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The real issue is accountability - officers need to be held accountable for reports the way pilots are accountable for use of auto-pilot[1]. [1] yes they are:

by asah 1y ago

The real issue is accountability - officers need to be held accountable for reports the way pilots are accountable for use of auto-pilot[1]. [1] yes they are: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+use+of+auto-pilot https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+u...

adriand 1y ago
That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it. The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  Here's the thing. I've read thousands of police reports. Most police reports are super short and super vague. Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Most criminal charges result in plea deals. Most defendants will never see any evidence against them before pleading guilty†. If, in the exceptionally rare case that a defendant goes to trial, an officer has to testify, it is probably on average a year after he wrote the report. He will be sat down just before trial by the prosecutor and shown his report and asked to read it. On the stand he generally will not have his report available to reference and is supposed to use his memory, but this will be corrupted by his reading of whatever is in the report he read a couple of hours before. If his report is full of inaccuracies he will almost certainly testify under oath to those. †This situation has changed very slightly in the last few years with lawyers now supposed to verify the probable guilt of their client before recommending a guilty plea.
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    > Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Watch the videos of Judge Fleischer on YouTube, dealing with probable cause. It is OBVIOUS from these videos that the first time the prosecutor has EVER read the report (and bear in mind, this is THE report, the police report establishing probable cause for the arrest in the first place). And most of them are entirely garbage. "Was observed in a vehicle" "Was he driving?" "Doesn't say"... "Initiated a traffic stop?" "Why?" "Doesn't say..."
hollywood_court 1y ago
Law enforcement needs greater accountability altogether. I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior. It’s astonishing that police officers aren’t held to the same standards as the rest of us. As a carpenter and building contractor, if I showed up at the wrong address and built or tore down something by mistake, I’d be financially and legally responsible. I’d be expected to make it right, and my insurance would likely step in. But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  Politically, you could probably sell the insurance idea as actually protecting officers. But then you'd get the wrong people opposing it...
  - lapphi 1y ago
    We could call it a cost cutting measure to save the taxpayer billions in unnecessary legal fees and settlements.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Chesterton’s fence cones to mind. I wonder what unintended positive effects the current policy has.
  - ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
    Chesterton's fence, as properly applied, should have been considered when granting the immunity we see now. e.g. I wonder what unintended (or perhaps intended) negative effects the current policy has compared to the previous one.
hxtk 1y ago
I really wish policing would take more inspiration from aviation on a different avenue for police accountability. The NTSB exists not to blame pilots (though they sometimes do), but to make air travel safer and prevent future plane crashes. In the business of preventing disaster in safety-critical industry, if you chalk something up to human error or call it a tragic accident, you guarantee that it will happen again. Finding that everyone did everything by the book means the book needs to be rewritten because the book that exists today contains a recipe for plane crashes. I wish police would treat use of force incidents the same way. The investigations after police use of force ask whether the officer violated the law or department policy. Like most law enforcement and judicial work, the exercise focuses on identifying, trying, and punishing guilty parties. If there is no guilty party, the process can produce no change. I would like to see more investigations into police use of force that focus on improving safety outcomes instead.
- KingMob 1y ago
  > I wish police would treat use of force incidents the same way Cops have the system they want. They won't voluntarily change it unless forced.
tehsolution 1y ago
The solution to police state is more policing? What about less? Take away guns and reach of the cops and politicians? Accountability by making 900k cops across all levels of government stripped of power and made normal people? Same for the 600k politicians coast to coast. Screw their story mode mental illness. Make everyone busy generalizing logistics process to serve biology and stop with story mode hustling memes about fiat (vacuous proclamations) valuations using jargon from the 1800s? Roughly 1.5 million pols and cops have 10s of millions wrapped around their finger. With urbanization the best part is a bunch of them live just a few miles from any given large urban area full of people being screwed by them. The time for demanding meager reforms from 60+ year olds who have no skin in our future is long gone. Skip the guns and go the route of making everyone a normie civil servant and no one has leverage https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-make-us-all-cops https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak... Except the low level gossipy kind like “so n so cheated”. Statistical analysis of death trends suggest we kill each other on Main Street over such gossip at the same rate humans did centuries ago. It’s those moments of nation state fueled atrocity and imperialism when human death spikes. Seem clear in the streets most adults just don’t go on murderous rampage.
- ta8645 1y ago
  That's incredibly naive. Spend some time watching police body camera footage. By and large, the police are doing exceptionally well in hostile and difficult circumstances. We're all safer because there is a real counterforce to tough guys, mafias, and paramilitary strong men. They don't exist or are heavily controlled, because the police are a powerful force for good. Taking away the police would create a power vacuum that would be filled faster than you can imagine; and by people who will treat us all much worse than the police ever have.
  - teddyh 1y ago
    If you make that conclusion after watching police camera footage, aren’t you making a classic survivorship bias fallacy? Those films are not a randomly-selected representative sample. Those films that you watched were those films that 1. Were allowed by the police officer themselves to be recorded in the first place (i.e. the cameras were either deliberately switched on, or at least suffered no timely “camera malfunctions”) 2. And also only films which made it through the filter of being considered suitable for publication, after the fact. What you have actually been watching are carefully-selected propaganda pieces that, even assuming they are indiviually true and unaltered, are undoubtedly presenting a false view, supporting the powers that select them.
pbronez 1y ago
Yes. It doesn’t matter exactly how each word in the police report was entered. All that matters is the officer signed off on it. They should be personally & totally responsible for the contents of the report. I don’t care if they use generative AI, speech to text, Dvorak touch typing, QWERTY hunt-and-peck or anything else. An officer must read the final report and sign to assert its accuracy. If police reports are low quality, it’s an officer performance problem. Obviously performance management in public safety is exceptionally challenging, but that’s the problem domain that matters. You cannot solve law enforcement accountability by tweaking your AI User Interface. That said, this seems like a missed opportunity to use technology to increase accountability. If you’re running speech to text on body cam footage, great! Everyone involved in the conversation should get a copy of the transcript. There should be a straightforward way to challenge STT errors. Again though, it’s the same deal as the body cam footage itself. Always-on body cams with default public access are one thing, officer-managed, sue-to-review is quite another. The crucial issues are political, not technical.

by asah 1y ago

adriand 1y ago

That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it. The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.

qingcharles 1y ago
Here's the thing. I've read thousands of police reports. Most police reports are super short and super vague. Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Most criminal charges result in plea deals. Most defendants will never see any evidence against them before pleading guilty†. If, in the exceptionally rare case that a defendant goes to trial, an officer has to testify, it is probably on average a year after he wrote the report. He will be sat down just before trial by the prosecutor and shown his report and asked to read it. On the stand he generally will not have his report available to reference and is supposed to use his memory, but this will be corrupted by his reading of whatever is in the report he read a couple of hours before. If his report is full of inaccuracies he will almost certainly testify under oath to those. †This situation has changed very slightly in the last few years with lawyers now supposed to verify the probable guilt of their client before recommending a guilty plea.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  > Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Watch the videos of Judge Fleischer on YouTube, dealing with probable cause. It is OBVIOUS from these videos that the first time the prosecutor has EVER read the report (and bear in mind, this is THE report, the police report establishing probable cause for the arrest in the first place). And most of them are entirely garbage. "Was observed in a vehicle" "Was he driving?" "Doesn't say"... "Initiated a traffic stop?" "Why?" "Doesn't say..."

hollywood_court 1y ago

Law enforcement needs greater accountability altogether. I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior. It’s astonishing that police officers aren’t held to the same standards as the rest of us. As a carpenter and building contractor, if I showed up at the wrong address and built or tore down something by mistake, I’d be financially and legally responsible. I’d be expected to make it right, and my insurance would likely step in. But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.

moron4hire 1y ago
Politically, you could probably sell the insurance idea as actually protecting officers. But then you'd get the wrong people opposing it...
- lapphi 1y ago
  We could call it a cost cutting measure to save the taxpayer billions in unnecessary legal fees and settlements.
barbazoo 1y ago
Chesterton’s fence cones to mind. I wonder what unintended positive effects the current policy has.
- ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
  Chesterton's fence, as properly applied, should have been considered when granting the immunity we see now. e.g. I wonder what unintended (or perhaps intended) negative effects the current policy has compared to the previous one.

hxtk 1y ago

I really wish policing would take more inspiration from aviation on a different avenue for police accountability. The NTSB exists not to blame pilots (though they sometimes do), but to make air travel safer and prevent future plane crashes. In the business of preventing disaster in safety-critical industry, if you chalk something up to human error or call it a tragic accident, you guarantee that it will happen again. Finding that everyone did everything by the book means the book needs to be rewritten because the book that exists today contains a recipe for plane crashes. I wish police would treat use of force incidents the same way. The investigations after police use of force ask whether the officer violated the law or department policy. Like most law enforcement and judicial work, the exercise focuses on identifying, trying, and punishing guilty parties. If there is no guilty party, the process can produce no change. I would like to see more investigations into police use of force that focus on improving safety outcomes instead.

KingMob 1y ago
> I wish police would treat use of force incidents the same way Cops have the system they want. They won't voluntarily change it unless forced.

tehsolution 1y ago

The solution to police state is more policing? What about less? Take away guns and reach of the cops and politicians? Accountability by making 900k cops across all levels of government stripped of power and made normal people? Same for the 600k politicians coast to coast. Screw their story mode mental illness. Make everyone busy generalizing logistics process to serve biology and stop with story mode hustling memes about fiat (vacuous proclamations) valuations using jargon from the 1800s? Roughly 1.5 million pols and cops have 10s of millions wrapped around their finger. With urbanization the best part is a bunch of them live just a few miles from any given large urban area full of people being screwed by them. The time for demanding meager reforms from 60+ year olds who have no skin in our future is long gone. Skip the guns and go the route of making everyone a normie civil servant and no one has leverage https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-make-us-all-cops https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak... Except the low level gossipy kind like “so n so cheated”. Statistical analysis of death trends suggest we kill each other on Main Street over such gossip at the same rate humans did centuries ago. It’s those moments of nation state fueled atrocity and imperialism when human death spikes. Seem clear in the streets most adults just don’t go on murderous rampage.

ta8645 1y ago
That's incredibly naive. Spend some time watching police body camera footage. By and large, the police are doing exceptionally well in hostile and difficult circumstances. We're all safer because there is a real counterforce to tough guys, mafias, and paramilitary strong men. They don't exist or are heavily controlled, because the police are a powerful force for good. Taking away the police would create a power vacuum that would be filled faster than you can imagine; and by people who will treat us all much worse than the police ever have.
- teddyh 1y ago
  If you make that conclusion after watching police camera footage, aren’t you making a classic survivorship bias fallacy? Those films are not a randomly-selected representative sample. Those films that you watched were those films that 1. Were allowed by the police officer themselves to be recorded in the first place (i.e. the cameras were either deliberately switched on, or at least suffered no timely “camera malfunctions”) 2. And also only films which made it through the filter of being considered suitable for publication, after the fact. What you have actually been watching are carefully-selected propaganda pieces that, even assuming they are indiviually true and unaltered, are undoubtedly presenting a false view, supporting the powers that select them.

pbronez 1y ago

Yes. It doesn’t matter exactly how each word in the police report was entered. All that matters is the officer signed off on it. They should be personally & totally responsible for the contents of the report. I don’t care if they use generative AI, speech to text, Dvorak touch typing, QWERTY hunt-and-peck or anything else. An officer must read the final report and sign to assert its accuracy. If police reports are low quality, it’s an officer performance problem. Obviously performance management in public safety is exceptionally challenging, but that’s the problem domain that matters. You cannot solve law enforcement accountability by tweaking your AI User Interface. That said, this seems like a missed opportunity to use technology to increase accountability. If you’re running speech to text on body cam footage, great! Everyone involved in the conversation should get a copy of the transcript. There should be a straightforward way to challenge STT errors. Again though, it’s the same deal as the body cam footage itself. Always-on body cams with default public access are one thing, officer-managed, sue-to-review is quite another. The crucial issues are political, not technical.