
Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings - pseudolus
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01874-9
======
pizza
The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US have starved the beast [0]
so greatly that the only remaining public infrastructure that functions as
it's intended to is policing. For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the
city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD.

For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves -
private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something
I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks.

On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller
police forces better than larger ones [1].

> _To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her
> students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common
> assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more
> positively residents evaluated the police services they got._

> _" Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative
> impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service
> provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their
> better trained and better financed larger neighbors.”_

> _But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in
> small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in
> community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge
> of the local area & more trust from people._

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/a_vansi/status/1270406823158468614](https://twitter.com/a_vansi/status/1270406823158468614)

~~~
rayiner
There is no austerity. Here is state-and-local spending as a percentage of GDP
from 1970 to present: [https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-
archive-re...](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-read-
only/wp-content/uploads/sites/1294/2016/07/11210814/30_003.jpg)

And here is GDP in 2010 dollars:
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=US)

State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to
15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a
factor of 3.5, even after _adjusted for inflation._

With respect to public infrastructure specifically, there has been no
austerity. For example, here is a graph of NYC subway ridership from 1970 to
2014:
[https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%...](https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C414px&ssl=1).
Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s
averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars:
[https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf](https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf)
(fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion
2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in
ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The
system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic failure in the last
few years.

The London transit system, by contrast, spends about $3.2 billion in capital
expenditures to run a system that is very similar in terms of age, size, etc:
[http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-
budget-2019-20.pdf](http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf). Despite
spending half as much money, London has been able to significantly grow the
network while keeping maintenance current and maintaining on-time performance.

Honestly, invocations of "starve the beast" and "austerity" are nothing more
than gaslighting. It's a cop-out for why our public services are so shitty,
even though we spend vastly more on them than we used to spend.

~~~
rtkwe
> Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s
> averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars:
> [https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf](https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf)
> (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5
> billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75%
> increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't
> enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic
> failure in the last few years.

Just because the spend per rider increased over that time doesn't mean the
system is getting what it needs though. A newer system will usually function
better than a starved system years later naturally because of deferred
maintenance and other aging infrastructure ailments even if the per rider
numbers have increased. Comparing it just on the per rider spend assumes that
the earlier number is enough.

~~~
graeme
The London underground was created in 1863 though:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground)

Though I suppose you would have to look at the state of thr system in the
1980s. NYC may have had more deferred maintenance.

~~~
rtkwe
One major thing is probably that the NYC subway did 24 hour operation
(recently stopped due to covid-19) so there wasn't an easy period for
maintenance tasks where the London Underground seems to run 5am-12am so
there's a nice 5 hour block for maintenance.

------
throwaway_pdp09
I don't know enough to agree or disagree, but to me having academics even ask
questions on the ethics of their work is the most important thing; if one's
work affects the real world then you can't duck responsibility for it.

~~~
ISL
Academics often ask ethical questions about their work. There are a huge
number of physicists who devote time to non-proliferation work, cleaning up
the ethical detritus from generations past.

~~~
ummonk
Well even that is not an ethically straightforward issue. Nuclear
proliferation reduces the frequency and typical intensity of violent
conflicts, in exchange for risking an extremely high intensity conflict.

~~~
RhysU
It's also about the only direction left. There's hardly any lawful, paid
proliferation to go around.

------
alexilliamson
People are boiling this down to "less crime = good". Like if a mathematician
can design a deployment system such that the percentage of crimes where an
arrest is made increases from 15% to 20%, how can that be a bad thing?

What if every single one of those additional arrests is a Black person? Well
that might require an additional look. It's possible that it's all Black
people doing those crimes. It's also possible that the mathematician built an
algorithm anchored on years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial
profiling.

Will the mathematician be able to say, "hey cops can we take a second look?".
No. Can the police be trusted to dig into the nuance themselves? Also no. Is
racism active and documented in police departments across the country? Yes.

Should everyone who has any ability to do so stand up and say, we won't
support this shit, which is what these mathematicians are doing? I think yes,
but that's obviously my opinion.

~~~
lazyjones
> It's also possible that the mathematician built an algorithm anchored on
> years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial profiling.

That possibility is explicitly excluded since the data comes from crimes
reported by victims, not investigations initiated by police officers.

~~~
BGthaOG
Minorities are less comfortable calling the police in the first place.

~~~
lazyjones
Do you have any data to back up that claim, other than anecdotal "evidence"?

Here's some real data:
[https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpa11.pdf](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpa11.pdf)

 _Across all races and Hispanic origin, American Indians and Alaska Natives
(15%) and persons of two or more races (15%) had the highest rates of
reporting crime or neighborhood disturbances to the police. No statistical
difference was observed between the percentage of white (9%) and black (7%)
persons reporting a crime or neighborhood disturbance to police in 2011._

Also, perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but Appendix Table 4 suggests that
minorities are much more satisfied with police response than the average.

~~~
BGthaOG
Quick search,

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-
violence-lowers-911-calls-in-black-neighborhoods/501908/)

And then there is the fact that illegal immigrants do not call the police for
their fears.

~~~
lazyjones
>
> [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-..).

3 people "screened and analyzed" 1.1 million calls and found out that there
was a (presumably temporary) effect on minorities after one much-discussed
incident involving minorities? The rest is cherry-picked examples and wild
conjecture and not thorough analysis of the data.

> _illegal immigrants do not call the police for their fears._

Um, that's because they're _illegal_ and has nothing to do with racism.

~~~
noobermin
It doesn't look great when you are presented with evidence then try to find
some reason to disbelieve it.

~~~
pochamago
I disagree, I think that's how we should expect dialogues to proceed. To
uncritically accept any evidence presented to you is a much less effective
method for reaching the truth.

------
lazyjones
They are complaining about "racial bias" in predictive policing products. This
"racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics. If reality
doesn't support the ideology, reality must be ignored. This is the sorry state
of academia nowadays.

~~~
wdevanny
I think many of the mathematicians would agree with:

>This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics.

They disagree that crime statistics are reflective of where crime occurs. They
are more reflective of where police officers are and where crimes are most
easily spotted. For example, the racial disparities in policing crack cocaine
versus powder cocaine.

Predictive systems that read in biased data will produce biased data.

~~~
lazyjones
> They are more reflective of where police officers are and where crimes are
> most easily spotted.

The article says: _MacDonald argues that PredPol uses only crimes reported by
victims, such as burglaries and robberies, to inform its software. “We never
do predictions for crime types that have the possibility of officer-initiated
bias, such as drug crimes or prostitution,” he says._

~~~
perl4ever
That doesn't mean reports are completely independent. Isn't it obvious that
the perception of whether the police will do anything is going to affect the
reporting?

~~~
antepodius
Wouldn't that affect it in an inhibitory way, though? Black areas would be
reporting less crime than actually occurs- so if reported crime rates there
are _still_ higher, that tells us something?

~~~
perl4ever
Just as a thought experiment, it could be that lesser crimes are not reported
because the police don't take them seriously, which leads to more criminals
committing major crimes, which are mostly reported.

By lesser crimes I don't mean trivial things that provide an excuse to harass
non-criminals and give "broken window" policing a bad name, but actual crimes
which aren't major violent crimes.

------
raarts
There is no question that the advancement of science has been good for
humanity as a whole.

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.

~~~
sudosysgen
Using math to improve the effectiveness of police is not necessarily a good
thing, because this kind of works really works to perpetuate proactive
policing and over-policing, as well as encodes bias.

~~~
mc32
So maybe address the biases?

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.

~~~
coffeemaniac
Well, when you're witnessing multiple instances of officers willingly and
enthusiastically assaulting defenseless and innocent citizens/journalists on
the street every day, you're past the point of "bias" correction.

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.

~~~
mc32
In France there were similar issues with the police vs the yellow vests.

(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.

~~~
munk-a
It was frankly amazing to see how utterly silent US media was on the yellow-
vests movement. Do you have any good retrospective sources that I can read up
on about those, I think my media experience with it was hearing about it once
on NPR and then never hearing it mentioned again except in the form of a neo-
facist related movement.

------
SomeoneFromCA
I wonder if any of the scientist or commenters in this thread have ever lived
in a bad hood. The hoods require more and better policing, the worst
offenders, who kill orders of magnitude more people are criminal gangs. You
remove police - you'll get spike in homicides.

~~~
kingkawn
Does it occur that the gangs are an attempt from within consistently
brutalized communities to mirror their brutalizers

~~~
beervirus
Nothing is anyone's fault, huh. He's not a murderer--he's just brutalized and
oppressed.

------
drocer88
It appears that one of the signers is selling a
competing/alternate/supplemental product: Cathy O'Neil :
[https://orcaarisk.com/](https://orcaarisk.com/)

From her twitter page (
[https://twitter.com/mathbabedotorg/status/127394137538240512...](https://twitter.com/mathbabedotorg/status/1273941375382405120)
) : Cathy O'Neil @mathbabedotorg I'm interested in algorithmic accountability,
civil disagreement, and the social mechanism of shame. Algorithmic auditor at
ORCAA.

------
koheripbal
This doesn't seem to make sense. By more accurately predicting where crimes
will occur, the police departments can _reduce_ the amount of patrols needed.

~~~
sudosysgen
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.

~~~
retortio
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.

~~~
sudosysgen
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.

~~~
retortio
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.

~~~
danharaj
When the NYPD did a work slowdown, rates of crime according to their own data
went down.

------
waffle_ss
> _widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat
> people of different races and ethnicities_

Citation needed, particularly for Nature. As far as I can tell the supposed
disparities are explained by the amount of violent crime the race and
ethnicity commits (leading to more police interactions), but it's impolite to
bring that up.

~~~
psychometry
Would you also like a citation for the statement "racism exists"? There are
some truths that are so plainly obvious and supported by mountains of data
that it's absurd to demand a citation for them.

~~~
x86_64Ubuntu
Part of maintaining these systems of white supremacy involves firstly
disbelieving that such paradigms exist, and then secondly putting the labor of
"proof" on the marginalized communities and their allies.

~~~
waffle_ss
Part of maintaining the lie of "white supremacy" is never being very concrete,
just ejecting dissenters with this weird homework assignment, or if pressed,
handwave everything away with vague allusions to the unfalsifiable "systemic
racism."

If the rare skeptic persists at this point you can now label them a "white
supremacist," having conveniently shifted the goalposts on that term so that
they are now an irredeemable racist, and proceed to burn their existence to
the ground and salt the earth.

------
exabrial
This sounds like _exactly_ the opposite of what needs to be done in fact.

I do support ethical decision making, academics should be conscious of first
and second order consequences.

------
mikaeluman
I don’t understand this. Usually the answer to bad algorithms is to produce
better ones, through research.

What is the alternative? To give up and stay out? Ethical considerations are
great. Define fairness and set a valid goal for the algorithm that takes
fairness into account.

Do the signatories presume a non-quant approach would be less biased towards
this supposed “systemic racism”?

------
retox
You'd think mathematicians of all people would be able to look at the numbers
of 'killings' and see through the propaganda.

------
young_unixer
The deeper question: should heuristic methods be used at all by police?

I mean not only artificial heuristics like machine learning, but the ones
people have always used, e.g.: "acting really weird means the person is
probably on drugs/commiting a crime".

All prejudices we use are heuristic techniques. Some are badly calibrated and
give bad results (e.g. racism) but some may give accurate results (e.g. "poor
neighborhoods have a higher crime rate"). Should these techniques be used when
they're accurate?

~~~
huntertwo
Cops shouldn’t be put in a spot to make decisions. Otherwise societal biases
seep into those decisions. Our policing systems should be resilient against
biases in the individuals policing.

------
trhway
i think that it shouldn't be boycotted, instead all such work should be done
in public. And not just through the crutches of FOIA. It should be in the open
to start with. There should be no NDA (except naturally for whatever PII is
protected by law). Police should publish all the data. Any contracts on
working with that data, any resulting models and their application should be
in the open.

------
jxramos
I've always wondered if there's a probabilistic argument to show just how
biased of policing there is by quantitating somehow the arrests made on a
given subpopulation and somehow show how improbable it would be to randomly
achieve a given arrest disparity to another subpopulation under the
presumption of equal offending by those subpopulations. Is there any math to
explore such a thing, sort of like flipping a quarter and hitting heads 5x in
a row, that sort of thing.

To use a less charged example say I have three populations of fish, and all
swallow coins in the same proportion as each other. In this universe sharks
make up 10% of the fish population, sea-bass 30% and rockfish 60%. Exactly 5%
of each fish type has a coin in their belly at any given time.

So if we have a world of 1000 fish, then we're talking 100 sharks, 300 sea-
bass, and 600 rockfish. Of those 5 sharks, 15 sea-bass, and 30 rockfish have
coins in their belly. To measure anything other than those counts of 5% per
subpopulation, is there a way to measure how improbable that would be with
random selection and subsampling and what not? Does this question even make
sense and is well defined enough? My stats strengths aren't the keenest.

------
Bostonian
So-called Black Lives Matter costs black lives by making policing less
effective. The "Ferguson Effect" has been documented. Recent headline: "104
shot, 14 fatally, over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago"
[https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicag...](https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago-
fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicide-gun-violence-june-19-22-104-shot) .

~~~
mikedilger
Roland G Fryer's recent work shows that for every investigation over a white
cop shooting a black person allegedly wrongly, 179 extra people die due to the
severe reduction in policing (up to 90%!) over the next two years. Roland G
Fryer is a black economics professor at Harvard. His papers are working papers
for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and as such not peer reviewed.
When he discovered in 2016 that (if you do the math properly) police are
actually more likely to shoot a white person in a life-or-death situation, he
said it was "the most suprising result of my career."

~~~
bitcurious
I found that work fascinating, and I’ve linked to it here before. Your summary
of the finding is misleading.

>for every investigation over a white cop shooting a black person allegedly

This is false. Fryer saw the effect when investigations were in response to
social media outrage. In fact, he called out that the effect is not seen when
investigation are started in response to complaints through the regular
channels.

~~~
mikedilger
I stand corrected.

------
s4n1ty
Everyone agrees that the police should be held to a high standard, but I'm
getting tired of people preaching this thinly-veiled anti-police bigotry.

------
RickJWagner
Really, nature.com?

Is noplace safe from politics?

------
tj-teej
A lot of comments here are missing the point of boycotting, it's an expression
of power with the concrete goal, it's not individual decisions of whether the
mathematicians feel the work is "ethical".

Yes, having more liberals working in policing is probably more inline with the
goals of those liberals than not, but that's not the point of a boycott.

If the police can't get the help they need from mathematicians because of a
large enough boycott then it gets them to the table and forces them to reform.

I'm not arguing whether or not this will work, or making a value judgement, I
just see a lot of comments which don't seem to understand this point.

~~~
Uhhrrr
If they can't get help from mathematicians, they'll try to do their own
analysis with Excel spreadsheets or just use their gut instincts.

~~~
romwell
And if they can get by with Excel just as good, then they didn't need
mathematicians in the first place.

If not, this will make someone unhappy. And this is the whole point of
boycott.

The police is making mathematicians unhappy. Bad cop, no donut in any
dimension.

~~~
Uhhrrr
It probably won't be as good, and the people they make unhappy will be the
general populace, who will experience more crime and worse policing.

------
mesozoic
And identity politics breached into the final bastions of logic completing the
spread of corruption and signalling the completion of the ritual to summon the
lord of chaos.

