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I think that you are completely missing the point. The problem is not about false positives, the problem is about the abusive behaviour to false positives. I ca

by honzzz 13y ago

I think that you are completely missing the point. The problem is not about false positives, the problem is about the abusive behaviour to false positives. I can totally understand that there are false positives but racial slurs, threats, shouting, refusal to provide water etc. are never ever justified. Abusive behaviour of this kind might be just a personal failure of some employee... in that case they need to be fired and severely punished. If those things happen on multiple occasions and nothing happens, nobody is fired/punished, nobody apologises... than you have a reason to believe that it is a systematic failure to uphold to certain standards commonly associated with states that are not police states. That seems to be the case in the US.

jmilloy 13y ago
That's fair. I tried to include this perspective as well. Personally I want to agree that this behavior is never ever justified, but do you know that being respectful has no impact on the number of actual violators that are caught? Instead, I expect there is a trade off, and I would sacrifice respect for increased efficacy, to an extent. Furthermore, the resources required to remove agents that misbehave compete with the resources to find violators. Ultimately, I think it's hard to tell from here if we're sacrificing too much respect given the results. I'd rather not have to become an expert in border control; I pay taxes so that someone else can do that. I can see, however, that many people find it hard to trust that someone else might know more than them. I think it's a shame that there is not enough transparency; is assuming the worst and crying foul without proper data really the best we can do?
- juliob 13y ago
  This just happened to my Aussie friend, although not to such a degrading degree. I don't think either event qualifies as a false positive. In either case, there was no evidence at all of an overstay. That's like a spam filter looking at your inbox and arbitrarily picking one email and putting it in your spam folder; would you call that a false positive? To have a false positive, there must be some sort of algorithm/procedure/heuristic, i.e. some sort of non-random selection mechanism. Otherwise, you don't have a spam filter, you have spam roulette. And that's how it is at the border with these immigration officers.

by honzzz 13y ago

jmilloy 13y ago

That's fair. I tried to include this perspective as well. Personally I want to agree that this behavior is never ever justified, but do you know that being respectful has no impact on the number of actual violators that are caught? Instead, I expect there is a trade off, and I would sacrifice respect for increased efficacy, to an extent. Furthermore, the resources required to remove agents that misbehave compete with the resources to find violators. Ultimately, I think it's hard to tell from here if we're sacrificing too much respect given the results. I'd rather not have to become an expert in border control; I pay taxes so that someone else can do that. I can see, however, that many people find it hard to trust that someone else might know more than them. I think it's a shame that there is not enough transparency; is assuming the worst and crying foul without proper data really the best we can do?

juliob 13y ago
This just happened to my Aussie friend, although not to such a degrading degree. I don't think either event qualifies as a false positive. In either case, there was no evidence at all of an overstay. That's like a spam filter looking at your inbox and arbitrarily picking one email and putting it in your spam folder; would you call that a false positive? To have a false positive, there must be some sort of algorithm/procedure/heuristic, i.e. some sort of non-random selection mechanism. Otherwise, you don't have a spam filter, you have spam roulette. And that's how it is at the border with these immigration officers.