You can’t cheapen a word that already possesses a negative connotation.
I guess what i don’t get is why this is more offensive to people than PRISM or any of the domestic spying programs; it’s not terribly dissimilar. The primary difference is this is specifically targeting the areas where violence is out of control, and yeah, if you hang out with a bunch of gangbangers, then there’s a good chance you’re involved or can provide information regarding an incident. It’s not racism, it’s pragmatism. Is it better to continue to let the people in those communities be victimized as collateral damage for turf wars and gang rivalries?
The real solution is to break the cycle of poverty and lack of opportunity and education. Glorification of criminals in pop music and cinema doesn’t help either.
I’ve lived in Chicago for a long time, and I can tell you crime has absolutely gone down in most areas, so the CPD is continuing to make progress. The war zones perpetually plagued by drugs and gun violence remain the same, so I can’t fault the CPD for trying to explore alternative solutions.
As a Chicagoan who lives within walking distance of Englewood, and who has walked around in the neighborhood (during the day) many times and driven through it quite a lot, I can tell you that the majority of people living in Englewood are decent, law-abiding citizens who are doing their best to work with the CPD and other groups to bring safety and sanity back to the neighborhood.
The fact that some people turn out bad after growing up in bad circumstances isn’t surprising; the fact that MOST people don’t, despite their upbringing, is actually a much more interesting fact to focus on.
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This. I’d like this.
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I can’t speak to the models being used in this case, but I have worked with a group whose job was statistical modeling of consumer behavior for the purpose of risk management. For these models the predictive value is measured in dollars. Millions of dollars. They are able to show, in actual bottom-line dollars and cents, the economic impact the implementation of policies derived from their models. Statistical behavior modeling for risk-management and marketing is now a widespread fact of life for major companies. It is so widely employed for the precise reason of its testable ability to deliver large and measurable savings and profit. Here’s a book for general interest that discusses current trends in predictive analytics and the many impacts to society.
If Chicago PD is able to demonstrate a statistically significant impact on crime from the policies suggested by their model, is there really much room for complaint?
In case you haven’t noticed, though, a lot of people really object to those programs too; comparing them is not much of a compliment. And man, when isn’t supposed pragmatism the excuse for such things?
See, there’s a problem right there. You’ve imagined that preventing crime is the one thing a police department should be judged against, and it sounds like they’re doing the same. But taking that standard alone doesn’t leave much drawback to harassing or arresting anyone who seems even vaguely different.
The real measure should be how well police preserve people’s rights, of which preventing crime is only one part. They really ought to demonstrate their measures help with that, although in this case even the significant reduction in crime part still seems speculative.
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There’s a balance that must be struck, obviously. If policies result in fewer homicides, but also erode the pursuit of happiness of the people affected by the policies, someone has to decide what the trade-off is. How many homicides are we willing to tolerate in exchange for not hassling how many “at risk” citizens? Who should decide that trade-off? Difficult questions. I’m glad it isn’t my job to have to answer them.
It’s a balancing of competing values: Security and Liberty. In my opinion the end does not justifies the means. Lower crime rates is a desirable goal - but do you want to use every means to get there? We could e.g. reduce reoffending to zero by killing everyone convicted of a crime. Do we, as a society, want abolish such principles such as “innocent until proven guilty”? I’m, for my part, willing to take the insignificant higher risk to become a crime victim in exchange for more civil/human rights.
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So was eugenics.
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It seems very obvious to me that this is something the public should, if not decide, deserve some say on. That’s part of why keeping who the “at risk” citizens, and how they might determine whether their actions against them are appropriate, secret is so anti-democratic. It means nobody gets to know what new trade-off has been picked for them.
As a rule, though, I think we might have noticed by now that functional societies have generally erred on the side of not treating people as criminal based only on statistics and actions they might someday take. That’s enough that when someone extols the virtues of the opposite, I’m not simply going to take them at their word.
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Well, you’re all on the same forum as me, so you’re all suspect now. I am well known to be violent; I mean, look at my avatar for chrissakes.
The police will get around to visiting you eventually.
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Oh I am pretty sure nobody made you say that. But you’re very sweet with your little anecdotes and those fabulous red herrings, and that ad homimen is to die for.
I have every idea. Your friends fail to the level of their training. Just like everyone.
As example I give you Boston Massachusetts. A city in which almost no crime occurred from April 19 to 21, 2013. It worked, so was there any room for complaint?
Don’t worry: my avatar cancels yours out. We’re all safe, thanks to the law of averages.
I seriously doubt they’re using this system to go after pot users. Most likely they’re using it to go after gangs, people who are at risk of getting into shootouts (though there might be some targeting of potential dealers since gangs use drugs for revenue).
You’re just assuming the worst answer to every question, so let me give you the best answer instead:
[quote=“Polama, post:73, topic:24039, full:true”]
That’s how you’re going to help the kid, by telling his teachers he’s probably going to become a criminal?[/quote]
By asking them for their input, they might say, no he’s a good kid and the prediction is BS, or they might say yeah, the kid really needs help.
[quote]
And then when somebody steals something from the classroom, who do you think the teacher is going to suspect?[/quote]
The kids they mistrust, is this more likely to put the kid into that group? Sure, but the teacher knows a lot about the students already.
Don’t be a moron about the intervention. Say we think you’re a good kid but we’re worried about these negative influences around you, be careful you’ll get dragged in and they can really mess up your life.
Clearly they’re not using it for pot at this time, but it does illustrate how important the methodology can be. If they are unwilling to allow their datasets and algorithms to be inspected, it’s entirely possible that something similar may be occurring here.
But there are already teachers there, perhaps they could just, I dunno, keep doing their job and the police can stay out of it?
Sure, kids egoes are notorious resistant to abuse of power!
Yeah, negative influences like your older brother, uncles, and Grandfather, who have all spent years of their lives in jail due in part to the previous versions of statistics based class (and often race) oriented social engineering projects.
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Okay, ignoring the fact that you’ve made no argument that this is scientific, merely that it’s useful, I’ll move on to dealing with your arguments, though they are pretty unrelated.
If Chicago PD is able to demonstrate a statistically significant impact on crime from the policies suggested by their model, is there really much room for complaint?
There are lots of things that I, as an individual, could do that would have statistically significant significant impact on crime, but that I would hope to hell you would find room to complain about. It’s… such an incredibly short-sighted and narrow vision of “success”, that I hope to hell I never end up working with the sort of person who thinks this way (again), as they inevitably crash and burn and bring everyone else down with them (at least every single time I’ve seen this sort of attitude they have certainly TRIED).
The problem here, it seems, is that you think it’s the primary goal of the police to have “a statistically significant impact on crime”, and that you seem to think that our ability to judge their place in society as a whole is somehow limited by their adhesion to that policy.
It’s akin to implementing a policy at, say, Walmart, that puts guarded posts and full strip checks at every entrance to “reduce shrinkage”. If I worked for the company in a management role, I wouldn’t give two shits about “the statistical impact on shrinkage” this would result in - it would still be a terrible decision, because the primary goal of Wal-mart is not to reduce shrinkage. Even if there was someone who had that as the stated primary goal of their department, I would have total grounds to complain about such a policy and attempt to prevent it’s implementation, because it doesn’t serve the overall goals of the company as a whole.
So it is here.
Statistics are, at best, a useful fallback tool for when no better option is available, especially in situations where there is a minimal cost to guessing incorrectly. There’s a reason those who’ve tried to succeed on the stock market through statistical analysis have done so incredibly poorly, more often than not significantly worse than random chance. Making accurate predictions requires a LOT more than statistics - sure, it might be enough if you’re a poker player who’s making your life off gambling by edging the odds slightly in your favour, because you don’t need accurate predictions, you need predictions that are slightly better than random chance - and even there, you’re a lot better off if you can find a way to look at the deck instead. Statistics can be useful, but statistics are not science any more than a measuring cup is - they are just a tool, and can be used for any purpose you desire, pretty much. They can help you make better guesses in situations where you don’t understand what’s actually going on, sure. But action based on actual understanding, on science, is always going to be superior. Sometimes, like in the case of actuarial tables, we use it because it’s the best we have - the cost of achieving more information outweighs the benefits, and statistics works “well enough”. But in situations where there is a cost simply to guessing at all, as is the case here, the equations regarding the value of statistics changes immensely.
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Coming from a relatively poor school district, it’s not my experience that teachers know the students like this. In younger grades a teacher might have 35 new students every year, once teachers start specializing in a subject they have 100+. The very worst and very best students might be known, but the vast majority are somewhat anonymous. In that context, police intervention is the strongest evidence a teacher will have one way or another. Most students don’t talk with the teacher, don’t work terribly hard, are more interested in socializing than learning, and just skate by. In most cases the teacher won’t have any contradictory evidence: they don’t know the kid well. Could they be headed for a downward spiral? Sure, who can tell. Now suddenly the normal childhood sullenness or whatever is a sign of future crime.
In my experience, honors classes were never about ‘saving’ a problem child. Resources are very tight at a poor school, as are opportunities. Honors classes were a chance to take a small group who might have a good future, isolate them from the very strong anti-education tendencies among the general population, and give them a strong transcript for college. There were always more people that could benefit from the environment then there were spaces. If there’s a fear a student would turn disruptive over time, or that best case scenario they aren’t going to college, then in my experience they would never get a spot over somewho who seems pointed in the right direction already.
I remember a kid passing 6th grade with a 14 cumulative average. Never did any work. But wasn’t disruptive, so they were happy to just keep pushing him through the system. I can’t imagine that system going above and beyond very far to help one of the many problem children in a school.
The intervention is very tricky. Realistically, the biggest negative predictor is going to be a child’s family. Fighting a child’s behaviour is at least fairly straightforward: you are behaving bad, this will have bad consequences. But now it’s, you haven’t done anything wrong, but your environment is leading you to crime. The implication is that your family is bad. Your mother isn’t going to raise you quite right because your father isn’t around. Whatever. Even if you don’t say that, the message is implicit, that your family is wrong in some way. Maybe some children will respond to that, but I’d bet at least as many side with their family if you create that dichotomy.
If a child is actively disruptive, the teacher can identify that and begin whatever processes are in place. If they commit juvenile crime, we should absolutely intervene. But every time the school pulled a ‘somebody did something bad, so we’re punishing everybody’, or a ‘You haven’t done wrong yet, but I don’t trust you’, it just bred ill will among the students, never any sort of positive behaviour.
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