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Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce

• lazyasciiart 4mo ago
  And if you need confessions, confessions will be made.
  • arjie 4mo ago
    Precisely! Illustrates the problem perfectly.
• pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
  > the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
  • arjie 4mo ago
    > And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be. I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
    • pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
      Somebody should make a website visualizing the data we do have, perhaps with uncertainty bounds, and a recursive breakdown locale-by-locale… Nose goes!! Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
  • TZubiri 4mo ago
    I think there's a bias in public discussion towards idealism, because most discussions will start by the argument that we need to reduce X, or we need to reduce Y. If there is a conflict and there needs to be a trade off, very few discussions and points will be about the tradeoff, but there will be a whole bunch of discussions about just plain reducing X or reducing Y.
• alexpotato 4mo ago
  To use a corporate example: People act like the only options are: - make it so hard to log in that no one can use a system - just give everyone root access You can build systems of approval that are fast, obvious who should be approving and are auditable.
  • evilduck 4mo ago
    You can also build systems that require secondary approvals without needing approval escalation up the chain. Creeping on women is a lot less likely if you need a peer or even a subordinate to review what you're doing.
    • calgoo 4mo ago
      They will just find some other creepy friend that will sign off without looking, in exchange for them getting the same treatment. It needs to go to a different system, with different priorities, but even then we know of corrupt judges rubber stamping warrants. Why dont we have a AI verify that each search is tied to a real case, and if its not block their access and they now have to go before a judge to explain why they should be unblocked and what they where doing. If they are going to use AI against us, then we should use AI to make sure they dont commit any crimes.
      • Obscurity4340 4mo ago
        This isnt even AI, its just basic control acess or whatever. The same or a similar thing already exists with doctors and nurses, particularly when a celebrity patient comes round. Not your patient/zero nexus for you to be involved in accessing their private medical charts? Out you go
      • handoflixue 4mo ago
        You could easily just do both - peer review gives you immediate access, then a supervisor audits it on a slightly slower time scale. Make anyone who signed off on access an accomplice to the crime so that peers and supervisors have an incentive not to rubber-stamp everything
• bigbadfeline 4mo ago
  > Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. That statement doesn't make any sense. What's the ideal number? +Infinity? "Not zero" includes that too. There has to be a way to place a ceiling on the number, asking for a non-zero "ideal" doesn't do that, on the contrary, it hides the all important question of what will keep the numbers low enough. Using this case an example, if the offender wasn't abusing the system hundreds of times in the span of 1.5 years, he would've never been caught. So, we don't even know the real, "non-zero", number of such cases. That's a big problem.
  • gavinsyancey 4mo ago
    The point the poster is trying to make by "the ideal number ... is not zero" is: There is a trade-off where a more complete and accessible surveillance apparatus could allow crimes to be solved but invites the system to be abused by police. So when we think about how much of a surveillance system we as a society want to allow, it is probably somewhere between "nothing" and "everything". Therefore, - It is worth allowing some crimes to go unsolved in order to prevent abuse of the surveillance state. ("The ideal amount of unsolved crime is not zero") - It might be worth allowing enough surveillance that it will inevitably be abused to some degree in order to help solve crime. ("The ideal amount of abuse of surveillance is not zero") Thus instead of centering discussions around "thing bad", it's probably more productive to talk about how we can get as much as possible of the upside while reigning in a use, and considering where we want the tradeoff to be. Given the power dynamics at play I'm not convinced I agree -- Flock is closely associated with Peter Thiel who is explicitly anti-democracy, and police are notorious for covering up crimes committed by fellow police. But I suppose it is worth considering that safe ethical surveillance (if it existed) could have some value, while keeping in mind that what we are getting is very far from that.
• AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
  > If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted. That's the legislator's fallacy. "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this." Suppose you address the problem in other ways, e.g. improve the economy and reduce poverty so there is less crime, or reform the laws so that we're not providing violent gangs with funding sources by criminalizing the consensual behavior of adults. Warrantless surveillance is not the only option and it's a bad one. > Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them. This has the same shape as "attempts to enforce the law will be likely met with methods that are immune to it". Government agencies are going to buck attempts to hold them accountable for abuse. The goal is to make their attempts ineffective, not to throw up our hands because doing it right isn't easy. Or let's turn your reasoning against itself: We have a law against the police misusing surveillance, so then all the cameras should be destroyed as the backlash against the police violating the law, right? Either your argument is sound and we should get on with destroying all the cameras because the police are breaking the law and we'll just have to use other means to deal with other people breaking other laws, or people are actually willing to tolerate a significant amount of lawbreaking, and then we should get on with destroying all the cameras because they're dangerous and the claim that we can't because people won't tolerate the law going unenforced is empirically deficient.
  • xigoi 4mo ago
    > Suppose you address the problem in other ways, e.g. improve the economy and reduce poverty so there is less crime The idea that reducing poverty will entirely eliminate crime is laughable.
    • tjbrock 4mo ago
      The quote says "reduce poverty so there is less crime", not "reducing poverty will entirely eliminate crime." Aren't those very different things? Seems like a bad reading of what they said. If you disagree with what they said, address it directly instead of addressing an exaggeration of what they said.
• kelnos 4mo ago
  An unsolved crime is much less serious than a crime committed using state apparatus, though.