithy, but apparently would need to spend quite a bit more time to get my point across (and, in the end, doesn't change/add to the discussion), so consider me wrong
  - standardUser 3y ago
    >Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate? No, it is not. If you give a speech in front of a crowd you may embarrass yourself. Are you desperate to give that speech because there are potential consequences? If you go rock climbing you might fall and break your leg. Are you desperate to go rock climbing, simply because it involves risk? I don't see the logic at all.
    - bumby 3y ago
      You might be conflating the proximate and root causes of the act. I may not get in front of a crowd because I'm desperate to give a speech, but I may be desperate to keep my job, or desperate for status, or something else. Likewise, with rock-climbing, maybe I'm desperate for an adrenaline high or a novel experience. To be generous to the OP, I think "desperate" just means the gains from the experience outpace the perceived risks.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Drug crimes are something of a special case, in that drug laws in the USA (which did not exist in the 19th century) were largely implemented in the early 20th century as a means of population control, with racist overtones (Chinese immigrant use of opium, Mexican and black use of marijuana, etc.). Since drugs were widely used (as was alcohol) across the entire US social spectrum, but enforcement was targeted at specific groups and individuals for political reasons, it's reminscent of what Stalin's head of the NKVD, Beria, said: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." This is a standard tactic of authoritarian states: create enough laws such that everyone is guilty of something, and then use selective enforcement of those laws as a mechanism to control the population. Whether or not the USA's promotion of drug laws of this nature qualifies it as an authoritarian state, well, that can be left as an exercise for the reader. The fact that the USA has the world's largest prison population, and that a very significant fraction of that population is there on drug charges, and that wealthy politically connected people rarely get incarcerated on drug charges, are all factors worth considering. As far as harm caused by fentanyl, if it was legalized and passed out to addicts in the form of transdermal patches in conjunction with addiction treatment and counseling (the original fentanyl formulation for treatment of cancer pain[1]), most of the violent crime associated with fentanyl would vanish. Note also that alcohol itself is far more associated with violence than the opiates are in terms of the direct effects of the substance. [1] https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(97)00361-8/fulltext https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(97)00361-8/fu...
smcin 3y ago
> a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back I think you mean this research, discussing Oakland: "Setting the record straight on predictive policing and race" - K Lum, W Isaac, 2018 [https://theappeal.org/setting-the-record-straight-on-predictive-policing-and-race-fe588b457ca2/ https://theappeal.org/setting-the-record-straight-on-predict...]. Her full bibliography is at [1] and X/Twitter is @KLdivergence > drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs Right. Second, without knowing their definition of "drug use" or "drug crime", that could mean anything from minor stuff like smoking/buying/possessing marijuana by under-18s, possessing or transporting >1 oz of marijuana, all the way up to possession or sale of large quantities of meth or fentanyl. Third, and what would be obvious to anyone familiar with the Bay Area 2020-22, if predictive policing used "drug crime" (convictions? or arrests?) as opposed to "drug use", then when the then-SF DA stopped prosecuting possession of personal-use levels of meth, SF police tend to reduce or stop arresting for it. So the arrest, prosecution or conviction data from SF would differ sharply to Oakland or pre-2020 SF or 2023 SF or San Mateo County. All the above factors combined seems like a huge combination of "data drift", "feature drift", "label drift", "model drift". [0]: https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ [1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kristian+lum%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kristian+lum%22
- tech_ken 3y ago
  Yep IIRC that’s the work she was presenting, thanks for doing the legwork I was too lazy to do :)
jlawson 3y ago
Crime isn't caused by poverty. There is no correlation. Crime was very low in the 50's, when poverty was much, much higher. Crime was low during the Great Depression. We're talking about people so poor they were cooking thin soups over outdoor fires in ramshackle Hoovervilles. No explosion of criminality. Think about your own family. Almost certainly, your great-grandparents were much poorer than you, but they were not more criminal, even though they lived with less material wealth than the poor urban neighborhoods of today's America. In many cases they had no electricity, or running water, and only the most basic healthcare. Yet they obeyed the law. It's not poverty. Crime comes from the dysfunction in people and communities which stems from deeper causes which are much harder, or impossible to change.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  The dysfunction in those communities is caused by being generally broke.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jlawson 3y ago
    No, it's the other way around. You can tell because many many communities now and in history have been highly functional while being broke, but every community full of criminals is broke (which is so obvious it sounds strange to even say). This demonstrates that criminality/social dysfunction causes poverty, not the other way around.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >but they were not more criminal I know that my grandparents sold booze illegally to bolster their income, my dad worked under the table a lot. Honestly how do you know how criminal anyone was in the 40s and 50s? Do you think they caught remotely as much theft, smuggling or tax evasion at a time when security cameras didn't exist? The state didn't even have a fraction of the capacity to trace lawbreaking that it has now. When our great grandparents were around most cops probably didn't even have routine motorized patrols, who on earth even bothered to report a violent altercation during the Great Depression
lr4444lr 3y ago
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.) occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true. I have no info on addicts, but I doubt most of them commit crimes either aside from dealing. Antisocial behavior is the common denominator.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true. No this does not follow from what I said. "Group A is more likely to do X than Group B" is very different from "The majority of Group A does X". One is a comparison between two rates, and the other is a comparison of one rate to an absolute threshold (50%).
ChadNauseam 3y ago
> The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. Seems like the world's most obvious and easiest to solve problem tbh. This is like saying "I showed version A of my site to 1000 users and version B to 100. And version A lead to 500 conversions while version B only lead to 75. Therefore, version A is better because it lead to more conversions."
logicalmonster 3y ago
> Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference. 1) Wanting to look at the root causes of an issue is always commendable, but the problem with this kind of analysis on HN is that it's a community of very smart people trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals through the lens of a high-IQ. You're trying to find the logic in what they're doing and putting yourself in their place to explain it with a logical reason, but you can't conceive how different the world is for the low-IQ people looting and stealing and harming others. Their reasons for crime might be far different than the reasons you try and see based on what you might do in their shoes. 2) I think that simply explaining that current crime comes from poverty and needing money is an explanation that falls flat. Much of the human experience has been in immense misery or poverty that the poorest person living in the US today can't even conceive of. Poor people in the US can still have TVs, smart phones, and more food than they can even eat. Poor people in the past used to literally sometimes die of starvation and have to choose whether or not they were willing to eat rotten food or hell, even rats or worse to survive. They had to risk working in extremely dangerous mines, factories, etc to barely eke out survival. Why didn't these people casually turn to crime? They had it much worse! Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? No, I don't think it's poverty. Something else about the world has changed other than "poor people need money so they resort to crime." 3) My thinking is that something closer to an extremely high and increasing time-preference is what is causing a lot of these problems. Whether it's through the influence of technology, apps, music/movies/tv and other cultural causes, many people have been conditioned to value the dopamine hit of immediate gratification far more than thinking about the long-term.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? The line between a raging horde of criminals and an army has been razor thin through history.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > Why didn't these people casually turn to crime? Isn't violent crime at an all time low, historically [0]? It seems like every other day some rationalist is trumpeting the relative safety of our affluent society. > Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? This happens all throughout history. Periods of acute poverty are rife with examples of people turning to banditry, literally Kurasawa made a movie about it. > No, I don't think it's poverty. I would recommend reading any of the studies linked elsewhere in the thread, empirical evidence disagrees with you big time. > trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals I think that writing off criminals as "low-IQ" is a huge error. Sure they may be less educated, but I don't know if it's possible to concretely prove that the potential for intelligence is lower among someone committing a B&E than some random office worker. I would actually argue that many criminals are much smarter than they are given credit for. Certainly any successful criminal able to evade arrest for a serious amount of time is probably quite intelligent. Pretending like everyone who decided to rob a liquor store at age 19 is some idiot brute whose sole motivation is acting like a thug I think is one of those convenient narratives that feels true, but which overlooks a lot of what would push a person to actually act that way. [0] https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel-eisner-historical-trends-in-violence.pdf https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel...
bunderbunder 3y ago
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), I suspect that often what happens for the most disadvantaged people is that the arrow of causality gets reversed - the deck gets so stacked against them that it's almost a crime to simply exist at all. And that, in turn, puts them into a desperate situation. There was an interesting piece of investigative journalism in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that I read maybe 10 or 15 years ago showing how policies set up by (then County commissioner) Scott Walker more-or-less made it implicitly illegal to live below the poverty line in a majority Black neighborhood in Milwaukee County. Not through any one law, but through a series of edge cases related to the interaction of laws and urban planning initiatives that were almost impossible for anyone without significant resources to navigate successfully.
dionidium 3y ago
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes. People get angry. They feel disrespected. And some of them even just think violence is flat-out fun. The "desperate people" model doesn't really hold water with respect to the most serious crimes we care the most about. Second, I am aware that this sounds like some kind of right-wing talking point, but you should consider that it's true: a job at Dunkin Donuts is more remunerative than stealing catalytic converters. It's not even close, really. We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd. If they were genuinely just desperate, they'd take the job at Dunkin. We'll never effectively police crime if we can't even acknowledge its true nature.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes Sure violent crime is complicated. I'll walk back my claims with regard to things like domestic violence or violent crime resulting from a fight or something. However there is still the large component of violent crime that is things like an armed robbery, for which I believe my claim applies. Somewhere else in the thread someone brought up the link between impulse control and poverty, which I think also has bearing here. Poverty has been documented to increase baseline stress, and I would imagine that someone working multiple part time jobs just to afford rent and food is going to have a way shorter fuse than like, some tech worker earning a quarter million a year, but that's just speculation on my part. > We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd. I see your point here, and I don't think it's totally invalid, but I do think it fails to acknowledge the whole problem. For one, I think we would need to get some sense of how many people both work at DD and steal cats out of cars. I would imagine that it's not a small fraction of the population. While slinging donuts probably pays more than petty crime, it also requires more time. If you're already working one fast food job maybe you're just going to augment that salary with some theft rather than take on another 20-30 hours of work. There's also the pride factor, FF jobs can feel very degrading whereas some varities of crime are self-employment, you get to set your own hours and working conditions. Additionally FF jobs may not even hire you if you've already got a conviction or consume certain drugs. I do overall agree that there is some cultural stuff at play, a young man who grows up in a poor neighborhood and meets a lot of criminals is likely going to feel pressured to himself start committing crimes, but I also have to ask if you can truly blame someone for making that choice and if it makes sense to separate that choice from an overall feeling of desperation? If you're a young man who believes he has absolutely no prospects whatsoever to actually "succeed" following the typical career path then that means you have little to lose, and coming from that mindset I don't think it's totally unreasonable to say "fuck it" and start operating outside the law, even if it pays less than slinging burgers. Desperation breeds disaffectation, which in turn results in seriously anti-social behavior. If coolness was the only factor every affluent suburbanite teenager would also be cutting catties, but clearly that's not the case. Yes the ultimate consequence is something more than "I just need money so I'm going to turn to crime", but the underlying agitation which kicks off the chain of events is often socioeconomic disadvantage.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate You recognized that drug possession is widespread and illegal in SF. Are they committing these crimes because they are desperate? Since it really depends on the crime you cant largely attribute it to 1 factor.
shuckles 3y ago
I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail in the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it was indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would learn that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads to drug busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be careful when training ML models to remove sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are useless. A relevant reference: "Identifying and Measuring Excessive and Discriminatory Policing" - https://5harad.com/papers/identifying-discriminatory-policing.pdf https://5harad.com/papers/identifying-discriminatory-policin... In any case, recreational drug use might be uniformly distributed (and there is an interesting question of what anti-social activities are labeled "crimes"), it is definitely not the case that home invasions, car jackings, robberies, etc. are uniformly distributed. > On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. If you're looking for a single summary of why people commit crime, a better summary is: people commit crimes because they don't think they'll get caught. Desperation doesn't explain all that much.
- saghm 3y ago
  > I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail in the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it was indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would learn that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads to drug busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be careful when training ML models to remove sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are useless. This assumes that the police actually _want_ to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods. It's hard for me not to think that using ML models is intended to be a way to insulate the decision makers from accountability; pick a model that gives the results you want, don't divulge the details, and you'll never have to explain your actions because you were "just following the model".
  - shuckles 3y ago
    No it's not. I'm making a claim about what ML models are capable of in response to someone incorrectly summarizing a possible weakness with them. If police don't want to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods, they don't need models to justify that. There is no jurisdiction in America where discretion has been ceded to statistical models.
IIAOPSW 3y ago
The only change I wish to suggest is the substitution of a term I'm trying to popularize. Replace "anti-social personality disorder" with "anus-type personality disorder".
Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
>she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. Any data on type and frequency of drug used?
mushbino 3y ago
One of the issues I've noticed. I can say from first hand experience that many wealthy people and VC's use drugs fairly frequently. I'm sure most of these arrests involve poor people though. You never hear about the wealthy folks being busted for drugs.
0xcde4c3db 3y ago
It would probably also help if we, as a society, weren't so addicted to unhinged moral panics about drugs, which in turn supply political fuel for similarly reality-impaired "tough on crime" policy pushes. Right now it's fentanyl, but in the past it's been crack, LSD, marijuana, etc.. (Fentanyl clearly poses legitimate problems for various reasons, but people have increasingly treated it like it's some kind of sci-fi chemical weapon instead of a medicine that's routinely used in hospitals and nursing homes around the world.)
moneywoes 3y ago
interesting why not use that medical data?
caycep 3y ago
I feel like this is a real world analogy to false local minima magnified by a misguided implementation of gradient descent.
mkoubaa 3y ago
I'm far more afraid of artificial stupidity than of artificial intelligence
heavyset_go 3y ago
That's the point. Cops are only going invest in systems that confirm their biases and allow them to target the people they "know" are "the problem". If cops, for whatever reason, have a history of targeting a particular neighborhood, arresting people that fit a certain profile, etc, and suddenly their new computer system tells them to focus on other areas or demographics, then that system is broken to them. They "know" where the crime is, and if they listen to the system that tells them otherwise, criminals will get away and/or they won't be able to make easy arrests they want to make. Law enforcement is also incentivized to buy systems that they can point to and scapegoat if they do something wrong. "I'm just doing what the computer told me to do and machines can't be biased" is a good enough justification to a lot of people, including the justice system.
hammock 3y ago
>they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again This process is already a common complaint of police, without predictive software.
dilyevsky 3y ago
This is like pigeon superstition but for cops
Georgelemental 3y ago
> Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference. Nayib Bukele locked up all his country's criminals, and by doing so made a massive difference to the quality of life. The truth is, crime causes poverty at least as much as poverty causes crime. There is no tradeoff between "arrest criminals and get them off the streets" and "fix poverty", the latter in fact depends on the former.
atoav 3y ago
With the crime you actually really need to catch (e.g. murders, terrorism, armed robberies) the problem is that they are rare, compared to them not happening. Most people on here have probably never even witnessed a murder for example, and terrorism is even rarer. That means your prediction that eats data with mostly legal stuff all day must be extremely accurate to be useful. Let's say you wanna predict who a terrorist ist by the way they are walking at an airport. Given the high volume of people the answer will be: nearly nobody, except when they are. So your mechanism just produces false positives all day long and might encode stereotypes on the way. The most important aspect for me would be that we actually demand scientific evidence of such a thing working before our executive is allowed to use it. Everything else is a huge risk for civil rights and doesn't help to prevent actual crime either.
solatic 3y ago
> Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Issue: police are not trained to, nor are they responsible for fixing, the underlying "sickness". Police, social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists have very different missions, training, skillsets, perspectives, and dispositions. We can argue that society should invest more in social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists, but not that police should become social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists to cover for insufficient resources in those areas.
Gareth321 3y ago
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. The data on poverty and crime isn’t directional. It’s not proven that poverty causes crime. It’s just as likely that crime causes poverty, or some other variables cause both.
Kiro 3y ago
Now explain the rise of gang violence in Sweden, with kids queuing to become gang members. I don't think poverty is the explanation (nor is immigration as some claims). There's no desperation here and plenty of options for other careers or life paths. No, they look up to the criminals. Being a gangster is cool and respect is everything. You need to respond violently to the most mundane things or you risk losing the respect. The ongoing conflicts started because of some truly ridiculous things, like someone not being invited to a robbery and feeling humiliated/jealous when they bragged about the crime. It's always some personal reasons where someone thinks they are being disrespected, and never about turfs like you would think.
jwestbury 3y ago
There was a really interesting episode of the podcast Hidden Brain last year about using medical data, but with a different approach -- the economist/sociologist Sara Heller did some research into predicting crime using medical data, or, more specifically, data about gunshot wounds. It turns out, you can predict gunshot victims quite well: They generated a large dataset for Chicago, then produced a list of the top 100 (IIRC) likely victims of gunshot wounds in the next year, and the people on that list had something like a 10% likelihood of being shot in the next year -- a more than 100x increase beyond the average Chicagoan. Dr. Heller's point, rather than being one about predictive policing in general, was that it's probably more effective to try to prevent people from becoming victims. They're actually running a longitudinal study right now -- Dr. Heller alongside Dr. Christopher Blattman -- looking at methods of preventative, positive intervention to reduce crime. Dr. Blattman has actually run some studies on this in Africa in the past, looking at giving people money, therapy, or a combination thereof, and found pretty impressive impact on reducing future criminal behaviour by giving people a modest monetary infusion alongside social support in the form of therapy and group sessions.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  http://heyjackass.com http://heyjackass.com for Chicago numbers.
  - chaps 3y ago
    That website is exceptionally biased in its motivations and doesn't give its sources of information. Take anything from it with a grain of salt and please try to identify other sources of information.
knallfrosch 3y ago
Is it really that hard to control for the police presence? Area A: We had 10 patrols of which 5 found drugs. Area B: We had 30 patrols of which 12 found drugs. I don't think it's too hard to notice that A is the better target for future controls, even though more drugs were found in B (when going by total numbers.) I think people on the left don't really want to admit that there are areas and populations that do indeed warrant more searches than others.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > Is it really that hard to control for the police presence? You could probably answer this question by reading the original work, it's linked somewhere in this thread. > I think people on the left don't really want to admit that there are areas and populations that do indeed warrant more searches than others. Are you simply unaware of the 4th amendment? Or do you just not value it?
  - knallfrosch 3y ago
    What 4th? Is that some US thing? In any case, I wasn't talking about "let's search this person's car because the person belongs to a minority", but rather "we control 10% of cars (randomized) passing through this intersection, because there's lots of crime in this area, and if the persons searched don't reflect the overall population mix, that's okay."

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. A lot of this depends if you are targeting drug users or drug dealers. While I agree that drug users are spread throughout the city, I would be very surprised if drug dealers are spread throughout the city. I would guess that drug dealers are far more clustered than drug users. So while it is useless if you are trying to target drug users, it is probably helpful for targeting drug dealers.

tech_ken 3y ago
Rich people abusing drugs have to get them somewhere, and they're probably not traveling to skid row to get them. I agree that drug dealers and drug users probably have different dynamics, but the reality is that police prosecute both, and in the case of the latter the above described dynamic clearly exists.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  We had a problem with high school kids buying drugs from homeless encampments near bus stops...which is why we no longer allow homeless encampments near bus stops...because fent kills these kids (which even the most "drugs are harmless" advocate doesn't want happening).
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    All the kids who bought drugs in my small town bought them from a cop's kid or a teacher.
- ChadNauseam 3y ago
  Most people don't care at all if someone is injecting fentanyl in the privacy of their own home, but you shouldn't do it right next to an elementary school. Clearly the police will have a priority in which one of these to prosecute.

deleted 3y ago

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AlbertCory 3y ago

we've heard about the "root causes of crime" for 50 years. Ditto "facing the sickness." Crime rises and falls independent of the social spending on this. "why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and they seek out opportunity? How about that? Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities. https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ I would not call this the profile of an objective scientist. Rather, she's an advocate. > pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
What do find to be the key difference between smoking crack and insufflating cocaine? Because "upscale people" include plenty enjoyers of the latter.
tech_ken 3y ago
> "why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and they seek out opportunity? How about that? "Criminals" are not some kind of universal entity that exists by default. They are people engaging in different patterns of behavior. They act this way for understandable, and often rational reasons. You're welcome to whatever mental model of the world you want, but in my view you're being unhelpfully reductionist. > I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it. No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion. The type of drug used clearly matters in some contexts (eg. public health), but in the context of arresting "criminals" I don't really care whether its fent or their grandma's oxy. The point is that abusing both are crimes, and that type of crime is everywhere. > Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities. I agree! Have a nice day :)
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > unhelpfully reductionist Is that some new curse word? Reducing a problem to its root causes is another term for "science." > No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion. "Obtuse"? you're the one who said "drugs are everywhere." You're the one making obtuse statements you can't support. No one's upset about rich people doing drugs, because they're not the ones smashing car windows.

pyuser583 3y ago

> why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) This is not my understanding at all. Crime seems to have fallen during the Great Depression. Murders, which are almost always reported, fell. Things get complicated once mass surveys replace crime reports. Rape almost certainly increased when marital rape was outlawed. Embezzlement almost certainly decreased when cash registers were implemented. One common way to “get rid of crime” is to gentrify, which inevitably lowers crime in a specific geographic area. Another way to “get rid of crime” is to send criminals to prisons, where it’s extremely difficult to report crimes, and surveys of victimhood are never conducted. I’m open to being convinced on this, but I don’t think the “mainly” cause of crime is poverty.

tech_ken 3y ago
I mean nothing social has a completely deterministic behavior. There are lots of higher-order effects that act differently on different types of crime. Nevertheless it's not hard to find studies documenting the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0]. For sure few people in poverty are committing insider trading, but when it comes to property or violent crimes the stress and desperation of poverty are clearly huge motivators. [0] Here's one example: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-rates-and-poverty-reexamination https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/crime-ra...
- scythe 3y ago
  >the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0]. "Very strong" is not a very useful description. Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately, your linked paper is not available. This one is: https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Cullen_2005_Crime___Justice.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/3521147/Pratt___Cullen_200... Poverty is listed, but it is not a stronger effect than religiosity, family disruption, or firearms ownership. The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment (length considered)". It is always a little frustrating to hear from a certain kind of politically motivated poster who is very interested in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime except their own conviction that poverty is the sine qua non of theft and violence. The evidence does not support this view.

futuretaint 3y ago

drug dealers will continue to sell drugs irregardless of financial stability. when law enforcement defers arrest/prosecution the drug dealing doesn't become less harmful to communities, the opposite is true. look at SF/Oakland. organized rings maximizing profits in retail theft and property crimes. if this is the alternative to broken windows theory of policing then good luck w/ that.

tech_ken 3y ago
Okay sure but most people with a steady 9 to 5 aren't buying industrial volumes of crack. Poverty creates big demand for the worst of the drug trade. Moreover, the drug dealers who are earning big exploiting this aren't going to be found in the worst parts of the city. The police are at best picking up the low- to mid-level distributors. "Broken Windows" has failed to win the drug war for decades; if you want to keep backing a failed experiment you're welcome to it, but I'm going to seek an improvement.

badlucklottery 3y ago

> Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions. I think the sad part is: that's the point. Departments were coming under fire for bad policing and needed to offload the blame. So they pay millions to some vendor to launder their bad policing through an algorithm and give them a scapegoat when they need it.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

You'd think that people would eventually wisen up to where the police are going to go to look for drug crimes. This isn't a smart game of whacka mole being played, the moles are just stuck in the up position. These days, in places like SF and Seattle, people just freely use their drugs on the street while cops just look on. But it is just one segment of the population that is doing it out in the open (unhoused), and cracking down on them would be considered racist (well, most of them are white, the argument is confusing). > mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class As far as crime goes, shoplifting rings, at least in our area, is mostly about drugs. You shoplift a lego set from Target, and get some fent in return from your ring leader. But ya, social norms are completely out the window at that point, and we are just seeing the end of that path.

bluepod4 3y ago
> and cracking down on them would be considered racist (well, most of them are white, the argument is confusing). Most of the shoplifters are too lol!
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Yep.
  - bluepod4 3y ago
    It’s like that in Boston too, according to my CVS manager friend from years ago.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Used properly, to intervene in the system using negative feedback loops "predictive policing software" seems a wonderful tool for reducing crime. If it accurately identifies areas of high crime then that's a sign of poverty, the root cause of crime, and helps identify neighbourhoods where we should hand out money - handing out money being the most direct way of tackling poverty. Of course some people might disagree with this intervention as "simplistic". And they'd be at least a little right. For those people who may not have read "Leverage points: Where to intervene in a system" by Dana Meadows, I highly recommend it to see why. Turns out that messing with parameters like money, and feedback loops that constitute a "criminal justice system" are the least effective of all actions. The fundamental values of the system must be addressed. One of those is itself the error that "cybernetic governance" based on software can do anything more than enrich a few software companies.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> If it accurately identifies areas of high crime You don’t need predictive policing to identify areas of high crime (in fact, identification of areas of high crime is an input to predictive policing.) > then that’s a sign of poverty, Poverty information is also an input to predictive policing, not something it provides you information about that you didn't already have, even in the fantasy world where it works well. > the root cause of crime Poverty is not the root cause of crime. It may be a root cause of some crime.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  You noticed that the analysis was simplistic despite my attempts to hide that. :) I'd be curious to know what the root cause of crime is. Laws? /s edit: Sarcasm aside... My serious point is; just what exactly is this software trying to achieve? Isn't this whole caper a solution looking for a problem dreamed up by people who have tech and nothing to do with it, and no grounding in basic human values?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

HPsquared 3y ago

People who interact with the medical system (especially young people) are not representative of the population as a whole. Especially in the US where people have to pay for medical treatment. All sorts of factors. A typical healthy 25 year-old does not go to the doctor, like, ever. On the other hand the population of 25 year-old drug users will have a higher rate of interaction with the medical system.

tech_ken 3y ago
That’s an interesting point, I can’t say I recall what type of analysis if any was performed to address something like this. With that said, while these types of selection biases probably make it challenging to reliably estimate absolute drug usage rates, I would imagine they are less impactful on the relative rates between demos of geographical areas, which is the quantity of interest here.

jncfhnb 3y ago

> Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions. Anyone can lie with statistics, but this isn’t really how ML works. Such a model would not appear to perform well, in addition to not performing well. If you had a model that predicted the probability of getting a drug arrest it should work just fine even if you give it an abundance of examples of going to the same area if it as still the same rate as other places. That is to say it should not learn these areas are different

tech_ken 3y ago
I’m not sure I understand your point. If the model is predicting the probability that police will make an arrest in a location then I think it could perform well on rudimentary classifier metrics without working well in the more general sense of resolving crime. If police could make drug arrests in a location, but tend to do it in ZIP codes with low socioeconomic indices then the model will predict more arrests where socioeconomic indices are low. Police acting on this intel will turn up true positives, and the classifier will get high marks. But because you’re not able to assess the false negative rate properly (the volume of crimes that police didn’t make arrests for) you’re unable to holistically evaluate its performance. I guess in that second sense the model isn’t actually performing well, but because it can’t be measured it doesn’t really get monitored.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  You would have to go out of your way, imo, to build a model this stupid. If the claim is that all areas have equal arrest potential, then this should be easily detected in the model. If the modelers were so stupid that they failed to account for the presence of police when estimating the rate of/probability of/total quantity of arrests then sure, they’re just stupid people making stupid models. Or intentionally making stupid models. But it would be very easy to do something like to predict the probability that a cop makes an arrest given they went to each area. And if there’s no difference in the areas, it should not matter how many times they went there. The rates should be the same. It seems likely that the models were right and that it’s way easier to make drug arrests in these areas, which was kind of baked into the original premise. So it’s not clear why blaming the modeling is an issue here. The problem is the externalities of the policy. Not some mode overfitting. Like would you blink if I told you the probability of being able to make a drug arrest in a poor area was 20% higher? Probably not. Does that need to mean that you only go to the poor area? No.

charcircuit 3y ago

>This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again One would except drug usage to go down in neighborhoods where it is slightly enforced meaning that they should move on to another location. If there is a problem population which never gets better then permanently having increased coverage would make sense.

l33t7332273 3y ago
>they should move on to another location I don’t think that follows at all. People like to be intoxicated in/near their homes.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  They as in law enforcement. If law enforcement improves the worst area then it will no longer be the worst area.

standardUser 3y ago

"On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate" Great comment, but this line demands a response. When so many consensual acts are considered crimes, we end up with a situation where most people are commiting crimes because... they want to. They aren't "desperate" to snort coke, or pay for a blowjob, or play an illegal card game, but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act. The only way that changes is by using extreme state violence under an authoritarian regime or, my preferred option, by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't committing a crime simply by living their lives.

ziddoap 3y ago
>but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate? Edit: was attempting to be pithy, but apparently would need to spend quite a bit more time to get my point across (and, in the end, doesn't change/add to the discussion), so consider me wrong
- standardUser 3y ago
  >Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate? No, it is not. If you give a speech in front of a crowd you may embarrass yourself. Are you desperate to give that speech because there are potential consequences? If you go rock climbing you might fall and break your leg. Are you desperate to go rock climbing, simply because it involves risk? I don't see the logic at all.
  - bumby 3y ago
    You might be conflating the proximate and root causes of the act. I may not get in front of a crowd because I'm desperate to give a speech, but I may be desperate to keep my job, or desperate for status, or something else. Likewise, with rock-climbing, maybe I'm desperate for an adrenaline high or a novel experience. To be generous to the OP, I think "desperate" just means the gains from the experience outpace the perceived risks.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Drug crimes are something of a special case, in that drug laws in the USA (which did not exist in the 19th century) were largely implemented in the early 20th century as a means of population control, with racist overtones (Chinese immigrant use of opium, Mexican and black use of marijuana, etc.). Since drugs were widely used (as was alcohol) across the entire US social spectrum, but enforcement was targeted at specific groups and individuals for political reasons, it's reminscent of what Stalin's head of the NKVD, Beria, said: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." This is a standard tactic of authoritarian states: create enough laws such that everyone is guilty of something, and then use selective enforcement of those laws as a mechanism to control the population. Whether or not the USA's promotion of drug laws of this nature qualifies it as an authoritarian state, well, that can be left as an exercise for the reader. The fact that the USA has the world's largest prison population, and that a very significant fraction of that population is there on drug charges, and that wealthy politically connected people rarely get incarcerated on drug charges, are all factors worth considering. As far as harm caused by fentanyl, if it was legalized and passed out to addicts in the form of transdermal patches in conjunction with addiction treatment and counseling (the original fentanyl formulation for treatment of cancer pain[1]), most of the violent crime associated with fentanyl would vanish. Note also that alcohol itself is far more associated with violence than the opiates are in terms of the direct effects of the substance. [1] https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(97)00361-8/fulltext https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(97)00361-8/fu...

smcin 3y ago

> a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back I think you mean this research, discussing Oakland: "Setting the record straight on predictive policing and race" - K Lum, W Isaac, 2018 [https://theappeal.org/setting-the-record-straight-on-predictive-policing-and-race-fe588b457ca2/ https://theappeal.org/setting-the-record-straight-on-predict...]. Her full bibliography is at [1] and X/Twitter is @KLdivergence > drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs Right. Second, without knowing their definition of "drug use" or "drug crime", that could mean anything from minor stuff like smoking/buying/possessing marijuana by under-18s, possessing or transporting >1 oz of marijuana, all the way up to possession or sale of large quantities of meth or fentanyl. Third, and what would be obvious to anyone familiar with the Bay Area 2020-22, if predictive policing used "drug crime" (convictions? or arrests?) as opposed to "drug use", then when the then-SF DA stopped prosecuting possession of personal-use levels of meth, SF police tend to reduce or stop arresting for it. So the arrest, prosecution or conviction data from SF would differ sharply to Oakland or pre-2020 SF or 2023 SF or San Mateo County. All the above factors combined seems like a huge combination of "data drift", "feature drift", "label drift", "model drift". [0]: https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ https://hrdag.org/people/kristian-lum-phd/ [1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kristian+lum%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kristian+lum%22

tech_ken 3y ago
Yep IIRC that’s the work she was presenting, thanks for doing the legwork I was too lazy to do :)

jlawson 3y ago

Crime isn't caused by poverty. There is no correlation. Crime was very low in the 50's, when poverty was much, much higher. Crime was low during the Great Depression. We're talking about people so poor they were cooking thin soups over outdoor fires in ramshackle Hoovervilles. No explosion of criminality. Think about your own family. Almost certainly, your great-grandparents were much poorer than you, but they were not more criminal, even though they lived with less material wealth than the poor urban neighborhoods of today's America. In many cases they had no electricity, or running water, and only the most basic healthcare. Yet they obeyed the law. It's not poverty. Crime comes from the dysfunction in people and communities which stems from deeper causes which are much harder, or impossible to change.

l33t7332273 3y ago
The dysfunction in those communities is caused by being generally broke.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jlawson 3y ago
  No, it's the other way around. You can tell because many many communities now and in history have been highly functional while being broke, but every community full of criminals is broke (which is so obvious it sounds strange to even say). This demonstrates that criminality/social dysfunction causes poverty, not the other way around.
Barrin92 3y ago
>but they were not more criminal I know that my grandparents sold booze illegally to bolster their income, my dad worked under the table a lot. Honestly how do you know how criminal anyone was in the 40s and 50s? Do you think they caught remotely as much theft, smuggling or tax evasion at a time when security cameras didn't exist? The state didn't even have a fraction of the capacity to trace lawbreaking that it has now. When our great grandparents were around most cops probably didn't even have routine motorized patrols, who on earth even bothered to report a violent altercation during the Great Depression

lr4444lr 3y ago

> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.) occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true. I have no info on addicts, but I doubt most of them commit crimes either aside from dealing. Antisocial behavior is the common denominator.

tech_ken 3y ago
> Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true. No this does not follow from what I said. "Group A is more likely to do X than Group B" is very different from "The majority of Group A does X". One is a comparison between two rates, and the other is a comparison of one rate to an absolute threshold (50%).

ChadNauseam 3y ago

> The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. Seems like the world's most obvious and easiest to solve problem tbh. This is like saying "I showed version A of my site to 1000 users and version B to 100. And version A lead to 500 conversions while version B only lead to 75. Therefore, version A is better because it lead to more conversions."

logicalmonster 3y ago

> Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference. 1) Wanting to look at the root causes of an issue is always commendable, but the problem with this kind of analysis on HN is that it's a community of very smart people trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals through the lens of a high-IQ. You're trying to find the logic in what they're doing and putting yourself in their place to explain it with a logical reason, but you can't conceive how different the world is for the low-IQ people looting and stealing and harming others. Their reasons for crime might be far different than the reasons you try and see based on what you might do in their shoes. 2) I think that simply explaining that current crime comes from poverty and needing money is an explanation that falls flat. Much of the human experience has been in immense misery or poverty that the poorest person living in the US today can't even conceive of. Poor people in the US can still have TVs, smart phones, and more food than they can even eat. Poor people in the past used to literally sometimes die of starvation and have to choose whether or not they were willing to eat rotten food or hell, even rats or worse to survive. They had to risk working in extremely dangerous mines, factories, etc to barely eke out survival. Why didn't these people casually turn to crime? They had it much worse! Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? No, I don't think it's poverty. Something else about the world has changed other than "poor people need money so they resort to crime." 3) My thinking is that something closer to an extremely high and increasing time-preference is what is causing a lot of these problems. Whether it's through the influence of technology, apps, music/movies/tv and other cultural causes, many people have been conditioned to value the dopamine hit of immediate gratification far more than thinking about the long-term.

carlosjobim 3y ago
> Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? The line between a raging horde of criminals and an army has been razor thin through history.
tech_ken 3y ago
> Why didn't these people casually turn to crime? Isn't violent crime at an all time low, historically [0]? It seems like every other day some rationalist is trumpeting the relative safety of our affluent society. > Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? This happens all throughout history. Periods of acute poverty are rife with examples of people turning to banditry, literally Kurasawa made a movie about it. > No, I don't think it's poverty. I would recommend reading any of the studies linked elsewhere in the thread, empirical evidence disagrees with you big time. > trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals I think that writing off criminals as "low-IQ" is a huge error. Sure they may be less educated, but I don't know if it's possible to concretely prove that the potential for intelligence is lower among someone committing a B&E than some random office worker. I would actually argue that many criminals are much smarter than they are given credit for. Certainly any successful criminal able to evade arrest for a serious amount of time is probably quite intelligent. Pretending like everyone who decided to rob a liquor store at age 19 is some idiot brute whose sole motivation is acting like a thug I think is one of those convenient narratives that feels true, but which overlooks a lot of what would push a person to actually act that way. [0] https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel-eisner-historical-trends-in-violence.pdf https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel...

bunderbunder 3y ago

> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), I suspect that often what happens for the most disadvantaged people is that the arrow of causality gets reversed - the deck gets so stacked against them that it's almost a crime to simply exist at all. And that, in turn, puts them into a desperate situation. There was an interesting piece of investigative journalism in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that I read maybe 10 or 15 years ago showing how policies set up by (then County commissioner) Scott Walker more-or-less made it implicitly illegal to live below the poverty line in a majority Black neighborhood in Milwaukee County. Not through any one law, but through a series of edge cases related to the interaction of laws and urban planning initiatives that were almost impossible for anyone without significant resources to navigate successfully.

dionidium 3y ago

> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes. People get angry. They feel disrespected. And some of them even just think violence is flat-out fun. The "desperate people" model doesn't really hold water with respect to the most serious crimes we care the most about. Second, I am aware that this sounds like some kind of right-wing talking point, but you should consider that it's true: a job at Dunkin Donuts is more remunerative than stealing catalytic converters. It's not even close, really. We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd. If they were genuinely just desperate, they'd take the job at Dunkin. We'll never effectively police crime if we can't even acknowledge its true nature.

tech_ken 3y ago
> Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes Sure violent crime is complicated. I'll walk back my claims with regard to things like domestic violence or violent crime resulting from a fight or something. However there is still the large component of violent crime that is things like an armed robbery, for which I believe my claim applies. Somewhere else in the thread someone brought up the link between impulse control and poverty, which I think also has bearing here. Poverty has been documented to increase baseline stress, and I would imagine that someone working multiple part time jobs just to afford rent and food is going to have a way shorter fuse than like, some tech worker earning a quarter million a year, but that's just speculation on my part. > We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd. I see your point here, and I don't think it's totally invalid, but I do think it fails to acknowledge the whole problem. For one, I think we would need to get some sense of how many people both work at DD and steal cats out of cars. I would imagine that it's not a small fraction of the population. While slinging donuts probably pays more than petty crime, it also requires more time. If you're already working one fast food job maybe you're just going to augment that salary with some theft rather than take on another 20-30 hours of work. There's also the pride factor, FF jobs can feel very degrading whereas some varities of crime are self-employment, you get to set your own hours and working conditions. Additionally FF jobs may not even hire you if you've already got a conviction or consume certain drugs. I do overall agree that there is some cultural stuff at play, a young man who grows up in a poor neighborhood and meets a lot of criminals is likely going to feel pressured to himself start committing crimes, but I also have to ask if you can truly blame someone for making that choice and if it makes sense to separate that choice from an overall feeling of desperation? If you're a young man who believes he has absolutely no prospects whatsoever to actually "succeed" following the typical career path then that means you have little to lose, and coming from that mindset I don't think it's totally unreasonable to say "fuck it" and start operating outside the law, even if it pays less than slinging burgers. Desperation breeds disaffectation, which in turn results in seriously anti-social behavior. If coolness was the only factor every affluent suburbanite teenager would also be cutting catties, but clearly that's not the case. Yes the ultimate consequence is something more than "I just need money so I'm going to turn to crime", but the underlying agitation which kicks off the chain of events is often socioeconomic disadvantage.

nonethewiser 3y ago

> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate You recognized that drug possession is widespread and illegal in SF. Are they committing these crimes because they are desperate? Since it really depends on the crime you cant largely attribute it to 1 factor.

shuckles 3y ago

I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail in the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it was indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would learn that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads to drug busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be careful when training ML models to remove sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are useless. A relevant reference: "Identifying and Measuring Excessive and Discriminatory Policing" - https://5harad.com/papers/identifying-discriminatory-policing.pdf https://5harad.com/papers/identifying-discriminatory-policin... In any case, recreational drug use might be uniformly distributed (and there is an interesting question of what anti-social activities are labeled "crimes"), it is definitely not the case that home invasions, car jackings, robberies, etc. are uniformly distributed. > On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. If you're looking for a single summary of why people commit crime, a better summary is: people commit crimes because they don't think they'll get caught. Desperation doesn't explain all that much.

saghm 3y ago
> I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail in the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it was indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would learn that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads to drug busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be careful when training ML models to remove sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are useless. This assumes that the police actually _want_ to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods. It's hard for me not to think that using ML models is intended to be a way to insulate the decision makers from accountability; pick a model that gives the results you want, don't divulge the details, and you'll never have to explain your actions because you were "just following the model".
- shuckles 3y ago
  No it's not. I'm making a claim about what ML models are capable of in response to someone incorrectly summarizing a possible weakness with them. If police don't want to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods, they don't need models to justify that. There is no jurisdiction in America where discretion has been ceded to statistical models.

IIAOPSW 3y ago

The only change I wish to suggest is the substitution of a term I'm trying to popularize. Replace "anti-social personality disorder" with "anus-type personality disorder".

Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago

>she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. Any data on type and frequency of drug used?

mushbino 3y ago

One of the issues I've noticed. I can say from first hand experience that many wealthy people and VC's use drugs fairly frequently. I'm sure most of these arrests involve poor people though. You never hear about the wealthy folks being busted for drugs.

0xcde4c3db 3y ago

It would probably also help if we, as a society, weren't so addicted to unhinged moral panics about drugs, which in turn supply political fuel for similarly reality-impaired "tough on crime" policy pushes. Right now it's fentanyl, but in the past it's been crack, LSD, marijuana, etc.. (Fentanyl clearly poses legitimate problems for various reasons, but people have increasingly treated it like it's some kind of sci-fi chemical weapon instead of a medicine that's routinely used in hospitals and nursing homes around the world.)

moneywoes 3y ago

interesting why not use that medical data?

caycep 3y ago

I feel like this is a real world analogy to false local minima magnified by a misguided implementation of gradient descent.

mkoubaa 3y ago

I'm far more afraid of artificial stupidity than of artificial intelligence

heavyset_go 3y ago

That's the point. Cops are only going invest in systems that confirm their biases and allow them to target the people they "know" are "the problem". If cops, for whatever reason, have a history of targeting a particular neighborhood, arresting people that fit a certain profile, etc, and suddenly their new computer system tells them to focus on other areas or demographics, then that system is broken to them. They "know" where the crime is, and if they listen to the system that tells them otherwise, criminals will get away and/or they won't be able to make easy arrests they want to make. Law enforcement is also incentivized to buy systems that they can point to and scapegoat if they do something wrong. "I'm just doing what the computer told me to do and machines can't be biased" is a good enough justification to a lot of people, including the justice system.

hammock 3y ago

>they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again This process is already a common complaint of police, without predictive software.

dilyevsky 3y ago

This is like pigeon superstition but for cops

Georgelemental 3y ago

> Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference. Nayib Bukele locked up all his country's criminals, and by doing so made a massive difference to the quality of life. The truth is, crime causes poverty at least as much as poverty causes crime. There is no tradeoff between "arrest criminals and get them off the streets" and "fix poverty", the latter in fact depends on the former.

atoav 3y ago

With the crime you actually really need to catch (e.g. murders, terrorism, armed robberies) the problem is that they are rare, compared to them not happening. Most people on here have probably never even witnessed a murder for example, and terrorism is even rarer. That means your prediction that eats data with mostly legal stuff all day must be extremely accurate to be useful. Let's say you wanna predict who a terrorist ist by the way they are walking at an airport. Given the high volume of people the answer will be: nearly nobody, except when they are. So your mechanism just produces false positives all day long and might encode stereotypes on the way. The most important aspect for me would be that we actually demand scientific evidence of such a thing working before our executive is allowed to use it. Everything else is a huge risk for civil rights and doesn't help to prevent actual crime either.

solatic 3y ago

> Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Issue: police are not trained to, nor are they responsible for fixing, the underlying "sickness". Police, social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists have very different missions, training, skillsets, perspectives, and dispositions. We can argue that society should invest more in social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists, but not that police should become social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists to cover for insufficient resources in those areas.

Gareth321 3y ago

> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. The data on poverty and crime isn’t directional. It’s not proven that poverty causes crime. It’s just as likely that crime causes poverty, or some other variables cause both.

Kiro 3y ago

Now explain the rise of gang violence in Sweden, with kids queuing to become gang members. I don't think poverty is the explanation (nor is immigration as some claims). There's no desperation here and plenty of options for other careers or life paths. No, they look up to the criminals. Being a gangster is cool and respect is everything. You need to respond violently to the most mundane things or you risk losing the respect. The ongoing conflicts started because of some truly ridiculous things, like someone not being invited to a robbery and feeling humiliated/jealous when they bragged about the crime. It's always some personal reasons where someone thinks they are being disrespected, and never about turfs like you would think.

jwestbury 3y ago

There was a really interesting episode of the podcast Hidden Brain last year about using medical data, but with a different approach -- the economist/sociologist Sara Heller did some research into predicting crime using medical data, or, more specifically, data about gunshot wounds. It turns out, you can predict gunshot victims quite well: They generated a large dataset for Chicago, then produced a list of the top 100 (IIRC) likely victims of gunshot wounds in the next year, and the people on that list had something like a 10% likelihood of being shot in the next year -- a more than 100x increase beyond the average Chicagoan. Dr. Heller's point, rather than being one about predictive policing in general, was that it's probably more effective to try to prevent people from becoming victims. They're actually running a longitudinal study right now -- Dr. Heller alongside Dr. Christopher Blattman -- looking at methods of preventative, positive intervention to reduce crime. Dr. Blattman has actually run some studies on this in Africa in the past, looking at giving people money, therapy, or a combination thereof, and found pretty impressive impact on reducing future criminal behaviour by giving people a modest monetary infusion alongside social support in the form of therapy and group sessions.

Ylpertnodi 3y ago
http://heyjackass.com http://heyjackass.com for Chicago numbers.
- chaps 3y ago
  That website is exceptionally biased in its motivations and doesn't give its sources of information. Take anything from it with a grain of salt and please try to identify other sources of information.

knallfrosch 3y ago

Is it really that hard to control for the police presence? Area A: We had 10 patrols of which 5 found drugs. Area B: We had 30 patrols of which 12 found drugs. I don't think it's too hard to notice that A is the better target for future controls, even though more drugs were found in B (when going by total numbers.) I think people on the left don't really want to admit that there are areas and populations that do indeed warrant more searches than others.

tech_ken 3y ago
> Is it really that hard to control for the police presence? You could probably answer this question by reading the original work, it's linked somewhere in this thread. > I think people on the left don't really want to admit that there are areas and populations that do indeed warrant more searches than others. Are you simply unaware of the 4th amendment? Or do you just not value it?
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  What 4th? Is that some US thing? In any case, I wasn't talking about "let's search this person's car because the person belongs to a minority", but rather "we control 10% of cars (randomized) passing through this intersection, because there's lots of crime in this area, and if the persons searched don't reflect the overall population mix, that's okay."