3 ms·

>waste police time. I dont know if you intended it but "wasting police time" is a pretty good book on the subject of administrative detections.

lmm 2y ago
It's not. It's a bunch of nonconstructive old-man-yells-at-cloud complaints. While it identifies a somewhat deep problem with crime metrics (what should you do when a reported crime was a real incident, but not something that warrants actually bringing charges or otherwise following up - something where "a policeman had a word with the guy" is actually the right solution that all parties are happy with) it contributes nothing to solving that problem (and, as the follow-up more or less acknowledged if you read it carefully enough, in fact made it worse).
- protocolture 2y ago
  Made it worse if you consider that the book prompted authorities to bury the problem further. They went from claiming administrative detections didnt exist, to admitting they exist, to obfuscating the system so they can claim administrative detections no longer exist. >it contributes nothing to solving that problem His solution was to remove administrative detections, so that beat cops dont: 1. Get rewarded for "detecting" 30 crimes, where the 30 crimes was 10 people being harmless in public 2. Spend all their time writing reports about their administrative detections instead of being a visible presence. "a policeman had a word with the guy" is I believe the authors wish. He seems to make a case for removing police powers to the point where they are little more than private citizens. I quite liked the old man yells at cloud format. But I didnt like his obsession with the yank sherrif.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > His solution was to remove administrative detections And replace them with what? There is no easy way to handle that scenario that doesn't create perverse incentives if you're managing police by statistics (and getting away from that is not something you simply do). If you treat them as permanently unsolved crimes, you'll turn them into pointless counterproductive arrests/charges. If you allow the police to just write them off without recording any details, they'll slip serious crimes through the same process. Frankly, administrative detections do "solve" the "crime" in every meaningful sense - the problem is treating "percentage of crimes solved" as a meaningful statistic in the first place, and shocked-pikachu-facing when you tell the police to solve a higher percentage of crimes and they respond by allocating more resources to crimes that are easier to solve.
    - protocolture 2y ago
      The other issues compounding this is that to make all this work, as the police grow they grow asymmetrically on the administrative side. So every dollar spent is slowly but surely less effective at performing basic police functions. >Managing police by statistics Thats the crux of the whole problem isnt it? The cops in the UK face the same issue as any tech business that cant scale. They are spending more effort measuring statistics and less effort on the business. To the point that, they gamified policing to ensure statistics are collected. >If you treat them as permanently unsolved crimes, you'll turn them into pointless counterproductive arrests/charges. Ok but the administrative detections skewed things away from serious crimes. Why detect 1 murder when you can detect 42 drug crimes across 3 people? And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day. And because they spent all their money on the people who will process and analyze that paperwork, they don't have another guy to replace him. Like the general thought the guy presents is that, 42 drug infractions letting you bust some kids balls and shake him down, but then removing you from the act of physical deterrence for the rest of the day is the fail state. If he wasnt incentivised to shake those kids down, he could have deterred some incalculable other crime. Perhaps those kids seeing the cop would have moderated their behavior, but now they are up on charges and the next group of kids on the same street corner are able to act without the cops watching (And this is when we leave the book and start talking about how many damn cameras the UK installs) I disagree with him but I understand the impulse to admire something constructed like a Sheriffs department in the US thats fairly divorced from a huge hierarchy. I wonder if he has similar complaints about policing in canada.
      - lmm 2y ago
        > Thats the crux of the whole problem isnt it? Right. So changing the details of the mechanism won't fix anything. And while I suspect the author would like to return to "let the police do what they like, and trust their judgement", that also has problems. > Ok but the administrative detections skewed things away from serious crimes. Why detect 1 murder when you can detect 42 drug crimes across 3 people? And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day. But it's not the administrative detection that's the issue there. If you make those arrests/charges you have exactly the same problem. The problem is deciding it's more important to solve 42/43 crimes than solve the murder, and that decision is happening outside of the police power structure. (It's also not entirely clear that it's wrong - reasonable people from all around the political spectrum have argued that preventing small crimes ultimately has a high long-term impact, in the same way that doctors save more lives by telling patients to lose weight than by everything else they do put together)

lmm 2y ago

It's not. It's a bunch of nonconstructive old-man-yells-at-cloud complaints. While it identifies a somewhat deep problem with crime metrics (what should you do when a reported crime was a real incident, but not something that warrants actually bringing charges or otherwise following up - something where "a policeman had a word with the guy" is actually the right solution that all parties are happy with) it contributes nothing to solving that problem (and, as the follow-up more or less acknowledged if you read it carefully enough, in fact made it worse).

protocolture 2y ago
Made it worse if you consider that the book prompted authorities to bury the problem further. They went from claiming administrative detections didnt exist, to admitting they exist, to obfuscating the system so they can claim administrative detections no longer exist. >it contributes nothing to solving that problem His solution was to remove administrative detections, so that beat cops dont: 1. Get rewarded for "detecting" 30 crimes, where the 30 crimes was 10 people being harmless in public 2. Spend all their time writing reports about their administrative detections instead of being a visible presence. "a policeman had a word with the guy" is I believe the authors wish. He seems to make a case for removing police powers to the point where they are little more than private citizens. I quite liked the old man yells at cloud format. But I didnt like his obsession with the yank sherrif.
- lmm 2y ago
  > His solution was to remove administrative detections And replace them with what? There is no easy way to handle that scenario that doesn't create perverse incentives if you're managing police by statistics (and getting away from that is not something you simply do). If you treat them as permanently unsolved crimes, you'll turn them into pointless counterproductive arrests/charges. If you allow the police to just write them off without recording any details, they'll slip serious crimes through the same process. Frankly, administrative detections do "solve" the "crime" in every meaningful sense - the problem is treating "percentage of crimes solved" as a meaningful statistic in the first place, and shocked-pikachu-facing when you tell the police to solve a higher percentage of crimes and they respond by allocating more resources to crimes that are easier to solve.
  - protocolture 2y ago
    The other issues compounding this is that to make all this work, as the police grow they grow asymmetrically on the administrative side. So every dollar spent is slowly but surely less effective at performing basic police functions. >Managing police by statistics Thats the crux of the whole problem isnt it? The cops in the UK face the same issue as any tech business that cant scale. They are spending more effort measuring statistics and less effort on the business. To the point that, they gamified policing to ensure statistics are collected. >If you treat them as permanently unsolved crimes, you'll turn them into pointless counterproductive arrests/charges. Ok but the administrative detections skewed things away from serious crimes. Why detect 1 murder when you can detect 42 drug crimes across 3 people? And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day. And because they spent all their money on the people who will process and analyze that paperwork, they don't have another guy to replace him. Like the general thought the guy presents is that, 42 drug infractions letting you bust some kids balls and shake him down, but then removing you from the act of physical deterrence for the rest of the day is the fail state. If he wasnt incentivised to shake those kids down, he could have deterred some incalculable other crime. Perhaps those kids seeing the cop would have moderated their behavior, but now they are up on charges and the next group of kids on the same street corner are able to act without the cops watching (And this is when we leave the book and start talking about how many damn cameras the UK installs) I disagree with him but I understand the impulse to admire something constructed like a Sheriffs department in the US thats fairly divorced from a huge hierarchy. I wonder if he has similar complaints about policing in canada.
    - lmm 2y ago
      > Thats the crux of the whole problem isnt it? Right. So changing the details of the mechanism won't fix anything. And while I suspect the author would like to return to "let the police do what they like, and trust their judgement", that also has problems. > Ok but the administrative detections skewed things away from serious crimes. Why detect 1 murder when you can detect 42 drug crimes across 3 people? And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day. But it's not the administrative detection that's the issue there. If you make those arrests/charges you have exactly the same problem. The problem is deciding it's more important to solve 42/43 crimes than solve the murder, and that decision is happening outside of the police power structure. (It's also not entirely clear that it's wrong - reasonable people from all around the political spectrum have argued that preventing small crimes ultimately has a high long-term impact, in the same way that doctors save more lives by telling patients to lose weight than by everything else they do put together)