
How to Predict Bad Cops in Chicago - mrjaeger
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-predict-which-chicago-cops-will-commit-misconduct/
======
civilian
I think journalists and police chiefs/PR often misuse the "few bad apples"
metaphor.

A few rotten apples will _ruin the whole barrel_. Their rot encourages the
rest of the apples to rot. A few bad apples can't be tolerated-- they have to
be sorted out _immediately_ or the whole barrel will be ruined and has to be
thrown out.

I feel that it's an appropriate metaphor.

~~~
jessaustin
When Van Dyke can shoot a gunless prone person _sixteen times_ while twenty
other cops just look on rather than stopping him at five or six, they're all
rotten. If their training is no better than this, they should carry break-
action pistols without magazines. On the other hand, in some cities it would
be considered a miracle if an officer were capable of emptying his weapon
without losing _any_ shots downrange, so they have that going for them.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Yes; The rottenness of the other officers does not necessarily mean that they
do these bad things, it means that they provide a shield for some officers to
continue to behave like this. It means that they enable this behaviour. It
means that they cover for it.

~~~
DougN7
This is what is so damning. Until the good officers stop supporting the bad
officers, the public will be against all of them. Seems so obvious, but they
don't seem to get it.

------
tptacek
The CPD's ability to react to data like this is severely hampered by the
public employee union that is the real governance for the force.

~~~
adrtessier
I love the idea of labor unions in the private sector. It gives small voices
some power against exploitation, and collective bargaining is something the
anarcho-syndicalist bit of me loves to see happen as a form of self-
governance.

No matter how I look at it, I can't see any net good for voters when public
employees unionize. Public employees are meant to serve the community they are
employed in. The benefits of taking a government job are supposed to be in
that you have a direct result in helping the communities around you; instead,
the benefits most people see in government jobs are fat pensions and a
bureaucracy that, if you're clever enough, you can get lost enough in to where
you don't actually need to work to get paid. If anything ever hits the fan,
you have multimillion-dollar, politically-connected attorneys ready to serve
you.

In the case of police unions, it strengthens the "thin blue line" into a
powerful bureaucracy that only looks out for the interests of its members,
very often to the detriment of the people these public servants are supposed
to be serving (and always in cases such as we've seen in Chicagoland
recently.)

I would love counterexamples to this thought. I can't seem to find any of
recent noteworthiness, but that could be due to the current anti-law-
enforcement/anti-government streak getting pageviews in the news these days.

~~~
analog31
In my state, the legislature broke the public sector unions a few years ago
(while sparing the police and firefighters unions). There has been a wave of
retirements -- pretty much any K-12 teacher who can afford to retire or leave
the profession is doing so. In some schools, there are no teachers left who
are older than 50. I know a few of these people, and we are losing the best
teachers, not the worst.

Two other non-union teaching gigs are preschool and college, and in both of
those areas, the age distribution of teachers drops off precipitously at
around 25 for preschool and 35 for college. My interpretation is that teaching
has ceased to be a career. Disclaimer: I taught an engineering course at the
nearby Big Ten university, but with no intention of doing it for more than one
semester.

The teachers union doubtlessly protected the bad apples, but it also protected
the good apples from things like wage erosion, gradually increasing workload,
and getting blamed for outcomes that they can't control.

And I'm sure that education is in need of massive reform, but any reform will
now have to be done with nobody interested in becoming a teacher.

~~~
pc86
I'm sure in no small part that is due to the fact that often teacher pensions
are based on the last several quarters/years of pay, and without a teacher's
union pumping up teachers' salaries based strictly on age and tenure as
opposed to skill, it was get out now or risk a lower pension payment in the
future.

~~~
analog31
From the people I talked to, it was mostly about morale and the work
environment, but certainly, the erosion of wages and job security increased
the economic risk of being a teacher. I'm not sure the numbers work out for
giving up 15 years of salary in the hope of having a slightly higher pension.

I think that an unusual problem for public sector employees is that their
wages are public knowledge, and as a result, are a target of resentment.

Going forward, I expect to see more of a relationship between pay and skill.
As I said, the best teachers are the ones who are leaving.

Granted, I'm not wholeheartedly pro union, but I see some areas where unions
have served a vital role with no obvious replacement. One is to function as a
labor movement in general. The unions weren't perfect at it, but as the unions
have been effectively defeated, nobody else has stepped up to speak for
workers.

The other has been to make certain occupations -- such as teaching -- worth
the risk of pursuing as a career, by providing a trustworthy career roadmap.
Other countries provide such a roadmap through government oversight of
education -- perhaps the state functions as a union in countries with more
pro-labor governments. But our governments haven't stepped up to serve that
role. Again, the teachers union wasn't perfect (most teachers believed that it
needed to be reformed), but nobody has figured out an alternative way to make
teaching career-worthy, or how to make schools work if teaching ceases to be a
career.

------
bpchaps
Incredibly cool to see this data released!

I FOIA'd the same data twice and got rejected both times. Apparently the data
was part of an active court case where ex cops were suing to get 4+ year old
complaints deleted. It wasn't that surprising of an outcome, but... Damn.

~~~
rozap
disclaimer: i'm an engineer at socrata

the Obama administration has pushed for more cities to start publishing this
data. While it's pretty light on standardization of formats between cities,
it's still a step in the right direction. in the next year we're going to
start seeing more cities publishing use of force data [1].

One neat example is Indiana's page here
[https://data.indy.gov/view/eg2v-uzn3](https://data.indy.gov/view/eg2v-uzn3) ,
though anonymized, you can still draw your own conclusions about things like
race, sex, and age and how that plays into how willing the officer is to use
force, and how far the force is taken

[1] [https://www.socrata.com/socrata-and-white-house-partner-
on-p...](https://www.socrata.com/socrata-and-white-house-partner-on-police-
data-initiative/)

~~~
danso
Hey, just want to say that you should tell your colleagues...great work! Last
year I assigned my class [1] an exercise in HTML scraping the officer-involved
shooting incidents of the Dallas PD (which was, with HTML tables, already far
and away the most transparent department in this regard). Then a few months
ago, I saw that the Socrata portal for Dallas now has the same exact data but
as a spreadsheet/CSV...including URLs to the PDF narratives (I don't expect
the narratives actually exist in a more parsable format on the basis of them
being narratives)...and hell, that is not even the most interesting police-
related dataset on the Dallas portal.

Whatever your public-officials-facing evangelists are doing, they are doing it
incredibly well, at a level that I would have never imagined when Socrata
first popped up.

[1] [http://www.compciv.org/homework/assignments/dallas-
ois/](http://www.compciv.org/homework/assignments/dallas-ois/)

[1a] Another example of someone resorting to programming to collect this data
(which is how I learned about its existence in the first place):
[https://github.com/dallasshooting/dallasshooting](https://github.com/dallasshooting/dallasshooting)

[2] [https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-
Public-D...](https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-Data-
Officer-Involved-Shootin/4gmt-jyx2)

------
cryoshon
I guess this methodology is nice, but consider how hard it can be to even file
a complaint:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8v7lF5ttlQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8v7lF5ttlQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h08jwjYVNAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h08jwjYVNAE)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfLwdyMbSHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfLwdyMbSHE)

As you can see, the cops, in true fascist form, take extremely unkindly to the
concept of filing complaints. I highly doubt that the numbers used by 538 are
inclusive, given how many complaints never make it to the official statistics
or how many times citizens are abused and don't file a complaint for fear of
further abuse.

To be fair, there's also not much data on which reports may be false, but who
cares about mincing a minuscule percentage of the crystal clear data: the
police in the US are a gang of criminals on the streets who are utterly out of
control and have to be severely and immediately curbed/reduced for the sake of
public safety. The cops can't stop slaughtering unarmed people. The cops can't
stop seizing people's property. The cops won't stop covering up bad behavior
of other cops. If one of a gang's members murders someone and the others cover
it up, do we simper that it was only "one bad apple" and that the rest of the
gang members are fine? No.

Whether in Chicago or elsewhere, the police are completely self servingly
corrupt, and cover up for their fellows rather than clean house and support
justice. I guarantee that there cannot be racial peace in this country without
a public defeat being chalked for the police nationwide. The rest of us will
benefit from such a defeat as well, of course.

------
danso
As a reminder of how the obscurity of data can make it unused for vital
analysis -- and as a corollary, how the statistical analysis doesn't even have
to be that sophisticated when you get your hands on obscured data, I
frequently point my students to this writeup of how reporters tracked
misbehaving police officers in Florida (a state in which it is actually very
easy, comparatively speaking, to get this data):

[http://ire.org/blog/on-the-road/2011/12/20/behind-story-
trac...](http://ire.org/blog/on-the-road/2011/12/20/behind-story-tracking-
police/)

> _It is the cleanest set of data I have ever worked with. There was no big
> clean up with the data. Sometimes you get a data set and find out it has
> errors or wrong information. Everywhere we turned this data pointed us
> correctly...When we got the data I spent a week or more playing around with
> it – sorts and counts, which officers got written up the most number of
> times. Then I started looking at certain types of offenses, like “he had
> both a domestic violence and an excessive force.” From that I created a list
> of 150-200 officers. Once we had a nice healthy pool of targets we tried to
> find out more details on them by asking for the reports on the incidents._

> _" This was a case where the government had this wonderful, informative
> dataset and they weren’t using it at all except to compile the information.
> I remember talking to one person at an office and saying: “How could you
> guys not know some of this? In five minutes of (SQL) queries you know
> everything about these officers?” They basically said it wasn't their job.
> That left a huge opportunity for us."_

via the 538 article, this sentiment is repeated:

> _The city had the tools to identify and curtail troublesome officers before
> Kalven pursued legal action. All of the complaints were stored within the
> department long before the Invisible Institute had access. As Kalven put it,
> “All the knowledge to transform the system existed within the system.”_

edit: The 538 article is greatly appreciated...I didn't even know of the
Citizens Police Data Project, and now I do...but skimming the dataset, I would
take a different approach than the one implied in the 538 article title. A
good data investigation doesn't have to come up with a statistical model for
predicting bad behavior. A simple group-by-count is devastating enough. It is
merely enough to show that with a simple aggregation of tabular data, we see
that the majority of police officers are doing "fine" \-- but that's not the
point. The point is that when police officers are _egregiously_ and
_repeatedly_ bad, there is apparently no institutional mechanism to root that
out. And we have little reason to expect that to change if, God forbid, more
and more police officers decide to go bad.

In other words, we can argue that Chicago cops are generally good/great. But
the fact that we don't have as many cop-problems as we hypothetically _could_
is a matter of luck and faith in human behavior and actions within a
bureaucracy...Faith in the human spirit is a nice feel-good thing -- like
believing the next shuttle will safely launch even though the Challenger just
blew up -- but when it comes to public safety and justice, it is imperative to
demand more. If the police loathe releasing disciplinary data (nevermind it
being the law, of course), they should consider being a bit more proactive in
policing themselves and removing the low-hanging bad apples.

