zlacker

Except this is not how it works. We are not accurately predicting where crimes will occur, but maximizing the amounts of arrests.

Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on.

Meanwhile, wage theft, over twice the size of all other kinds of theft put together, keeps growing year after year.

Police patrols should be entirely reactive, and not proactive. Proactive policing does not work.

>>sudosy+(OP)
The 'proactive' is just driving or walking around a neighborhood. It isn't (necessarily) doing things like stop and frisk or just going around accosting random people on the street.

>>sudosy+(OP)
This is false. Socio-economically disadvantaged areas genuinely have more crime than elsewhere. They require more policing as a result. Without more policing, the crime problems get worse not better. Your sort of thinking has been tried out with disastrous results in cities throughout the US. It is actively harming law abiding citizens living in poor communities.

Policing is not causing crime. People committing crime is causing crime.

>>oh_sig+N1
It's not just driving or walking around a neighbourhood, it's doing your best to find the maximum amount of crime. Otherwise, you wouldn't need mathematical models in order to optimize the "efficacity" of the operation.

The vast majority of crime where police should be involved are crimes where the victim can call the police later. For those that don't fit this criteria, either police patrols are already ineffective (targeted assassinations, for example), or the police isn't being called because the victim thinks it will make the situation worse. Which in many cases is true, and I think fixing that problem would be a good step to take.

>>sudosy+(OP)
Police patrols should be entirely proactive otherwise they are responses instead of patrols. The only point of police patrols is to have a moving and visible presence in the community.

>>sudosy+u3
I guess I don't really understand what is generally wrong with a police officer looking for a crime being committed in public and then stopping it?

>>austin+y3
There are many cases of reactive police patrols. For example, at a protest, as a response to a people feeling that it could help their community, and so on.

I assure you mathematicians aren't optimizing the "visbile presence in the community". That's not something you need a mathematician for. Mathematicians are optimizing the ability of police to maximize the number of arrests by deciding which areas they should patrol in order to maximize crime.

>>austin+y3
Count me as one people would rather the cops just respond when called than cruise around looking for crime. If it's that important someone will call it in. If they want a better response time they can do what EMTs do and forward deploy.

>>sudosy+u3
In the town where I grew up the most common non-traffic emergency calls were calls of injury of which the most serious were cardiac distress. The police used mathematical models to position two SUV patrols at opposite sides of town where each contained some manner electric cardio medical device for rapid response to heart attacks.

>>retort+b2
Wage theft in the US is the majority of theft. Tell me, are people in socio-economically disadvantaged areas committing more wage-theft?

You have to ask yourself why there is more crime in poor areas. The answer is that we don't go looking for or don't care about the crime that happens in other areas as much, and that the socio-economic conditions lead to more crime. You can't fix these issues by sending police there to act like an occupying army. You can only fix the root cause.

As a personal anecdote, having grown up in such places, people have so many bad experiences with police that they genuinely don't want to call them when their presence might maybe help. So is sending police patrols to maximize the number of arrests and create ever more negative experiences the solution? No. You have to fix the root cause.

>>retort+b2
"Without more policing, the crime problems get worse"

Do you have a source?

>>sudosy+K4
> I assure you mathematicians aren't optimizing the "visbile presence in the community".

How, is this your line of work?

>>sudosy+(OP)
It’s intuitive and true that poor homes and neighborhoods are going to house more crime. Now, is the solution to arrest them and send them to jail for long periods of time? I don’t know. Arguing that the poor aren’t more susceptible to crime is a losing battle though.

>>sudosy+K5
I'm sorry but I don't take your anecdotes seriously. I've seen too many legitimate uses of police force described as "police brutality" recently to take accusations of police brutality at face value. It seems that people have convinced themselves of police brutality through popular narrative and twisted anecdotes.

Removing criminal elements from communities creates safer communities, which is a prerequisite for people thriving.

>>retort+b2
I think it's disingenuous to say this in absolute terms. Simply by pointing out that poor people many times can't bail themselves out before a hearing, and suffer all the consequences (like lost job, lost home) that come with that, is proof that the system is at least to a degree stacked against poor people.

>>austin+B5
Sure, this is also done in my city. Except that isn't the responsibility of police, but that of the EMS service/paramedics/firefighters. If the police are doing that in your town I also think that's problematic, because many people won't call if they know the police are going to come for injuries.

>>sudosy+(OP)
When you say "..which leads to more crime" I'm going to presume you mean that it leads to catching a higher percentage of the existing crime, which leads to more police, which leads to catching a higher percentage yet again.... rather than the direct interpretation that police presence causes crime.

>>jimbob+o6
> It’s intuitive and true that poor homes and neighborhoods are going to house more crime.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to assume certain truths based upon intuition.

>>retort+I6
duuuuude chillax, if police stop reporting crime, crime will naturally disappear.

>>austin+76
My guess is that it is hard to measure "moving and visual presence in the community" and input it into a machine. Not that it wouldn't be nightmarish to communities that have already been overpoliced if that's what was being maximized. I don't want armed guards exclusively patrolling the streets of poor and minority neighborhoods.

>>sudosy+07
> because many people won't call if they know the police are going to come for injuries.

That is not what occurred in practice and there is no data to suggest this would ever be a probable outcome. At any rate people don’t have a choice on who responds if the call is to 911.

>>throwa+M4
You might be underestimating the prejudice of the people calling things in to the police. Listening to police radio for just a few hours I was astounded at the things people report to the police: 1) A man and young girl walking down a country road... the man happened to be a minority, the girl was white. Police decided to check it out. 2) A man wearing camoflague and carrying a long rifle.. in a country area, during duck hunting season. Police decided to check it out.

>>jimbob+o6
> It’s intuitive and true that poor homes and neighborhoods are going to house more crime.

I challenge your assumption. To me it seems intuitive that crimes are committed at higher rates by the socioeconomically advantaged, because they can get away with it.

See for example that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the general population.

https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing...

>>retort+I6
When the NYPD did a work slowdown, rates of crime according to their own data went down.

>>pessim+B9
Not at all. You can measure average density of patrols in various areas at various times, the mean and average distance between patrols, the average response times for different patrols to converge onto a response. You can also poll the community on perceptions of local police, visibility, community satisfaction, and so on. To say this sort of thing is too hard to measure really only means you don’t want the data.

>>austin+76
This is addressed at the very start of the article. It's about predictive policing.

>>jimbob+o6
If we look at theft like the OP does, wage theft vastly outnumbers other types of criminal theft.

>>sudosy+(OP)
Not all crime is equal, and to present crime as purely a dollar value is a bit disingenuous. Wage theft is important, and isn't pursued nearly enough, but it isn't on the same level as violent crime, which happens primarily in disadvantaged communities.

Completely agree on proactive policing. End the drug war and it would cease to be necessary.

>>austin+Ba
> there is no data to suggest this would ever be a probable outcome

The data behind 911 Good Samaritan laws[1] that protect people from being arrested when they call in overdoses would like to have a word with you.

[1] https://www.shatterproof.org/advocacy/state-by-state-informa...

>>austin+76
Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but it doesn't seem to me that you'd need fancy predictive mathematics to get reasonable solutions for community visibility.

>>oh_sig+H4
We create what we look for

>>kingka+Sp
Are doctors creating cancer and high cholesterol?

>>retort+b2
In his defense, there are some crimes (like smoking weed) that everyone commits, but that only get prosecuted in places the police decide to patrol.

>>austin+Ba
In my city if there is a 911 call for a medical emergency you will get the firefighters or the ambulance faster, and depending on the emergency might not get police at all.

In any case, if you are giving anyone defibrillators and locating them to minimize response time to cardiac incidents, it would be absurd to give it to the police.

>>DenisM+yx
Doctors actually fix cancer and high cholesterol, police simply takes the criminals away but does not fix crime. It's an approach to crime about as sophisticated and effective as blood-letting and amputations - works sometimes, makes everything worse when that's all you use.

>>sudosy+OW
How do you know that removing criminals away does not reduce crime?