Using math to improve the effectiveness of the police is a good thing. This effort - however well intended maybe - would throw out the baby with the bathwater.
People who live in areas that experience high incidence of criminal activity also want to have crime reduced. They want someone to establish order—when you have a vacuum, someone will fill it, usually someone with even less oversight, though occasionally you can luck out with a benevolent dictator of sorts.
So yes people in those areas want policing —though they may also want some reform as well. Few people want no police. They know that’s a recipe for a power vacuum and the domino effect that has.
In this setting, it's less clear which "side of the force" is most impacted by the scientific input, but I think it might be reckless to simply cut them off without finding a better model for providing some of their more critical social services. In particular drug, mental health and domestic abuse interventions which sadly seems to be a very large portion of their workload.
> Using math to improve the effectiveness of the police is a good thing.
There isn't a mathematical definition for "police effectiveness" and any attempt at a quantitative metric for that sort of thing should be viewed with intense skepticism. If your "police effectiveness measure" is skewed towards making more arrests, then that metric clearly has problems and, if used by an actual US police force, would just result in excessive violence and lawless arrests against innocent black people. This is just an example but the risk is real. The fact that such a metric might be theoretically possible is not a good enough reason for engaging in research which will affect the lives of real people.
The only scientists who should be collaborating with police departments are sociologists and psychologists - and, as the hoary history of psychology demonstrates, even they should be treated suspiciously.
The biases are deep and insidious. They exist in each and every one of us. "Addressing" them is a complicated issue.
These instances are not the result of some nebulous ingrained tendency to view others as less than themselves, they're the result of a coordinated and deliberate attempt to assert power.
Your assertion that removing police would create a "vacuum" assumes incorrectly that there is currently a sense of "order" established. This is not the case, as there is no set of behaviors black men in particular can adopt which will not result in their extrajudicial execution. Police are more accurately viewed as an occupying militia and I see no reason to believe it would just as soon be replaced by something similar.
(Anti-Riot)Police see themselves as the entity that establishes order at the cusp of disorder.
When you have these kinds of confrontations (it could be internecine for all I care) you’re going to see that kind of human interaction. Neither person is a robot and thus the results are less than ideal.
What is worse is a power vacuum and the resulting gangs and warlordism (unless the community stands up its own local police force) but we’re back to policing.
- electricity (cellphone towers, refrigerators)
- food technology (producing food efficiently)
- medicine (vaccines, hospitals)
- hygiene (sewer system, clean water)