Our Boys In Blue

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Our Boys In Blue

Postby Blossom » Thu Feb 06, 2014 12:54 pm

So, there's a car crash. It happens. Ambulance, fire truck show up. As per training, fire truck pulls in behind the ambulance and positions itself to block the adjacent lane of traffic while rescue is going on. CHP officer shows up, cuffs and detains firefighter for blocking traffic.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 8:09 pm

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 8:52 pm

I know a guy who works administrating legal and justice system grants for a State government and is known for being extremely pro-police.

I actually said "I mean, this is, no joke, the first step to actually making Thoughtcrime a legitimate real offence." and his only reply was "correct".
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Büge » Fri Feb 21, 2014 10:39 pm

Oh come on. If three albino psychics in a sensory-deprivation tank can't do it, what's to say a computer programmed by humans can?
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:04 pm

Being creeped out by the existence of such a thing is not going to make it stop existing, so you run into the old saw about power: it's not good and it's not evil by itself, but only in the way that it is used. If the article is to be taken at face value then the PD's usage so far seems to be "Let's find the most unstable people in the city and aggravate them", so we're not off to particularly auspicious start, but I guess the Romans weren't allowed to marry each other in a day.

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:17 pm

Wellllll... the "This is coming and you can't stop it!" might have more legitimacy if you accept premise that the computer program is giving accurate information. The cops involved have stonewalled pretty much any attempt for people to learn about the workings of this (most notably "So what's the proportion of dudes flagged by this thing who're black?").

The thing is, I actually work daily with people who write and maintain algorithms that detect criminal behaviour. From time to time, I even suggest algorithm modifications myself as part of my job.

Granted we're just some stupid corporation that can barely find it's own asshole, but while those programs are useful in their own way, there's no way you could rely on them as the first point of judgment. Worse, I see certain people in my department who constantly abuse the system to boost their performance numbers or use them to justify a "gut feeling" they have when it's pretty clear they're harassing a legitimate person, usually a new immigrant, or a kid - someone who can't fight back, who doesn't know how to raise hell or complain.

I get that this is supposed to increase police efficiency, but the thing is you can also boost police efficiency (mostly against low-level crime) by instituting a good old fashioned police state. Regardless of the methods used - old or new - it is incredibly inappropriate to proactively and personally approach targeted individuals with no or minimal criminal record and say "WE'RE WATCHING YOU!" Like, the article is actually describing behaviour typical of police and state officers in actual police states. Only justification is now BECAUSE SCIENCE rather than a mustachioed leader who says his bully boys can do whatever they want. But the end behaviour is the same.

No machine is going to perfectly predict the future. Not for now anyway and not even remotely closely. I know we're making leaps and bounds in computing technology, but suggesting we can predict the future at the individual level is absurd to the tenth power. The possibility for error and abuse here is exponentially higher than any possible benefit.

Modern Justice systems are supposed to have massive and repeated safeguards simply because the possibilities for mistakes, laziness, and outright abuse are just too high to risk. It's why we accept something as seemingly unbalanced as Blackstone's Formulation as sacrosanct. Because we have accepted that a non-zero amount of crime will occur because other social needs trump the need for police efficiency. Because we need safeguards that stringent to balance the probability of abuse by our arbiters of the law.

This represents a huge erosion of those safeguards, as well as an encroachment by the state on the most private space you have - your own thoughts, on especially vulnerable people, no less. Were I in the US I would write my congressman (no matter where I lived) and would generally do everything I could to raise hell about this. If anyone so much as dreams of implementing this here, I would fight it tooth and nail and hoof and claw.

:tldr:

No really, this is the slippery slope to Thoughtcrime.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:25 pm

I leave it largely open to interpretation but I expect most people here to consider "appropriate usage" to mean maybe an aide to plot patrols and resource allocations, nothing more. Certainly not as a warrant for any sort of direct interaction, I mean what the hell do you even think if you're living on society's edge and a cop shows up to your house one day and is like "YEAH OUR COMPUTERMACHINE SAYS YOU'RE PROBABLY AN ASSHOLE, NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, JUST LETTING YOU KNOW WE INTEND TO TREAT YOU LIKE SHIT KTHXBYE."

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:27 pm

Brentai wrote:I leave it largely open to interpretation but I expect most people here to consider "appropriate usage" to mean maybe an aide to plot patrols and resource allocations, nothing more. Certainly not as a warrant for any sort of direct interaction, I mean what the hell do you even think if you're living on society's edge and a cop shows up to your house one day and is like "YEAH OUR COMPUTERMACHINE SAYS YOU'RE PROBABLY AN ASSHOLE, NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, JUST LETTING YOU KNOW WE INTEND TO TREAT YOU LIKE SHIT KTHXBYE."

Brent,

The article itself states that a targeted individual had an officer show up at his door for a "chat".

They are going to people's houses. This is a thing that is happening right now.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:27 pm

A good comment from elsewhere:

[the potential for abuses] is really compounded by the fact that absurdly too many things are illegal in the united states. We're to the point where every single American commits jailable offenses every single day, but enforcement is dependent on someone caring and calling the police. This is already eroding a lot of how the justice system is really supposed to function. So if you combine that kind of thing with ANY program to attempt a higher degree of enforcement or prediction, you're going to get disgustingly abusive basically overnight.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:35 pm

Mongrel wrote:
Brentai wrote:I leave it largely open to interpretation but I expect most people here to consider "appropriate usage" to mean maybe an aide to plot patrols and resource allocations, nothing more. Certainly not as a warrant for any sort of direct interaction, I mean what the orange do you even think if you're living on society's edge and a cop shows up to your house one day and is like "YEAH OUR COMPUTERMACHINE SAYS YOU'RE PROBABLY AN ASSHOLE, NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, JUST LETTING YOU KNOW WE INTEND TO TREAT YOU LIKE coconut KTHXBYE."

Brent,

The article itself states that a targeted individual had an officer show up at his door for a "chat".

They are going to people's houses. This is a thing that is happening right now.


Are you somehow under the impression that I'm just coincidentally bringing that up?

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:38 pm

I read your post as "Well, there are some reasonable uses for this to trend things in a general sense, but I don't think they'll be going to people's houses and talking to them directly or anything."

Apologies if I parsed that incorrectly.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:39 pm

There are reasonable uses for this tool.

We are not witnessing them in practice.

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:41 pm

See, I don't think any of the potentially reasonable uses of this tool are worth the risk of its use. Not only do I think the benefits are not worth the risk, but I think the scales on that are wildly unbalanced, that the risk of damage vastly outweighs the benefits by orders of magnitude.

Social risks are not the same as environmental or mechanical risks. I am not usually given to slippery slope arguments, but the past fifteen years have not been very good for civil liberties and that perilously greased hill.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:45 pm

glocks4interns wrote:Maybe NYC could get a similar program going for white collar crime.

"Hello Mr. Investment Banker, I see your fund did very well last year. be careful."


Oh man, could you imagine if they started doing this?

Haha. Neither can I.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Büge » Fri Feb 21, 2014 11:48 pm

To a cop, the explanation is never that complicated. It's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch-criminal behind it all. If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you're gonna find out you're right.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Angryoptimist » Sat Feb 22, 2014 2:42 pm

I'm not sure this is something we should be allowed to have while we've got unjust laws and police who sometimes seem to think they're at war with the citizenry. At a minimum.

Then we get into the issues of precrime. Then we get into the issues of whether a uniformly sterling police force with perfect laws wouldn't be a bit too tempted with such a thing (i.e. tempted to enforce social or moral codes external to the written law).

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Bal » Sun Feb 23, 2014 9:38 pm

Don't think of this as a gross violation of the public trust, think of it as one more step toward our inevitable Cyberpunk future. I'm hoping some kind of corporation can figure out a way to integrate this into some kind of AR display in those glasses cops all seem to wear.

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Tue Apr 08, 2014 4:59 pm

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/lapd-officers-monkey-wrenched-cop-monitoring-gear-in-patrol-cars/

LAPD installs automatic voice recording for police cars. Police destroy antennas en-masse to sabotage system.


Oh LAPD
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Classic » Tue Apr 08, 2014 6:51 pm

Did that anonymous officer really just talk about being in a back alley for 45 minutes with someone "reluctant to talk" as "opening a can of worms"?
Did that person really just suggest that they shouldn't be monitored when the first thing someone will suspect of those unaccounted for 45 minutes is an impromptu violent interrogation!?

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Apr 08, 2014 11:28 pm

It'd be really inconvenient if people were to somehow care about LA's civilian population.

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