3 ms·
If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in z
by curtisblaine 3y ago
If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? It's hard to buy into the rhetoric of "it's only fair if you monitor the crime equally" if you have already independently sampled it for decades and by now know the zones where it's much likely to happen.
Would you patrol a desert in the same way you patrol a busy road intersection if you're trying to prevent car accidents?
- cratermoon 3y ago> would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime You mean these zones? https://whitecollarcrime.zone/ https://whitecollarcrime.zone/
- kortilla 3y agoFor shotspotter? No. If someone made a system for detecting fraud, embezzlement, or insider trading, you bet your ass it would be deployed there.
- User23 3y agoThe problem is Bayesian priors look an awful lot like racism to the unaided eye, enough so that it's really hard to justify them. Or maybe it's racism masquerading as a Bayesian prior. I don't see how to know for sure either way.
- smt88 3y agoAlso if such devices (and law enforcement) worked well to reduce crime, the crime would move to less-surveilled areas. We don't see that happening anywhere.
- User23 3y agoI didn't realize that there's a conservation law for crime. Is this some kind of ingenious application of Noether's theorem that I haven't heard of?
- smt88 3y agoIf you're going to be sarcastic, you should to make a point that makes sense. Criminals react to successful surveillance and law enforcement. It's idiotic to suggest that they wouldn't.
- User23 3y agoYou are still claiming that crime is conserved. It's not possible, even likely, that a reduced cost-benefit for committing crime shifts preferences toward some non-criminal activity with a more attractive risk-reward profile?
- smt88 3y agoConservation of crime isn't a claim I made and it isn't relevant to my comment. If ShotSpotter were successful, crime would move to a different area and/or go down. Arrests would be made, so it's impossible to assume crime rates wouldn't change in that scenario. Neither happening in correlation with ShotSpotter installation, which is one way we know these tactics don't actually work.
- User23 3y agoThere are far too many confounds to draw a conclusion like "these tactics don't actually work." Speeding up police response to gunfire isn't going to have a measurable impact if the police aren't actually allowed to do anything when they get there, except maybe call the paramedics. We know at least one of the tactics that does work, because Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD provided demonstrative proof (and saved thousands of lives by drastically reducing murders). However, that also relies on Bayesian priors (or is it racism?) and thus has become unfashionable amongst the current ruling urban elite. It is highly plausible that a technology like ShotSpotter would be highly effective making such preemptive interventions more data driven and effective. Unfortunately, the ideological blinders many people choose to wear around criminology really makes it difficult to constructively discuss or address. After all this study is trying to present, in a weaselly way, the claim that ShotSpotter actually increases shootings. I'd love to hear the proposed mechanism for that. I'm sure it's something that makes superstition look sensible.
- curtisblaine 3y agoViolent crime is not a zero-sum game.
- bastawhiz 3y ago> would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? Both. I don't skip out on adding monitoring to my applications that don't crash as often. The crashes might be less frequent but that doesn't mean I don't need monitoring.