I saw a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back that I think made this case far more effectively. Her point was somewhat limited to drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. Therefore, when the cops went to a location to make drug arrests they typically succeeded, because it's not hard to find drug crimes in the Bay Area.
The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again, despite the fact that drug crime was prevalent everywhere. In effect it was an insufficiently explorative learning strategy, just hitting the same lever over and over. Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions.
Crime and criminology is complicated, but at the end of the day not that complicated. On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.
"On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate"
Great comment, but this line demands a response. When so many consensual acts are considered crimes, we end up with a situation where most people are commiting crimes because... they want to. They aren't "desperate" to snort coke, or pay for a blowjob, or play an illegal card game, but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act. The only way that changes is by using extreme state violence under an authoritarian regime or, my preferred option, by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't committing a crime simply by living their lives.
There's 4 things we call "crime" and the only thing they have in common is that the state sends in an agent to physically restrain you from doing it.
1) Rational crime. Someone looked at the payoff to getting away, the cost to getting caught, and the probability of each and concluded the expected payoff was positive.
2) Victimless crime.
3) Political crime. Crime where the point is to openly defy the law itself. From Rosa Parks sitting in front of the bus to the unknown man standing in front of the tank, we all know what this looks like.
4) Deranged crime. Actual anus-type personality disorder.
Seems reasonable for something like weed, but for "hard" drugs like meth there's clearly a negative externalitiy imposed on the community from your unstable behavior.
We do ban alcohol because of that though. Maybe not a total ban but we regulate the hell out of it. You can’t even drink until 21 and then you can only drink in certain areas and you’re cut off once you show signs of intoxication.
Ok, so we should regulate the hell out of meth, heroin, ecstasy, etc. It doesn't make sense to federally ban a drug like LSD considering how little harm it causes compared to the drug alcohol.
It is far easier to use psychedelics irresponsible then it is with alcohol. Most people crash at some point when drunk, but usually do not undress and walk out onto a busy street... The tendency of psychedelics to unearth mental health problems is IMO too much of an issue given how many people have untreated issues these days.
I've taken most common drugs. LSD, MDMA, shrooms, cocaine, amphetamines, list goes on.
None of them, except maybe some prescription pills like benzos, take control away from me the way alcohol does.
None of them have had me wake up in some random place with no idea how I got there. None of them have made me do things I don't remember, none of them have made me do and say things I regret.
Alcohol has caused all of that and more. The only reason I still drink alcohol is because it's the only socially acceptable drug. I'd much rather do coke or molly, to me those feel significantly safer than alcohol. And they're better, and they don't ruin the next day to the same degree alcohol does, at least not in my experience.
And yes, alcohol absolutely can make people undress and walk out into a busy street. It can also make people aggressive. One time my father came home shitfaced, furious at me for no apparent reason, punched a hole in my bedroom window, came into my room and started screaming at me while bleeding everywhere from punching the glass, then grabbed me by the neck and started choking. I can't remember how it played put after that but I ended up spending the night at my aunt's place. The next day he was in shambles, he would never do anything like that sober. And for the next few years until I moved out, I was anxious every time he went out.
I still do illegal drugs. Not very frequently, I'm a regular guy who works a decent job, is dependable etc. I'm not going to work high or anything like that. Just like most people don't get drunk at work. I know many people with similar lifestyles. I'd bet the majority of illegal drug users are just like me, they have their fun in a responsible way and live normal lives. Just like with alcohol the really messed up addicts are the exception, not the norm.
It is a statistical bias. The vast majority of psychedelics users don't undress and walk around naked. But you often don't notice them precisely because psychs are illegal and people don't advertise their use. It is however widely accepted to drink in public. Everybody who's been in a busy downtown on Saturday night would agree that alcohol definitely brings up violence in some people. And yet it is typically brushed off because most people manage to drink responsibly. Unless you are in the psychedelic community, you just don't know what the majority of psychedelic users are like.
Go to a psytrance festival and see for yourself. I've been to many and I haven't seen people running around naked. If anything, I feel safer there than on many large events where people drink.
I am inclined to not believe that due to my anecdotal evidence. I lost a dear friend at the age of 17 due to him trying the McKenna mushroom dose, and ending up jumping out of the window on the 7th floor. I life in a country where alcohol use is not unheard of, but after roughly 40 years living here, I still dont know anyone how died from alcohol intoxication in a similar way. Alcohol casualties are usually a long-term effect.
Well, trading stories, I've lost two close friends to drunk driving accidents and one because he slipped into an icy river when drunk.
I'm really sorry about your loss. Situations like that are awful. I think it's really important for people interested in psychedelics to try them in a safe environment with people who have experience with the given drug and are willing to stay sober and keep an eye out. Every time I've encountered psychedelics (hundreds of occasions) it's been in situations like this, and they prevent tragedies.
Those of us who are arguing for legalization are basically arguing for society to create these kinds of safety nets writ large. Rather than counting on having a wookie friend nearby you can straight up call up 411 or something before doing a drug. I know it sounds ridiculous but if people are going to do these things anyway... I mean we're happy to have society teach eachother how to have sex safely, why not drugs? And that includes alcohol.
You can still drink in dry counties and possession of alcohol is not illegal. Lack of liquor licenses is not the same thing has the criminalization of other substances.
The equivalent to that are towns that forbid the sale of marijuana in states that legalized it. It's still legal to use and possess.
You chances of drinking alcohol responsibly for decades are way, way better than your changes on not becoming an unemployable wreck in mere years on meth or heroin.
That would be hard to get data on, because alcohol is mostly legal and meth and heroin are mostly illegal.
So you have a huge confounder: it seems likely people who are willing to do illegal acts, are more likely to become unemployable.
So if meth was legal, and alcohol was illegal, the situation might be reversed.
(I'm not saying this is true, but to make your statement you'd need to carefully exclude the possibility of this effect.)
Btw, heroin and other concentrated drugs are popular partially because we banned comparatively milder and bulkier alternatives. Eg opium ain't as hard as opium, but it's just as forbidden, and its bigger bulk makes it less profitable to smuggle.
It's not on shelves because it's a precursor chemical to actual meth manufacturing, not because it's a dangerous drug (otherwise it'd be Rx-only, like the other meth-like drugs).
Neither ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or phenylpropanolamine are the reversed-chirality methampetamine. "Regular" methamphetamine is dextromethamphetamine; the other version is levomethamphetamine.
Opium literally gets scraped off of poppies. Anyone can actually obtain it with some patience and know how. It would take an enormous individual effort to collect enough to use, let alone hurt oneself or sell any.
Yet, ridiculously, sometimes people who have simply eaten a lot of poppy seed bagels or something end up getting tagged as heroin users, because the metabolites are so similar. Never mind that the quantity of poppy seeds you'd have to ingest in order to feel even a little bit of opiate effect is probably more than a human can physically consume. It gets picked up and flagged because the tests are that sensitive.
Yep, and I tell you what: on the rare occasions when I have accidentally doubled my dose of Adderall, I do not like the way it makes me feel one bit. An actual addict would probably be taking 10x or more of my prescribed dose to get their high. I wouldn't be able to enjoy the high because I'd feel like I was literally dying.
> 6% of alcohol drinkers are diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, the number exceeds 50% for meth users.
This seems like numbers you can not compare fairly. I would think if alcohol were illegal, a bigger percentage of users would be diagnosed with alcohol use disorder.
Diagnostic criteria are quite agnostic (badum-tss) towards the chemical in question.
You could also argue that people consuming illegal substances are less likely to report for treatment and be diagnosed in the first place.
Why is it so hard to accept that different substances are differently addictive and harmful, per capita? Would you shoehorn chocolate and coffee to the same bucket?
I am just careful in this area because previous policies have not been based on scientific evidence, but political agenda (as expanded upon other-where in this thread).
So I don't trust my common sense...
I accept that different substances have different effects.
Harm is a domain that is very broad and hard to quantify fairly I think.
Does Meth cause more harm because more Meth addicts have fallen out of society than say Coke? If so, how can we make sure to differentiate between mere correlations and causal relations?
You are going for a reduction to the absurd here, but what you are saying isn't actually that far off what is practical.
In general, many behaviours influence the chance of bad things happening. Eg getting behind the wheels of a car in the first place increases the chance of vehicular manslaughter (compared to walking).
Society can punish the probabilistically bad behaviour, or the bad outcome or any combination of the two (including none).
If the punishment is purely financial, and enforcement is certain and actors have deep pockets, it doesn't really matter which combination you pick.
You can emulate the deep pockets by requiring people to get insurance. Even if the law only polices the bad outcomes, a rational insurance company might want to police its customers behaviour. (Eg your health insurance gives you a discount, if you show them evidence of healthy habits. That's equivalent to charging people who fail to provide that evidence more, but the discount is more PR friendly.)
Both driving at all and drunk driving increase the chance of a person committing vehicular manslaughter. Societies largely allow driving, but ban drunk driving.
Drunk driving is dangerous, mainly because drunkards have slower reaction times and are more prone to taking risks. The more alcohol you have in your blood, the harsher the fines and punishment. But we typically don't check people's sober reaction times and risk appetite, and charge them more for driving sober.
It's all about trade-offs.
In the case of vehicular accidents, most people don't necessarily have deep pockets, and the damage of injuring or killing people can't be undone by paying money. However we eg still let old people drive, and only do something about them when they actually get involved in an accident.
The essential element of vehicular manslaughter that differentiates it from "a crash in which someone dies" is the mental state of the driver - specifically, that they're acting in a reckless or negligent manner.
This is fundamentally nothing to do with economic trade-offs: it's about generally disincentivizing risk-taking when in command of a multi-ton vehicle moving at speed.
We can know this because even if a "bad" driver is objectively more risky than a professional race-car driver who is 20yo, but has drunk a beer; it's the latter that's committing a crime when they drive.
That argument breaks down when you look at how these laws were actually created and changed over time.
People didn’t pick 0.08 BAC and then lower it because they found 0.08 BAC wasn’t low enough, instead the same organizations kept pushing for ever lower limits so they keep dropping independent of any actual impact.
In fact, that reinforces my argument: it's not about relative risk, it's about the definition of what's considered negligent varying over time based on changing attitudes.
Zero tolerance laws have nothing to do with risk. 0.08 is a risk but 0.001 BAC doesn’t have a detectable influence on behavior. Yet 7 states set have zero tolerance at literally 0.000. The definition of negligence isn’t changed by these groups, they are going to arbitrarily decease thresholds and increase penalties over time because that’s why they exist.
Nobody advocates for drunk drivers as a group so there’s no equilibrium reached, just ever harsher penalties and lower limits. I don’t drink, but it’s obvious that using literally 0 as your threshold will pointlessly waste money going after edge cases unrelated to drinking.
When someone has already sold all he could to buy drugs and is now resorting to theft to get a fix, it's a bit too late to intervene. Hard drugs have a very high preponderance to cause detrimental behaviours, and convert a productive member of society to a welfare-consuming blob at best. Of course they should be banned.
Hard drugs can be extremely harmful. So you make them illegal. Now you have two problems. Most of the problems that you associate with drug abuse are exacerbated or wholly created by the prohibition rather than the addiction that it purports but entirely fails to fix.
> resorting to theft to get a fix
Does this pattern characterize alcohol addicts as well? Or do the vast majority of alcoholics generally just hold down jobs to buy booze? Heroin is only expensive because it is illegal. Poppies will grow pretty well in just about every state in America. It is the prohibition that forces heroin junkies to rob and steal and whore for money. It is the prohibition that creates the gangs and cartels and adds the violence. When was the last time you saw a street battle between the grocery store and the bodega over alcohol territory? 1933 is the answer. When was the last time someone died from a mis-dosed, tainted or adulterated cocktail? 1933.
I support broad legalisation plus taxation. Very similar to what's common for alcohol and nicotine around the globe.
Despite being legalised, alcohol still causes problems. But I doubt banning alcohol would decrease problems on net (especially compared to heavy taxation).
Banning something is not the main problem, per se. It's banning something the people want. You could ban durians in the US and maybe a couple would get smuggled into an Indonesian neighborhood, but it would never turn into a gang war. If you look at the countries that have banned alcohol, they are also mostly the countries where the culture has strong and effective prohibitions on alcohol, and people police themselves for the most part.
Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture. And still has! The Puritan heritage that's against any fun is strong with them.
Another side note: restrictions on smoking in restaurants, workplaces and other areas largely preceded shifts in culture in many jurisdictions. So legislation can predate changes in culture. However, I don't know whether that's just a coincidence, or if there's a causal effect? Also, legislation that makes desirable things inconvenient, but doesn't outright ban them, probably has a much, much lower chance of turning into gang wars. (That's a big part of why not-too-high taxation works fairly well for drugs.)
Yet another tangent: we often see drug production and distribution as part of organised crime. But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organised crime: as you can see by the legalisation of alcohol and more recently cannabis, people in the industry would much rather just do their business and satisfy customers; but organised, violent crime can become a parasite on any activity that's shut off from recourse to the police and legal system to defend themselves.
> Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture.
To be sure. The 18th Amendment was passed by a majority of Americans. However it outlawed, "intoxicating liquors". It was the Volsted Act, passed to be the nuts and bolts of enforcement for the 18th, that outlawed everything, much to the surprise and dismay of a fair faction of its supporters. The Presidents of the United States maintained a liquor cabinet in the White House throughout Prohibition. The actual implementation of Prohibition lost many of its supporters and the negative unintended consequences of prohibition lost many more.
> But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organized crime
Of course. Milton Friedman said, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel."
It typically takes many years of irresponsible alcohol consumption to become so dependent on it as to not survive a normal working day without, and then typically liver cirrhosis will take care of you.
Heroin is ludicrously more potent in that regard, in mere weeks you're either high or in withdrawal.
The fact that alcohol was once also illegal doesn't make them somehow equally harmful on physiological or societal level.
This is very silly. Highly dependent alcoholics are all around us every day, and very few of them are living on the streets. They will shorten their lives, on average, but cirrhosis isn't an assassin that comes in the night after 10 years of alcoholism. There are millions of old drunks in the world. Most of them buy their own booze with their own labor.
And indeed, if you are rich enough or have enough clout to avoid police problems, you can be a heroin addict for decades. You can even stay productive. Take for instance, The Rolling Stones.
I don't even feel the need to debate that the primary and secondary effects of legal alcohol addition are huge and expensive.
About 2/3 of American adults drink alcohol. About 0.3% of Americans took heroin within last year, x200 difference.
Diagnosed alcohol vs heroin use disorder: 14.8M vs 1.1M, x13 difference.
Addiction treatment stats: 50% alcohol, 5% heroin, x10 difference (percentages of all addiction treatments).
The sole fact that the two are on the same scale in terms of deaths, delinquency and even visibility should indicate that that per capita hard of heroin and alcohol are incomparable.
You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
> You sure can rock a concert while being high, not so much in withdrawal, and you wouldn't want you bus driver, nurse, teacher or pretty much anyone else around you be in either.
These are problem behaviors with or without prohibition. And prohibition doesn't seem to reduce them. So you have not fixed them with prohibition, you have only imported the additional problems of cartel drug manufacturers, violent drug gangs, purity dosing and adulteration deaths, infectious disease spread through dirty needles, political corruption, an oversized militarized and swamped criminal justice system, and all the crime associated with needing to rob, steal and whore for drugs priced at 100X what they would cost if legal.
> But sure, feel free to count yet another dangerous, addictive, yet inexplicably socially accepted psychoactive drug in the same list with heroin - coffee.
Also pornography, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. Chemical dependance is neither required nor sufficient for addiction to be a destructive force in a person's life. What can't we ban if we decide it is sufficiently harmful?
That is maybe, because most of them start doing hard drugs, when they are already not functioning well. And then Heroin gives them the rest and they turn into messed up junkies and criminals.
And since it is illegal, it is hard to get data on how many people use hard drugs while maintaining a normal life. Those who are successful, don't draw attention. I always thought otherwise, but was surprised a couple of times, by finding out seemingly normal people use heroin on a semi regular basis. So apparently some people can do it.
> Those anecdotes are more the exception rather than the rule.
That is false. Most addicts are nicotine and alcohol addicts and they function ok, in general, without special support. They have plenty of problems, to be sure, but prohibition would only multiply them.
For sure. Lots of people have developed a chemical dependance on coffee/caffeine, and might suffer certain ill effects of withdrawal if they stopped drinking it. Yet most would not be considered addicts, per se because almost all of them drink coffee simply because they enjoy it, could easily quit if they wished, and are not continuing use despite serious negative consequences.
Chemical dependance is neither necessary nor sufficient for addiction.
Addicts who have access to 'maintenance' doses of heroin are often able to function relatively normally.
It turns out that if you're having to find hundreds of dollars a day and you're not sure you're going to even be able to find that next hit, and you don't know the purity of what you're getting, or have access to clean needles, or ... things get rapidly worse for you over and above the effects of the drug itself.
Addicts who do have access to cheap or free doses, and who do know that they can access these reliably, and who do have access to clean equipment, known doses of known substances etc, can stabilise their lives, hold down jobs and often can slowly come off the substance, or be persuaded onto programs that can get them clean over time.
I know that western societies in general aren't ready for this, because there would be outraged howls of "OMG we can't just be giving drugs to junkies! And we're paying for their drugs! This is highly immoral!". However from what I've read in the past it's better all round for us to use this sort of compassionate approach to heroin addiction - addicts get help to get their lives together and it's cheaper for the rest of us to support them like this than it is to put up with the high levels of petty crime they otherwise commit, pay the costs to incarcerate them and fight the gangs of drug traffickers. Further, these sorts of things can cut down on new users, and I believe this was found out in Switzerland - there's very little that's alluring about a line of tired, grey, old-looking faces lining up outside the heroin clinic every morning, that's not what edgy, rock-n-roll kids want to get into ...
I'm not advocating that heroin should be sold openly in shops like alcohol, but there is a wide territory between that and where we are now, and I feel a real solution (or at least a better path) lies somewhere in that territory.
We can do this already without heroin -- suboxone. The problem is that it isn't easy to get it and when you do get it very few doctors will prescribe it as a maintenance medication.
That’s not exactly the same and while I understand it’s a great treatment for a lot of people, I think I’m talking about a path that leads people more easily towards suboxone. Just plain giving them heroin safely, cheaply and predictably can help addicts start to get their lives back on track. And then maybe move to suboxone when they’re ready.
But I guess regardless of the specifics (and I’m sure I’m not the expert here anyway), the point is that we ought to be trying what works, for the addicts and for the rest of us to reduce their associated crime, rather than sticking to dogma and judgement.
> Just plain giving them heroin safely, cheaply and predictably can help addicts start to get their lives back on track
That's part of Switzerland's drug policy since the late 90s of the last century. It was confirmed multiple times in referundums by the public and I think it's overall very successful.
The greatest success, in my opinion, is that it completely reversed the image of heroin consumption. By turning it from a "hero" drug to a total loser drug.
ADHD drugs like adderall are a tiny step from meth (and you can actually get meth under prescription for ADHD; brand name Desoxyn) and people take them every day from childhood on without becoming destitute.
That's broadly true. Though do keep in mind that therapeutic doses of stimulants for treatment of ADHD are tiny fraction of 'party' doses.
Btw, nicotine works well against ADHD for most. (Smoking is about the worst way to get nicotine. Plasters or even vaping are better alternatives.) See https://gwern.net/nicotine
Addiction is made worse by social and economic stresses. So is anti-social behaviour.
If you want to fix addiction and personal violence, start by removing systemic political and economic violence and assembling a reliable social contract.
Start modelling and dramatising pro-social behaviours in the media - which can be done in a gritty and relatable way, not a saccharine and patronising way.
This won't end addiction, violence, and mental illness, but it will make these problems less prevalent and easier to target and manage.
> But in another, critical sense, addiction does discriminate among people, in a way that is unjust and deadly, and in a way that shines a spotlight on tears in the socioeconomic web that is holding our society together. It has long been observed by clinicians that social determinants of health (SDoH) can tip the scales against people, in their already daunting quest to recover from any type of addiction. According to the World Health Organization, SDoH are defined as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at global, national, and local levels."
The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving. Wherever you draw the poverty line, both the percentage and quantity of people below the line keeps diminishing.
Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Somebody will inevitably be in the bottom 10% of any measure. Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
> Your reductionist approach to human agency and freedom of will is appalling.
I don't understand where this is coming from at all. I value human agency and freedom most of all.
> Poor Americans of today have better healthcare than kings of 300 years ago.
Yes, in the last 300 years we started using soap and also discovered penicillin, this has indeed caused enormous leaps forward in medical care. Did you mean medical access? That is still highly striated based on class, and our royalty class seems to be smaller but far more wealthy now (the difference in net worth between our top .1%, 1%, and 90% is astounding).
> The conditions of the poorest 10% have vastly improved over the last 100 years, both in relative and absolute terms, and keep improving.
People say this all of the time but outside of soap and penicillin I'm not exactly sure what people are talking about. The poor and starving seem to only exist in greater numbers than ever in history. Perhaps the conditions of the absolute poorest in American society are slightly better than the absolute poorest in American society 200 years ago, but at the cost of creating new poverty classes abroad in colonized places that previously had relatively low technological development but much higher happiness and quality of life than they do now.
You're getting downvoted for this, but you're right. I used to believe that recreational use of hard drugs was victimless, but I don't anymore. If you take opiates, meth, or crack-cocaine, there is some probability that you will become addicted, and once addicted, there is some probability that you will impose a cost on your community.
Hard drugs are really, really bad for you, and really bad for society. It really is the drug that is the problem - some substances simply cannot be used safely for recreation. If you choose to take them, you're rolling the dice on where you'll end up, and that makes it a crime with society as the victim.
Addiction potential is heavily tied to one's circumstances. The more desperate the circumstances, the greater the abuse potential. For example, you specifically listed crack as opposed to run of the mill powder cocaine. The only difference between them from an abuse potential perspective is the purchasing power of the user. Likewise, the raver who's popping some mystery mix of amphetamine, methamphetamine, and MDMA at a party once a month is far less likely to succumb to addiction than poor sap living in Redding where the only thing available for entertainment is smoking meth. Opiates are self-selecting in this regard: they're not that pleasant relative to other drugs, except for their ability to make you content, which only really appeals to the desperate.
If we follow your "it's illegal because there's a probability" theory of law enforcement, then it should only be illegal to do drugs while poor, which is pretty much where the law stands today without the deceptive veneer of equality. Now, that should sound like an absurd legal take, because it is. The reasonable response is that it's poverty that's the problem, and it's not a problem we solve by throwing all the poor people in jail.
"some substances simply cannot be used safely for recreation."
Do you have hard data on this?
Because otherwise you are creating lots of victims with the war on drugs, who would otherwise just use drugs recreational without harming anyone.
In the medical world, this is typically quantified by the Therapeutic Index[1], which is basically how much margin there is between an effective (therapeutic) dose and a lethal dose. (Fentanyl and heroin have notoriously thin margins, while cannabis is famously wide.)
It's a big consideration in what's OTC vs Rx, and what guardrails (inpatient only, regular blood draws, etc) are needed.
There was a good "magic quadrant"-style plot of this against addictive potential, but I can't seem to find it just yet. (This [2] is close.)
It doesn't consider externalities, so it's not great for the "do drugs and you'll end up unemployed, and if you're unemployed you'll end up homeless, and homeless people are a cost on the community" class of arguments.
> negative externalitiy imposed on the community from your unstable behavior.
It's the same externality as being in a depression or bipolar for instance. I see the moral argument where intent is taken into consideration, but more on the practical level, the community as a whole should have mechanism to deal with unstable members.
>but more on the practical level, the community as a whole should have mechanism to deal with unstable members.
Right but what does it mean in terms of legality? We have mechanisms to deal with store theft (eg. anti-theft systems, insurance), does that mean it's okay to steal stuff?
Society criminalizes "victimless" behavior all the time for really good reasons.
Like: if I try and kill my neighbor, but my rifle jams as I shoot, there's no victim, right? Or: if my friends and I get together to plan the burning of a synagogue, there's no victim. Or: if I offer to pay you to kill that pesky neighbour, there's no victim (until you go through with it). Or: if I offer to buy goods off you that have you stole, what I am doing has no victim (the goods were already stolen).
The notion that "victimless" crime is somehow in a category of crimes that are lesser or "not proper" crimes is unjustified.
We have above: attempted murder, conspiracy to commit arson, soliciting a murder, receipt of stolen goods - most of which I think people would regard as serious crimes.
Societies criminalize things that are considered "bad", victim or no - and that reflects the contemporary moral viewpoint of the society. Sodomy (of the consensual variety) was a crime many places, and now it generally isn't.
Intending to commit a crime is not a crime, though. And accessory-after-the-fact crimes (like receiving stolen goods or assisting an escape) don't match that pattern either.
Yes, it is. If you willfully intend to commit a crime, you can be charged with a number or inchoate offenses, even if you don’t actually go through with it.
>>if I try and kill my neighbor, but my rifle jams as I shoot, there's no victim, right?
Unless he was completely unaware that you tried to do so, of course there's a victim - anyone would be severely traumatized from an attempt on their life, even if it was ultimately unsuccessful.
None of those are victimless crimes. If you attempt to shoot someone and your rifle jams, you still exposed him to the risk of dying. This is a ridiculous strawman.
If you don't like that one - how about this: the law in the U.S. criminalizes attempts to do things that are factually impossible. So if you try to poison someone with (what you believe to be) "arsenic" but it turns out to be the regular sugar they normally take in their coffee, you can be convicted of attempted murder in most states.
It's not a straw man - the point is that society defines crimes by "bad acts" (usually in combination with "bad states of mind") that should be discouraged and penalized, even if there's no actual overt harm done to people or property.
The notion of a victimless crime is therefore ill-formed: the purpose of the criminal justice system isn't just to penalize people who create victims - it's created to apply penalties to specific acts/mental states that have been deemed morally culpable.
When people talk of "victimless crimes", they don't actually mean crimes that lack victims - they just mean those sorts of criminal acts that they don't really think are actually morally culpable.
First of all, you need to separate an activity's direct, real externalities from those created by draconian, stupid laws that make consuming and buying those drugs into something much harsher and costly than it need be.
Secondly, everything we do has externalities in some variably extrapolated way and that by itself is a bad, hazy-logic reason to blanket ban it. Instead, you create reasonable checks and try to ascertain motives (as we do for so many other potentially dangerous activities without banning them). If one's motive is to get high in their own private context but they can't do so without becoming a burden on the criminal justice system (because their otherwise personal activity suddenly became a public cost and the target of some bullshit moral crusade), then maybe your anti-drug laws are the bigger problem, not that individual's personal choices and their artificially constructed effects on "the community".
Yes, I know that some people high on meth, cocaine, PCP, etc can become mentally unstable and commit violent acts or crimes, but people in all kinds of reasonably, widely legal situations can also do the exact same things without whole categories of consumption and behavior and activity being banned in a heavy handed push for social purity.
Obviously separate problems, like alcohol and drunk driving. People use prescription meth (desoxyn) and opioids responsibly, just like alcohol. Negative externalities are a separate choice.
Using meth is as victimless as using alcohol, and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
Some people use meth and opioids responsibly, but they very much are not the same as alcohol. Alcohol is a much safer recreational drug. Some people become alcoholics, but a higher percentage of people who try opioids get addicted, and addiction happens after fewer exposures.
The whole reason addiction is a problem is that it alter decision making, once someone is addicted. So you incur much of the moral responsibility the first time you decide to take the drug for fun.
And also, opioids are a curious example for responsible drug use, given how many people who used prescribed painkillers became addicted to them.
Just because it's legal, doesn't mean there's no victim.
>and I think it's pretty silly to say there's a victim when I have a beer at home after work.
This is getting into hair splitting territory. Meth has therapeutic value. It's available as a prescription drug under the name Desoxyn, and it's indicated for treating ADHD and obesity. It's possible for someone to get illegal meth and use it to self-medicate their ADHD responsibly, but that's not the typical use case. The typical use case is someone taking far above the therapeutic amount, getting tweaked out, and engaging in harmful behaviors that hurts them and their community. Sure, you could argue that using the drug itself isn't harmful because theoretically you could be using it responsibly, but it quickly leads to a slippery slope. Is driving drunk victimless, because if you don't crash nobody is harmed? Is violating health codes victim less as long as nobody gets sick?
It isn't the typical use case because it is illegal. Going through the trouble of buying meth to help your self-diagnosed ADHD is not generally what people choose to do if they have access to a doctor who will prescribe them Adderall instead.
We have no idea how many people would be using it responsibly in other situations but the current one so your examples are flawed.
There is a humanity aspect to things. Sure maybe if you make the crime 10 years in prison the infraction rates will go way down, but also you are using the state to enact very harsh sentences on vulnerable people, which is inhumane, and moreover you are spending loads of money locking people up to solve a crime which arguably is harmless. You could as an alternative build supportive/subsidized housing so that the people sleeping on benches can get a real bed, and provide medical and mental health services and job training. In this case instead of spending all your money on buildings to house these people which take away their rights (prisons) you spend the money on supportive services which help the people get on their feet.
You are still spending money, but one solves the root problem and the other solves only one specific crime.
If we're pushing on how an individual's behavior affects their family and friend, we should expand to all the other situations it happens.
For instance teens dieting to look thin to the point of getting eating disorders have an effect on their parents every day life, friends (who are also at risk of getting ropped in and follow the trend too), and the general public including the medical system. How much do you want to blame anorexic teens for that ?
>by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't committing a crime simply by living their lives.
I think your comment provides some necessary nuance to the discussion but it may also miss an important consideration. Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom. Making all consensual acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of stability. It's a balancing act.
Sending people off to jail to lose their families and jobs because the drug they like is different than the one the state likes does absolutely nothing to improve social stability. Very much so the opposite.
Very few people are in prison for simple possession. The American justice system, contrary to most popular sentiment, is quite diversionary. As a percentage, Sweden probably has more people in prison for drug possession than America.
Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
as a general rule when one makes statements that go against the common wisdom one should also make some sort of effort at showing the cause for ones arguments, but at any rate here is a stat that says 1 in 5 prisoners are in prison for a drug offense https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2023_drugs.html
yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball rolling here.
It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
on edit: I see Bumby went and got some stats too, to clarify I don't doubt that violent offenses outweigh other offenses, what I doubt is that America does not have a large number of people incarcerated for drug possession.
> It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales:
Your data is consistent with my claim: I meant the denominator being the prison population, not the entire population. Sweden has about 8600 people in prison so about 37% of their prison population is in there for "drug offenses", whereas in the United States it's less than 1 in 5 per your Prison Policy citation. Obviously if you treat entire population as the denominator, then any comparison of Swedish and American prisons is useless because we incarcerate a much larger percent of the population.
Edit: I realize my original comment said "people" not "proportion of people", but in my defense interpreting it to be people literally is a bit absurd. Sweden's population is about 30x smaller than the United States, so there's no way the counts are comparable!
Edit 2: Actually no I did say “As a percentage”. Whew.
Next, you can see from this sample of federal prison (table on page 2): though drug offenses were the most serious charge for half of prisoners, only 0.1% was for possession. The rest was for trafficking and sales. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
This data is from 2010, and the United States has undergone a decriminalization revolution since regarding possession, so new prosecutions are even less likely to be possession claims.
> You can be charged with drug trafficking even if you have not actually sold any drugs. Prosecutors will try to show that you were in possession of a controlled substance and planned to sell or distribute it, even if you were going to distribute it for free or use it with friends.
Texas is finally calming down on weed but back when I was in college I knew plenty of friends that were slapped with "trafficking" because they had some normal amount of grams on them and the cops just went for it. That lets prosecutors scare them into shitty deals because with trafficking you're looking at years of prison.
Considering the scale of the American prison industrial complex, I'm sure plenty of people didn't have good enough lawyers to get the bogus trafficking charges thrown out.
Also, some of the possession charges are about sales and distribution. Cops often put the lower charge on reports, and prosecutors also often plead down your case.
> With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales
With the caveat to your caveat that "sales" in the US tends to include anything above 1 or 2 doses. I'm no bartender, but I'll still buy beer by the twelve pack.
Only because most jurors have some background knowledge of what constitutes a "normal" amount of beer to buy and consume. A gram of cocaine could be described as 6 lines, or it could be called several dozen bumps. The prosecution is going to go up there and wax poetic about how you'd only buy multiple thirtyracks if you're planning on throwing a party i.e. distributing, and your average jury will eat that up.
Assuming you even get to a jury trial. For most pseudo-distribution cases like this, the defendant is going to plead out, because they know they're dead to rights on the possession charge, and if the judge throws the book at them for that then they may well have been better off taking the distribution plea deal.
This varies a lot by jurisdiction so it’s hard to determine aggregate impacts. For every anecdote of judges throwing the book at someone, I could probably offer one of judges letting off someone easy. The important point stands regardless: Sweden has a larger percent of its prison population incarcerated for drug offenses than the United States. Most people going to prison were convicted of a violent crime.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear: the potentially high penalties for possession are used a threat, to push people into pleading guilty on the distribution charges. Possession alone can potentially land you in jail for up to 3 years. Distribution has a wider range, from 1 year up to potentially 9 years.
If you're caught in possession of a couple grams of coke, then the prosecutor is going to want to get you on distribution. They can say something like "You will be found guilty of possession, we both know that. If you plead guilty on both counts, we can recommend concurrent sentencing and you'll be out of prison in less than two years. If you don't take the deal, we're going to push for everything we can get: even if you get off on the distribution charge, you'll still be in prison for 3 years for possession."
Now, you or I, affluent tech-bros that this forum attracts, know that this is a terrible deal. We'd hire a lawyer, fight it tooth and nail, and walk away with a possession conviction and a slap on the wrist sentence. But if you're some broke kid, with a public defender who's really just there to counsel you on what plea deal you should take, it might not seem like such a bad idea.
I understand how pre-trial negotiations work, and I am not an affluent tech bro. In fact, I spent some time consulting DA offices throughout the country on how to adopt best practices in criminal justice reform. Public defenders are not universally pushovers and judges and juries are not universally looking for blood.
Like I said, getting aggregate statistics on how pleading down impacts the composition of the prison population is very hard, but the fact of the matter is most people who end up in prison don’t do so because of anything which looks like only recreational drug use.
I would like to note that the terms “possession”, “sale”, and trafficking” are a bit tricky when it comes to drug law. My home state could consider anyone with over a quarter ounce of cannabis to have “intent to distribute”. I would regularly buy whole ounces for personal use because it’s much cheaper than buying small amounts, but that also meant that if I were ever caught I would be facing charges for sale and trafficking.
These also vary state to state, and while a white kid with a 1/4 might not get possession, a black kid with the same amount might get the book thrown at him depending on who’s prosecuting the crime.
Ok, fair enough that you meant the percentage of the population incarcerated was higher, as opposed to the percentage of the population as a whole. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
As per OkayPhysicist's point about what counts as possession and trafficking, many drugs require larger dosages with habitual use and the courts do not take this into account.
on edit: I see Komali did a better job pointing out that lots of traffiking and sales are actually possession.
Komali only claimed some percent are possession, not “lots”. And I’m going to disagree: overcharging is definitely a problem but there’s lots of pleading down as well. There are jurisdictions where you can plead down a violent crime to a drug offense. Because these strategies vary so much between DAs, it’s hard to get aggregates on how much this is happening.
>yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball rolling here.
The same source[1] lists drug possession as 34k of 132k total in state prisons. That suggests only a quarter of the drug offenses are actually for possession, and it's only 3.2% of the overall state prison population. That said, those figures represent the upper bound of of people in prison for possession, because offenses could be pleaded down.
> Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
this challenged my conceptions a little bit, while I wasn't blown a way by it, I did expect possession to be a higher percent of the whole. Here are some sources for others who are curious:
At yearend 2019 (the most recent year for which
state prison offense data are available), 58% of all
persons imprisoned by states had been sentenced
for violent offenses (710,800 prisoners) [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf page 28]
For the same year, 46,700 people were in prison with the most serious crime being possession. This represents 3.8% of the prison population.
However; the above are statistics for STATE prisons. The federal system seems to be murkier, with 46% (67,000~) of inmates being their for drug related reasons. Unlike state breakdowns, drug crimes are differentiated here. If we assume the breakdown between possession and other charges is the same as state levels (a VERY shaky assumption) we'd expect 10% of the federal system to be related to possession.
Averaging some of these numbers, it seems that even in a 'worst case scenario' roughly 9% of inmates are in for possession, but more realistically we're looking at around 4%.
I would bet good money that rate is even lower now. Many states proceeded with decriminalization campaigns for possession in the meantime, most reasoning from false premises.
I was originally skeptical of this. Based on what I found it seems like incarceration levels are about 1.27x higher for violent crimes.
State data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 651,800
Non violent crimes (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 141,100/131,600/109,100/6,800. Total=388,600
Federal data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 10,547
Non violent crimes: (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 5,950/66,474/58,894/433, Total = 131,751
Combined:
Violent crime (2020): 662,347
Non-violent crime (2020): 520,351
With that said, there is massive disparity in federal crimes, where there are almost 7x the sentences for drug crimes compared to violent crimes. But that includes trafficking etc. and can't be characterized as 'simple possession'
> Sweden probably has more people in prison for drug possession than America.
Don't know if you picked Sweden in particular intentionally but they are very much an outlier of their own when it comes to drug-related crime. Simple possession of small quantities for personal use can still have you end up in jail or even prison for up to 6 months.
The state does not like those drugs because society does not like those drugs, and in the case of certain drugs, like heroin and other harder drugs we have decided that it is rational to attempt to keep them off the streets rather than agree to legal use.
It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like", but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or heroin anytime soon.
The state has a legitimate interest in limiting the number of people taking opioids in public. It's self-defeating to do that through mass incarceration. To be determined how well decriminalization works. But it's definitely not that the government just doesn't like drugs - hard drugs really do have societal costs.
I think the article makes a point that is overlooked:
>After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
Can't decriminalize drugs if you stop funding drug treatment programs and chuck it all onto underfunded NGOs who have their own motivations.
I think this underscores that these problems are more complicated than may want to acknowledge. I don't think you're doing this, but part of this thread started as a pushback to the simplistic sentiment that implied we just need to decriminalize.
As you point out, we can simultaneously criticize our current policies while acknowledging simplistic replacement policies aren't really solutions.
I believe they meant recreationally legal. There are lots of medications that are also used as recreational drugs (cocaine, opiates, etc.) but their use shouldn't be conflated.
Very much agreed. But to the original point, it's about finding a balance. Just like imprisoning people for long periods isn't always conducive to stability, neither is a society full of addicts who struggle to hold down a job or take care of their family. It shouldn't be characterized as an either/or but as finding a reasonable balance.
I think the "balance" argument is a diversion because when you examine the actual policies and their outcomes, at no point does it appear that stability is the actual goal. Yes, the idea that we need a balanced approach to individual vs collective rights is valid and should be a guiding star for us. My argument is that it is not - that our policies instead cause greater instability - and the balance argument is nothing more than a rhetorically nice-sounding cover story for these destructive policies.
I would argue that rather than stability a lot of the puritan instinct comes from a desire to see one's children thrive.
The relevant analytical unit at the small scale is the family: I don't want my kids to be temperant because of stability, I want them to abstain from drugs/games/$VICE because that's the path which maximizes the chance of their living a fulfilling life, or (more cynically) which maximizes their chance of bearing me successful grandkids and great grandkids. This is why puritainism is selected for evolutionarily (at least in environments where resources are limited).
To return to the large scale policy questions, I also don't want to see the continent of my children fall to a mercantilist China (using China as an example because Chinese law cracks down hard on drug sales and limits students to one hour of video games per night). Accordingly, I support policies to limit access to addictive substances and stimuli, despite the inevitable conflict between those laws and individual rights. The inequitable enforcement of those laws is another problem entirely, and one which I think would be well solved by starting with the prosecution of celebrities and thought leaders who openly partake in $ADDICTIVE_STIMULUS, and their suppliers.
This is a pretty reasonable hypothesis, but to add a counterpoint: the nuclear family is relatively recent phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective.
Not sure how that is a counterpoint, GP doesn't even specify they are talking about a nuclear family. Presumably other family structures have a similar dynamic where they want the youth to succeed.
Fair enough. From an evolutionary perspective, there is a much smaller distinction between “family” and “society as a whole”. Prior to the nation-state, most of “society” were people known on a personal level.
So I’m not sure that there is a strong distinction between “ensuring my family has a good outcome” and “ensuring a stable society” because a stable society is meant to be a means and not an end. Regardless, this feels a bit like an untestable hypothesis.
On the contrary it is very testable: look at number of grandchildren in families with different moral beliefs and cultural norms. Can look at whether the grandchildren thrive, too.
Your statement shows why social science is hard. Superficially, sure it seems testable but in reality it is much more difficult.
Good science controls for variables. Counting the number of offspring turns a blind eye to a number of variables that can influence the outcome beyond just moral beliefs or cultural norms. Can you say your results aren't influenced by factors like genetics, environment, war, etc. that are outside those moral beliefs? Even if you could control for them, a lot of that data isn't available from an evolutionary perspective. And even if it was, moral beliefs are not static; you could have one set of morals that leads to higher numbers of offspring in one stage of your life and change morals later. It makes for a messy, and probably untestable, hypothesis.
That's my main gripe that led me to the OP. People tend to take an enormously messy social situation and think they can distill it to a simple model. Real life tends to not work that way.
The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor implementation begs for better implementation, not the nullification of the goal. I am not defending current drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.
This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you measure societal stability, but that would be a long digression to itself.
AFAIK the drug laws the US deals with today primarily stem from the “Drug War” which was politically motivated to target Nixon’s “enemies” (blacks and anti-war activists):
> Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.
> [Ehrlichman, Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs] “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
There's a difference between not being a big fan of drugs and wanting the onerous law enforcement and incarceratorial regime which was eventually implemented. Without much meaningful input from the CBC, I imagine. Your "Ehh, sort of," is quite weak. Going back to marijuana, opiate, and even alcohol prohibition policies, drug laws have always been more about controlling the conjured threat of minority populations than anything else.
I had never heard of prohibition as a tactic to oppress racial minorities. It seems like you’re trying to shoehorn a narrative.
“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.
Again, the Black congressional representatives (which, due to districting were mostly representing Black people) were rather openly upset with him...for not going even harder.
That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.
I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.
I would just add that, based on the prevalence of drug use and abuse in this country, the increasing availability and increasingly reduced cost of illicit drugs, combined with the exceptionally high rate of incarceration and probation compared to other wealthy nations (and even non-wealthy nations), we are clearly doing something spectacularly wrong. And this wrong approach is costing us billions upon billions of wasted dollars, not to mention the cost in human lives and livelihoods. No alternatives should be off the table.
agreed that the discussion about how you measure or even define social stability is probably what's really at stake in this discussion. Policing and the concept of criminality provide a kind of 'stability' in the form of social control to governments. On the other hand, those same forces can be incredibly destabilising to the social lives of everyone who is criminalised, their families and friends, especially given that criminalisation for so many people is often a death sentence.
The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse and humanising responses to problematic drug use that don't depend on control via the threat of punishment
do you also think the state should criminalize religion? given the ubiquitous problems caused by religion in the public sphere, the domestic lives of countless millions families etc etc?
Au contraire! Persecution of the lower classes can do wonders for the preservation of a certain order. Aldus Huxley imagined an imposition of fetal alcohol syndrome to keep the trades in their place, but we do it more cheeply by destroying families and carting men off to work slave labor. Overzealous policing synergizes nicely with the myth of meritocry by helping the middle class (MLK's "white moderate") attribute socioeconomic divisions to heritable "merit."
> Making all consensual acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of stability.
From a practical standpoint, this depends on the notion that prohibitions actually increase stability. No place that drugs have been legalized or decriminalized have seen significant increases in addiction rates, for instance. No place that legalizes drugs will need criminal gangs to supply them anymore. Restricting consensual acts reduces a society's stability considerably.
From a moral standpoint, giving anyone the authority to prohibit victimless acts is a pandora's box human rights violations. Who chooses what is worth oppressing in the name of stability? So soon after gay marriage (or just being gay at all) was legalized and we are already forgetting this lesson.
> Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom.
All states are at least seemingly concerned with balancing the collective and individual freedoms. Western ones just have the arrogance to claim they do it the best. If it's any consolation the chinese claim the same.
"Making all consensual acts legal" is certainly an easy strawman to argue against, but maybe there's a middle ground between that anarchist hellscape and "owning this fish that is not explicitly illegal in the US but is illegal in Honduras can land you in federal prison."[0]
Not necessarily. I'm saying a government that takes measures to mitigate increasing the extremes of common acts that lead to destructive behavior can be more stable.
E.g., I'm not sure the current trend of increasing access to gambling will lead to a more stable society, although it increases freedom. There's a balancing act there too.
What I'm not saying: the current policies are the best ways to mitigate those risks in order to increase stability.
That’s a really good point, although I do think the desperation/desire line in the case of ex. snorting coke is somewhat blurry. Overall though yes, in my mind I was imagining “serious crimes” like theft or interpersonal violence, rather than vice crimes like sex work or gambling. Definitely in many cases desperation is not a factor, but in many other cases I believe that it is.
Edit: I would also say that providing sex services is probably an act of desperation in many cases, even if paying for them isn’t.
Ok, I have to push back again. Having known many sex workers, while it is certainly an income option of last resort for many people, it is not always. I know some people who are very established in their careers and there is nothing desperate about it (even if the origin of the career path in some cases was). And others, like dominatrixes, often train specifically and purposefully to purse a career in sex work that they enjoy. There's a million variations, but this knee-jerk "all sex workers are desperate" nonsense is starting to sound really antiquated and ill-informed. And rude.
Sure I never said "all sex workers are desperate", I said "in many cases". There was a great book I read a while back "Revolting Prostitutes" which talks about this distinction between types of sex workers. There are many, many sex workers who are perfectly happy doing their work, and I believe that these are the people you know (the book gives this group the tongue-in-cheek name "happy hookers"). However on the whole these people tend to be affluent and well-connected (which could also be extrapolated from knowing an HN poster), and as such get over-represented in our current sex-work discourse IMO. Responses like this, which use these "happy" sex workers to push back on the negative aspects of sex work experienced by people who are acting out of desperation obscures a lot of important nuance at play. No doubt that the moralizing "all sex workers are abused and need saving" is equally if not more harmful, but I think it's really important that we acknowledge that for many people sex work is often just that: work (which is also the take of "Revolting Prostitutes"). Understanding it as a form of labor, subject to all the usual abuses of labor plus the extras unique to sex work is IMO a really important framing for thinking about sex work as a crime. This is where I'm coming from when I describe "many" sex workers as "desperate"; they are people who really need income doing the best work they can find (either best pay, most flexible hours, etc). Not trying to condemn anyone for their choice of career or side-hustle, but ignoring the reality that many sex workers are exploited by their employers and clients is IMO far more rude than my previous comment
Upvoted and apologies for being too aggressive in that last comment.
I would only add that it is my understanding that most sex workers would very much like sex work to simply be considered work, and that the only way to improve conditions for all sex workers is to end criminalization of consensual sex between adults, paid or otherwise. At least that's the overwhelming consensus of the swers I know and the stuff I read/follow on the topic.
Thanks, and no problem! It's a touchy subject and there's lots of shitty takes on it so I get the reaction. Definitely agree that the best solution is simply decriminalization, maybe with the addition of improved support services for the populations that do find themselves turning to sex work out of need.
It says "providing sex services is probably an act of desperation in many cases" which was enough to trigger me, but I agree I overreacted and posted a follow up.
>but they want to do those things and will do so regardless of the criminal status of that act
Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate?
Edit: was attempting to be pithy, but apparently would need to spend quite a bit more time to get my point across (and, in the end, doesn't change/add to the discussion), so consider me wrong
>Isn't doing something regardless of potential consequences just another way to define desperate?
No, it is not. If you give a speech in front of a crowd you may embarrass yourself. Are you desperate to give that speech because there are potential consequences? If you go rock climbing you might fall and break your leg. Are you desperate to go rock climbing, simply because it involves risk? I don't see the logic at all.
You might be conflating the proximate and root causes of the act. I may not get in front of a crowd because I'm desperate to give a speech, but I may be desperate to keep my job, or desperate for status, or something else. Likewise, with rock-climbing, maybe I'm desperate for an adrenaline high or a novel experience. To be generous to the OP, I think "desperate" just means the gains from the experience outpace the perceived risks.
In such discussions, its usually better to strive to understand what the commenter actually meant rather than being pedantically correct. The latter can border on bad-faith rather than adding to the discussion. The OP clarified their point.
As already pointed out, there are more definitions. This one aligns just fine with the OP's point:
'desperate: driven by great need" (From the American Heritage Dictionary)
I think you actually make a good point for rock climbing being a desperate act. Most humans don't climb rocks. Whether out of complacency or fear, that feels pretty rational! Some choose to ignore the risks. Desperate for adventure, perhaps?
I don't give speeches to large crowds either, that sounds hella stressful. That won't stop me, but I'd have to be desperate for the respect or attention.
Yeah, let's change our laws so that Tom, Dick and Harry can pimp, deal drugs around schools, run underground gambling dives and protection rackets. Genius!
Plenty of consensual acts are detrimental to the society.
1. What's wrong with pimping per se? Fundamentally, a pimp is an just an intermediary that finds clients for people who sell a service. How is it different from an agency? Yes, pimping can involve violence, but the reason why is that the victim is unlikely to report the violence, as it would require them to incriminate themselves.
2. Tobacco and alcohol are legal, yet you don't see people selling to kids. It happens from time to time to teenagers, but not to young children. The reason why is precisely that children don't have the mental faculties to understand the full scope of their decisions and therefore can't give informed consent.
3. If gambling is legal there's no need for it to be underground, it can just be out in the open. Where are you more likely to get scammed, in some clandestine gambling den, or in a licit casino?
4. A protection racket is clearly not consensual. "Give me money or I'll damage your property" doesn't require consent of the victim.
You've misunderstood the nature of desperation. People doing those things are absolutely desperate - for a dopamine hit, for love or intimacy or community, for something to do with their time that is meaningful (losing all your money is certainly meaningful).
No one who has those things - and recognizes it - settles for bottom-barrel surrogates like the ones you've listed. Someone who is starved for them absolutely will.
No more desperate than the person running to get the runner's high or volunteering in a soup kitchen because they get a kick out of it or someone seeing a scary movie because they enjoy the feeling of safe fear.
Drugs are fun. That's the reason a lot of folks do them. It doesn't mean you are desperate in ways that other people aren't. You are just using your time differently.
It isn't even that your comment isn't true some of the time. It does read like DARE propaganda.
I disagree. If running or volunteering at a soup kitchen were viewed by the would-be criminal as options for fulfilling their needs, they wouldn't be. There is something - generally psychological or social - pushing them to self-destructive solutions rather than pro-social ones. As for reads, your flippancy indicates some combination of ignorance and apathy. I won't waste any more time trying to make you understand, because I'm unconvinced of your capability to do so.
You'd think that people would eventually wisen up to where the police are going to go to look for drug crimes. This isn't a smart game of whacka mole being played, the moles are just stuck in the up position.
These days, in places like SF and Seattle, people just freely use their drugs on the street while cops just look on. But it is just one segment of the population that is doing it out in the open (unhoused), and cracking down on them would be considered racist (well, most of them are white, the argument is confusing).
> mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class
As far as crime goes, shoplifting rings, at least in our area, is mostly about drugs. You shoplift a lego set from Target, and get some fent in return from your ring leader. But ya, social norms are completely out the window at that point, and we are just seeing the end of that path.
> why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class)
This is not my understanding at all.
Crime seems to have fallen during the Great Depression. Murders, which are almost always reported, fell.
Things get complicated once mass surveys replace crime reports.
Rape almost certainly increased when marital rape was outlawed. Embezzlement almost certainly decreased when cash registers were implemented.
One common way to “get rid of crime” is to gentrify, which inevitably lowers crime in a specific geographic area.
Another way to “get rid of crime” is to send criminals to prisons, where it’s extremely difficult to report crimes, and surveys of victimhood are never conducted.
I’m open to being convinced on this, but I don’t think the “mainly” cause of crime is poverty.
Start with googling "did crime fall during the great depression" because reputable sources will show you that no, during the first part it did not and then it only fell after recovery programs began to be put in place to put people to work. As well as noting there is going to be more correlation with property crime and poverty than with violent crime. You also have to consider confounding factors such as that in cities crime went up during Prohibition and then back down when Prohibition was repealed in 1933 which overlaps with Great Depression years.
I mean nothing social has a completely deterministic behavior. There are lots of higher-order effects that act differently on different types of crime. Nevertheless it's not hard to find studies documenting the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0]. For sure few people in poverty are committing insider trading, but when it comes to property or violent crimes the stress and desperation of poverty are clearly huge motivators.
There is a strong link between poverty and crime within a society but that strong link starts to weaken when you look across different societies, especially in the same region. And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological need like housing, medication, or food.
There are many traits that increase both your risk of poverty and criminality, such as poor impulse control.
> but that strong link starts to weaken when you look across different societies, especially in the same region
I'm not surprised by this, one would expect things like the ease of getting a weapon, cultural norms, and social welfare services to have big interactions with the poverty - crime relationships.
> And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological need like housing, medication, or food.
This is not as clear to me, though I imagine it also strongly depends on the type of theft under consideration. Certainly I concede that most theft in the US is probably not pure Jean Valjean-style "I just needed a loaf of bread", but in my experience the people committing like smash+grabs out of a parked car are not typically very affluent. Maybe they're doing this because they can't afford the iPhone they want since all their savings went to rent and food, but I don't think you can fully say that it's purely "desire" causing them to act criminally.
Re the poor impulse control side of things, I think it would be very hard to isolate the causal direction between it and poverty. I can imagine someone working multiple part time jobs to get by is going to have a harder time controlling their impulses purely out of fatigue and stress. Not sure if this is what you're thinking
In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it, which in addition to all the correlational studies is pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control reduces criminality. Also in my personal life I know people who are poor and rich and too a man everyone I know who's committed the types of crimes we care about had some combination of poor impulse control or psychopathy.
> I would bet money the correlation between number of hours worked and criminality is inverse.
So someone working more hours at a legit job is less likely to commit a crime? I think that's likely. For one, more hours worked probably means somewhat less need for money. But I would also imagine that it's indicative of some personal traits which correlate negatively with criminality.
> In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it, which in addition to all the correlational studies is pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control reduces criminality.
I think you forgot to link the study, but I believe the results. I absolutely don't dispute that impulse control causally effects crime. I just think that impulse control may be impacted by environmental circumstances such as poverty and a lack of quality education. Someone in tons of debt who can't afford to pay for rent or food is probably not going to feel like they have much to lose, and therefore may not care too much about the consequences of their actions.
> So someone working more hours at a legit job is less likely to commit a crime? I think that's likely. For one, more hours worked probably means somewhat less need for money. But I would also imagine that it's indicative of some personal traits which correlate negatively with criminality.
Agreed
> I think you forgot to link the study, but I believe the results.
I definitely did forget to link the study. I'd try to find it again if it was a point of contention but it doesn't sound like it is.
> I just think that impulse control may be impacted by environmental circumstances such as poverty and a lack of quality education.
I think peer group and culture have a large impact. I'm not aware of any studies showing you can train self-control in any meaningful sense (if we could we wouldn't need to put so many people on adderall). And I'd be surprised if we can't train self-control when we try to train it, but are very successful at training it at school where we aren't specifically trying to train it.
Also just from personal experience I've seen a few poor->rich and rich->poor transitions and it didn't seem to meaningfully affect their personality. But if you have studies or anecdotes that tell a different story, I'd love to hear them.
>the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0].
"Very strong" is not a very useful description. Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately, your linked paper is not available. This one is:
Poverty is listed, but it is not a stronger effect than religiosity, family disruption, or firearms ownership. The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment (length considered)".
It is always a little frustrating to hear from a certain kind of politically motivated poster who is very interested in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime except their own conviction that poverty is the sine qua non of theft and violence. The evidence does not support this view.
> It is always a little frustrating to hear from a certain kind of politically motivated poster who is very interested in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime except their own conviction that poverty is the sine qua non of theft and violence.
I don't know if I said anywhere that poverty is the only contributing factor, or is fully required for crime to occur (clearly white collar crime is a counterexample), but I do strongly believe that it is a leading factor for many varieties of crime, particularly the "guns and drugs on the table" types of crimes that the police love to prosecute. Thanks for your condescending evaluation of my motivations and your correction of my language summarizing a study. I disagree that "very strong" isn't a useful descriptor of quantitative findings, but I suppose everyone is free to have their own preferences. Sorry for your frustration, but I do think that it's misguided.
> The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment (length considered)".
Unsure how strong your understanding of multivariate regression is, but I would imagine that including two big covariates of poverty in an analysis would reduce the effect size of the actual poverty variable. "Family disruption" seems like another big correlate of poverty. The link you provided doesn't work for me so can't investigate any of these deeper, but I imagine that drawing out a little causal diagram of all these possible causes might help you reconcile the study you found with the one I provided. Have a good one!
It’s no mystery that “guns and drugs on the table” crime is perpetrated by low-IQ psychopaths. I’m tired of people’s political views unleashing this group of people in my neighborhood. I would appreciate another approach.
There are multiple replies linking you to studies which speak to the contrary. You are of course, free to selectively address them (or ignore altogether) if they cause mental discomfort, but please do not make sweeping generalizations that they are "simply and empirically wrong".
In your own words, the truth might be more nuanced than the current falsehood-du-jour.
Can't tell if this is a low effort troll, or if you're just confused about who you're replying to or what this comment was saying. The linked comment has a quote from the article confirming the points I made in my initial post:
> Indicators of "concentrated disadvantage" (e.g., racial heterogeneity, poverty, and family disruption) are among the strongest and most stable predictors.
Absolutely nothing in the article being discussed in this comment aligns with the comment I was replying to:
> It’s no mystery that “guns and drugs on the table” crime is perpetrated by low-IQ psychopaths
Moreover, I both saw and discussed this article, so it's absolutely not the case that I'm ignoring inconvenient truths. The truths under discussion are both extremely convenient to my point, and directly addressed by me.
> Very strong" is not a very useful description. Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately, your linked paper is not available. This one is:
So I looked up the Pratt/Cullen 2005 paper (https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/655357), and right off the bat, the abstract doesn't seem to agree with you:
> Indicators of "concentrated disadvantage" (e.g., racial heterogeneity, poverty, and family disruption) are among the strongest and most stable predictors.
Also, what makes you think your counterexamples are unrelated to poverty? I would expect "unemployment length" and "poverty" to be HIGHLY correlated, and unemployment is #2 on the list.
You are citing a correlational study from 1986 on 1970 data as strong evidence? That study doesn't even establish the direction of causality: it's very plausible high crime rates lead to poor economic outcomes, versus the opposite. That also squares with the fact that most poor people aren't criminals and don't have criminal tendencies but are unable to absorb the cost of crime.
First one that came up in Google from a source with a TLD that I trusted. Feel free to do your own research, I don't believe you will find much substantial disagreement with the older study but if you do please pass it on to me.
edit: here's a more recent meta-analysis helpfully linked elsewhere in the thread which confirms the findings
https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/655357
Punchline is:
"""
Across all studies, social disorganization and resource/economic deprivation theories receive strong empirical support; anomie/strain, social support/social altruism, and routine activity theories receive moderate support; and deterrence/rational choice and subcultural theories receive weak support.
Basically every type of crime rate goes down for every cop you add, with murder going down the most. You might be arguing that for a fixed level of policing, most criminal behavior is explained by desperation, but adjusting the level of policing is the most effective way to change the level of crime.
This also intuitively checks out: you could have ~0 crime in a dystopian police state with high levels of desperation, but you would definitely have crime in a police-free state with no desperation (lots of well-off, rich people commit crimes!).
Check out “routine action theory” (which I came across due to the above meta-analysis, can’t explain why it 403d for you, paper is Pratt & Cullen 2005). Posits crime as occurring when three conditions are met:
* Motivated perpetrator
* Vulnerable victim
* Lack of guardianship
Presence of police reduces factor 3, increase in socioeconomic deprivation increases factor 1. It’s unclear to me how you can confidently make the statement that “more police is the most effective” as that doesn’t seem to be attested to anywhere in that study (though I can only read the abstract), however thinking about the balance of these three factors brings our two arguments somewhat into line.
> Nevertheless it's not hard to find studies documenting the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0].
That doesn't mean causation. The same behaviors and character flaws of a person will both make them poor and make them commit crime. A man that is unreliable, selfish and violent will be unemployable. He will also be inclined to crime because of those personal traits. What's interesting is the underlying reasons why people turn out to be that way, but people rarely want to have that discussion. They judge the world as they judge themselves, and they know that they would have little qualms about committing violent crime if they were broke.
You might be interested to learn about the field of causal statistical analysis. There are many, many ways that a researched might infer a causal relationship from observational data. No doubt each individual case is complicated, but I trust professional researchers over your armchair epicyclic theory of the causes of crime.
The "main" cause of crime are laws against victimless, consensual acts. The number of times drug laws are broken every second in this country absolutely dwarfs the number of violent and property crimes being committed.
> Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.
1) Wanting to look at the root causes of an issue is always commendable, but the problem with this kind of analysis on HN is that it's a community of very smart people trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals through the lens of a high-IQ. You're trying to find the logic in what they're doing and putting yourself in their place to explain it with a logical reason, but you can't conceive how different the world is for the low-IQ people looting and stealing and harming others. Their reasons for crime might be far different than the reasons you try and see based on what you might do in their shoes.
2) I think that simply explaining that current crime comes from poverty and needing money is an explanation that falls flat. Much of the human experience has been in immense misery or poverty that the poorest person living in the US today can't even conceive of. Poor people in the US can still have TVs, smart phones, and more food than they can even eat. Poor people in the past used to literally sometimes die of starvation and have to choose whether or not they were willing to eat rotten food or hell, even rats or worse to survive. They had to risk working in extremely dangerous mines, factories, etc to barely eke out survival. Why didn't these people casually turn to crime? They had it much worse! Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others? No, I don't think it's poverty. Something else about the world has changed other than "poor people need money so they resort to crime."
3) My thinking is that something closer to an extremely high and increasing time-preference is what is causing a lot of these problems. Whether it's through the influence of technology, apps, music/movies/tv and other cultural causes, many people have been conditioned to value the dopamine hit of immediate gratification far more than thinking about the long-term.
Isn't violent crime at an all time low, historically [0]? It seems like every other day some rationalist is trumpeting the relative safety of our affluent society.
> Would it ever be socially acceptable for large groups in the past to run amok and violently burglarize others?
This happens all throughout history. Periods of acute poverty are rife with examples of people turning to banditry, literally Kurasawa made a movie about it.
> No, I don't think it's poverty.
I would recommend reading any of the studies linked elsewhere in the thread, empirical evidence disagrees with you big time.
> trying to explain the behavior of very dumb criminals
I think that writing off criminals as "low-IQ" is a huge error. Sure they may be less educated, but I don't know if it's possible to concretely prove that the potential for intelligence is lower among someone committing a B&E than some random office worker. I would actually argue that many criminals are much smarter than they are given credit for. Certainly any successful criminal able to evade arrest for a serious amount of time is probably quite intelligent. Pretending like everyone who decided to rob a liquor store at age 19 is some idiot brute whose sole motivation is acting like a thug I think is one of those convenient narratives that feels true, but which overlooks a lot of what would push a person to actually act that way.
> Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions.
I think the sad part is: that's the point.
Departments were coming under fire for bad policing and needed to offload the blame. So they pay millions to some vendor to launder their bad policing through an algorithm and give them a scapegoat when they need it.
Her full bibliography is at [1] and X/Twitter is @KLdivergence
> drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs
Right. Second, without knowing their definition of "drug use" or "drug crime", that could mean anything from minor stuff like smoking/buying/possessing marijuana by under-18s, possessing or transporting >1 oz of marijuana, all the way up to possession or sale of large quantities of meth or fentanyl.
Third, and what would be obvious to anyone familiar with the Bay Area 2020-22, if predictive policing used "drug crime" (convictions? or arrests?) as opposed to "drug use", then when the then-SF DA stopped prosecuting possession of personal-use levels of meth, SF police tend to reduce or stop arresting for it. So the arrest, prosecution or conviction data from SF would differ sharply to Oakland or pre-2020 SF or 2023 SF or San Mateo County.
All the above factors combined seems like a huge combination of "data drift", "feature drift", "label drift", "model drift".
we've heard about the "root causes of crime" for 50 years. Ditto "facing the sickness." Crime rises and falls independent of the social spending on this.
"why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and they seek out opportunity? How about that?
Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities.
I would not call this the profile of an objective scientist. Rather, she's an advocate.
> pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics.
I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
> "why crime occurs" -- because there are always criminals, and they seek out opportunity? How about that?
"Criminals" are not some kind of universal entity that exists by default. They are people engaging in different patterns of behavior. They act this way for understandable, and often rational reasons. You're welcome to whatever mental model of the world you want, but in my view you're being unhelpfully reductionist.
> I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion. The type of drug used clearly matters in some contexts (eg. public health), but in the context of arresting "criminals" I don't really care whether its fent or their grandma's oxy. The point is that abusing both are crimes, and that type of crime is everywhere.
> Ordinary citizens have a right to be safe in their cities.
Is that some new curse word? Reducing a problem to its root causes is another term for "science."
> No obviously not, being obtuse on purpose doesn't further any useful discussion.
"Obtuse"? you're the one who said "drugs are everywhere." You're the one making obtuse statements you can't support. No one's upset about rich people doing drugs, because they're not the ones smashing car windows.
> They act this way for understandable, and often rational reasons.
this sounds like something you like to believe, rather than anything that comes out of studying actual criminals.
Psychologists who study real criminals in prisons report a very high level of psychopathy. AFAIK there is no treatment for that.
> "Criminals" are not some kind of universal entity that exists by default.
actually, all the evidence through history says that they are a "universal entity," given that every civilized society has them. Maybe you're imagining some sort of ideal society that doesn't have them, but in our real world, we do.
And the word "criminals" does not need quotation marks.
No, but they might take MDMA or LSD, or they might abuse opiates or sleeping pills. "Drugs" isn't a codeword for some specific kind of thing, it's a very amorphous class of substances that changes significantly depending on who you ask.
The fact remains that a lot of people you might not think are drug users actually are. You're just not seeing them because they're functional people who lead ordinary lives. There's a whole host of different subcultures where drug use might be accepted beyond the desperate poor. And those subcultures generally have different norms around what is acceptable and what gets you shunned.
The police will arrest you just the same whether they catch you with a couple of MDMA pills or a baggy of crack.
> I would not call this the profile of an objective scientist. Rather, she's an advocate.
What exactly is the problem in there? If you're for "human rights" you can't be objective? Everything else just seems to be a summary of her research results.
Should epidemiologists be careful to never advocate for policies that improve survival outcomes so they maintain the profile of an objective scientist?
It's not that someone who is "for" something can't be objective, it's just that there is a strong likelihood that they ~aren't~ being objective. It doesn't mean an advocate doesn't have valuable perspectives, it just means that you should perhaps take them with a grain of salt.
Everyone is "for" something, hence the ridiculous example of
> Should epidemiologists be careful to never advocate for policies that improve survival outcomes so they maintain the profile of an objective scientist?
So again I'll ask: specifically what is the "something" listed on that page[1] that would lead you to believe this person is better considered an advocate and not an "objective scientist"?
It makes sense that upscale people use lots of drugs. They can afford it. Wine moms popping pills is practically trope fit for family friendly comedy tv. Cocaine lawyers, "upper"/"downer" party culture that only the well-off youth can generally afford... I know so many wealthy college kids bumming off adderall and other adhd drugs from their friends...
> I call BS on this one. Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin? Prove it.
Your question is flawed: "Upscale people" can afford different drug-habits and different drugs... Or even the same drug in a different form-factor that gets a different name.
That confusion is really important to recognize and eradicate, because we've already seen it used for evil and human suffering.
It has lead (and may yet lead) to incredibly biased laws where two people getting caught with the same amount of the same chemical received insanely different punishments, based on whether its packaging/administration was the "low class" form or what the "upscale" preferred.
Your own question echoes this: You demanded proof of "crack" (cocaine) specifically, but not "powdered". In the past, 5g of crack cocaine would cause a mandatory minimum 5-year prison term, while "upscale people" with 499g of powdered cocaine didn't have to worry about that.
Isn't that because the free base form is a lot more bioavailable/potent? Similar to meth vs. Adderall. Not that I agree with criminalization of any of it, and the scale factors might be off, but there's at least some logic to it.
Kind of? The two are chemically the same - the big difference is that crack is often smoked which makes it fast acting. However, the high last about as long as it takes to kick in, so it’s pretty much a quick up and down.
It was believed to be so much “worse” than powdered because crack was used as a means to vilify black communities while powdered circulated in white communities with must more lenient punishments.
My understanding is that they are not chemically the same: you can't smoke cocaine or amphetamine salts; they'll burn instead of vaporizing. You need to first swap what stabilizer the active component is bound to. i.e. perform some reaction to convert to crack/meth. The point of doing that conversion is to be able to smoke it. My understanding is it's also not just fast acting, but quite a bit more intense. So e.g. more likely to trigger psychosis instead of just making you talk a lot, clean the house, get good grades, etc.
> Upscale people in Pacific Heights smoke crack and shoot heroin?
They don't smoke crack, they snort powdered cocaine, or do pills. They don't start (But they sometimes end) with fent, or heroin, or meth, they start with oxy and adderral.
You assume doing drugs is a sign of a dysfunctional person. While it often is, plenty of people use drugs responsibly, in moderation, because drugs are fun.
I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail in the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it was indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would learn that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads to drug busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be careful when training ML models to remove sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are useless.
In any case, recreational drug use might be uniformly distributed (and there is an interesting question of what anti-social activities are labeled "crimes"), it is definitely not the case that home invasions, car jackings, robberies, etc. are uniformly distributed.
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder.
If you're looking for a single summary of why people commit crime, a better summary is: people commit crimes because they don't think they'll get caught. Desperation doesn't explain all that much.
> The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be careful when training ML models to remove sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are useless.
Sure I don't disagree with that, and I'm not saying that all ML models are useless in this space. However the original article's point (that currently implemented predictive policing software doesn't function) I think is very much in line with Lum's work. I'm just attempting to give a more concrete case for the point, as I felt the Gizmodo article was pretty lacking.
> people commit crimes because they don't think they'll get caught
My hometown had some of the lowest crime rates in the nation (no auto thefts, no burglary, no armed robbery). This was absolutely not because it was hard to get away with it (my mother has left her car unlocked every night since I was a teenager, it would be trivially easy to rob her and escape). My town also was extraordinarily wealthy, among the richest nationwide. Now, maybe (probably) there was a lot of white-collar crime or domestic violence. However in terms of public violent crimes there is a clear effect of socioeconomic status. Yes someone in total destitution probably will not commit a crime if they think they will immediately get arrested, but I think the calculus is far more tolerant of the downside risk of arrest if the upside risk is that your kid gets dinner that night. This is what I mean when I say that desperation is a major driver: that it raises the bar on "how much risk of prison am I willing to accept in order to get what I need".
> that currently implemented predictive policing software doesn't function
To the extent you consider pretrial decision risk assessment software to be "predictive policing" (after all, it's predicting which defendants will skip their court date or commit a crime on bail), then there's plenty of evidence that we have good ones. Even a simple logistic regression over the charged crime, defendant age, and gender outperforms most judges: https://5harad.com/papers/simple-rules.pdf
If I recall, KL has written guides for DAs adopting pretrial risk assessments as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge. These models work today.
> My hometown had some of the lowest crime rates in the nation (no auto thefts, no burglary, no armed robbery).
Even if poverty is a necessary condition for violent crime, to the extent you ignore crimes like domestic violence to bolster your argument, that does not mean it's a sufficient condition. As a result, your simplification about crime being driven by poverty is still misleading.
> This is what I mean when I say that desperation is a major driver: that it raises the bar on "how much risk of prison am I willing to accept in order to get what I need".
Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does not change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response. The supplemental poverty measure suggests poverty was reduced by over 50% through extended unemployment, the super doles, and child tax credit expansion. And yet crime of all types (homicide is the easiest to measure) has skyrocketed.
(As a bit of an aside, because policing in America is funded by local jurisdictions, my guess is your safe childhood town was over policed and it’s quite likely petty thieves would be caught. Either by the community or by police officers with little else to do. A statewide police force could redirect funding from rich, low-crime neighborhoods to high-crime neighborhoods and better reduce crime overall.)
> To the extent you consider pretrial decision risk assessment software to be "predictive policing" (after all, it's predicting which defendants will skip their court date or commit a crime on bail), then there's plenty of evidence that we have good ones.
I think this is a fundamentally different ballgame than predicting where and when crimes will occur with the intent to prioritize police presence, but I do take your point that simple models can outperform human decision making in these cases. What's absolute classification error of these models?
> Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does not change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
Not really disputing this, my point is "Need to Steal to Eat" - "Certainty of Punishment" = "Decision to Commit Crime". I don't really understand why "Certainy of Punishment" would be expected to impact "Need to Steal to Eat", but I'm not surprised that the empirical studies you refer to didn't find a relationship there. Would you be able to provide a reference on this one?
> As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response.
Not sure the extent to which the results of this are generalizable. The proper counterfactual here is not "crime-rates pre-pandemic" it's "crime rates post-pandemic in a world where we didn't provide anti-poverty measures". The former is a very poor proxy for the latter, IMO. I wonder if anyone has compared across states or countries with different pandemic responses?
> my guess is your safe childhood town was over policed and it’s quite likely petty thieves would be caught
Yes it had a very well-funded police department who did very little day-to-day. I can say with certainty that they were very bad at tracking down the local drug dealers as our drug trade was positively thriving. Possibly they would be more motivated to catch petty thieves, but this wasn't really tested while I was there. The occasional bit of vandalism or other hooliganry did not typically get punished, as I recall.
> I think you missed the point. An ML model would only fail in the way KL describes under certain circumstances. If it was indeed the case that everyone does drugs, then it would learn that traffic stops in wealthy neighborhoods also leads to drug busts. The conclusion of KL and related work is that we have to be careful when training ML models to remove sources of underperformance, not that all ML models are useless.
This assumes that the police actually _want_ to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods. It's hard for me not to think that using ML models is intended to be a way to insulate the decision makers from accountability; pick a model that gives the results you want, don't divulge the details, and you'll never have to explain your actions because you were "just following the model".
No it's not. I'm making a claim about what ML models are capable of in response to someone incorrectly summarizing a possible weakness with them.
If police don't want to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods, they don't need models to justify that. There is no jurisdiction in America where discretion has been ceded to statistical models.
> If police don't want to make drug busts in wealthy neighborhoods, they don't need models to justify that.
They may not need models to justify it, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be helpful for them to avoid accountability. I obviously can't say for sure whether or not the police are actively trying to avoid policing any given wealthy area, but it doesn't seem like a stretch that if that was a goal, then obfuscating the source of that decision would be helpful, even if it might not be required.
> There is no jurisdiction in America where discretion has been ceded to statistical models.
That's not at all what I said. My point is that someone who wants to influence _perception_ of where decisions were coming from could make use of ML to make their decisions seem to be the result of "objective" data rather than personal bias.
> Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions.
Anyone can lie with statistics, but this isn’t really how ML works. Such a model would not appear to perform well, in addition to not performing well.
If you had a model that predicted the probability of getting a drug arrest it should work just fine even if you give it an abundance of examples of going to the same area if it as still the same rate as other places. That is to say it should not learn these areas are different
I’m not sure I understand your point. If the model is predicting the probability that police will make an arrest in a location then I think it could perform well on rudimentary classifier metrics without working well in the more general sense of resolving crime. If police could make drug arrests in a location, but tend to do it in ZIP codes with low socioeconomic indices then the model will predict more arrests where socioeconomic indices are low. Police acting on this intel will turn up true positives, and the classifier will get high marks. But because you’re not able to assess the false negative rate properly (the volume of crimes that police didn’t make arrests for) you’re unable to holistically evaluate its performance. I guess in that second sense the model isn’t actually performing well, but because it can’t be measured it doesn’t really get monitored.
You would have to go out of your way, imo, to build a model this stupid. If the claim is that all areas have equal arrest potential, then this should be easily detected in the model. If the modelers were so stupid that they failed to account for the presence of police when estimating the rate of/probability of/total quantity of arrests then sure, they’re just stupid people making stupid models. Or intentionally making stupid models.
But it would be very easy to do something like to predict the probability that a cop makes an arrest given they went to each area. And if there’s no difference in the areas, it should not matter how many times they went there. The rates should be the same.
It seems likely that the models were right and that it’s way easier to make drug arrests in these areas, which was kind of baked into the original premise. So it’s not clear why blaming the modeling is an issue here.
The problem is the externalities of the policy. Not some mode overfitting. Like would you blink if I told you the probability of being able to make a drug arrest in a poor area was 20% higher? Probably not. Does that need to mean that you only go to the poor area? No.
> The problem is the externalities of the policy. Not some mode overfitting.
Sure I don't disagree with this. I guess the point is not so much that ML models are bad here in the typical sense (although greedy consultants may, and IMO likely are, happy to pawn off shitty models to jurisdictions which don't know any better), but more that the underlying system isn't one where predictive modeling is truly going to be "effective" (although, as another commenter pointed out, there are cases where predictive modeling works fairly well such as pretrial detention risk assessment). The problem as I see it is that model "efficacy" means one thing to the cops and voters ("effective" in the sense of reducing or preventing crime) and another thing to a data science ("effective" in the sense of able to achieve a high F1 score or w/e). These definitions may be correlated, but are not guaranteed to be, and the strength of the correlation is highly dependent on how the model is ultimately used.
That would just depend on a whole host of specifics. Incidentally, the same specifics as for regular statistics as ML is also statistics, and is sensitive to experimental design and sampling just the same.
Used properly, to intervene in the system using negative feedback
loops "predictive policing software" seems a wonderful tool for
reducing crime. If it accurately identifies areas of high crime then
that's a sign of poverty, the root cause of crime, and helps identify
neighbourhoods where we should hand out money - handing out money
being the most direct way of tackling poverty.
Of course some people might disagree with this intervention as
"simplistic". And they'd be at least a little right. For those people
who may not have read "Leverage points: Where to intervene in a
system" by Dana Meadows, I highly recommend it to see why.
Turns out that messing with parameters like money, and feedback loops
that constitute a "criminal justice system" are the least effective of
all actions. The fundamental values of the system must be
addressed. One of those is itself the error that "cybernetic
governance" based on software can do anything more than enrich a few
software companies.
You don’t need predictive policing to identify areas of high crime (in fact, identification of areas of high crime is an input to predictive policing.)
> then that’s a sign of poverty,
Poverty information is also an input to predictive policing, not something it provides you information about that you didn't already have, even in the fantasy world where it works well.
> the root cause of crime
Poverty is not the root cause of crime. It may be a root cause of some crime.
You noticed that the analysis was simplistic despite my attempts to
hide that. :) I'd be curious to know what the root cause of crime
is. Laws? /s
edit: Sarcasm aside... My serious point is; just what exactly is this
software trying to achieve? Isn't this whole caper a solution looking
for a problem dreamed up by people who have tech and nothing to do
with it, and no grounding in basic human values?
People who interact with the medical system (especially young people) are not representative of the population as a whole. Especially in the US where people have to pay for medical treatment. All sorts of factors.
A typical healthy 25 year-old does not go to the doctor, like, ever.
On the other hand the population of 25 year-old drug users will have a higher rate of interaction with the medical system.
That’s an interesting point, I can’t say I recall what type of analysis if any was performed to address something like this. With that said, while these types of selection biases probably make it challenging to reliably estimate absolute drug usage rates, I would imagine they are less impactful on the relative rates between demos of geographical areas, which is the quantity of interest here.
That's the point. Cops are only going invest in systems that confirm their biases and allow them to target the people they "know" are "the problem".
If cops, for whatever reason, have a history of targeting a particular neighborhood, arresting people that fit a certain profile, etc, and suddenly their new computer system tells them to focus on other areas or demographics, then that system is broken to them. They "know" where the crime is, and if they listen to the system that tells them otherwise, criminals will get away and/or they won't be able to make easy arrests they want to make.
Law enforcement is also incentivized to buy systems that they can point to and scapegoat if they do something wrong. "I'm just doing what the computer told me to do and machines can't be biased" is a good enough justification to a lot of people, including the justice system.
drug dealers will continue to sell drugs irregardless of financial stability. when law enforcement defers arrest/prosecution the drug dealing doesn't become less harmful to communities, the opposite is true. look at SF/Oakland. organized rings maximizing profits in retail theft and property crimes. if this is the alternative to broken windows theory of policing then good luck w/ that.
Okay sure but most people with a steady 9 to 5 aren't buying industrial volumes of crack. Poverty creates big demand for the worst of the drug trade. Moreover, the drug dealers who are earning big exploiting this aren't going to be found in the worst parts of the city. The police are at best picking up the low- to mid-level distributors. "Broken Windows" has failed to win the drug war for decades; if you want to keep backing a failed experiment you're welcome to it, but I'm going to seek an improvement.
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder.
Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes. People get angry. They feel disrespected. And some of them even just think violence is flat-out fun. The "desperate people" model doesn't really hold water with respect to the most serious crimes we care the most about.
Second, I am aware that this sounds like some kind of right-wing talking point, but you should consider that it's true: a job at Dunkin Donuts is more remunerative than stealing catalytic converters. It's not even close, really. We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd.
If they were genuinely just desperate, they'd take the job at Dunkin.
We'll never effectively police crime if we can't even acknowledge its true nature.
> Most violent crime is the result of interpersonal disputes
Sure violent crime is complicated. I'll walk back my claims with regard to things like domestic violence or violent crime resulting from a fight or something. However there is still the large component of violent crime that is things like an armed robbery, for which I believe my claim applies. Somewhere else in the thread someone brought up the link between impulse control and poverty, which I think also has bearing here. Poverty has been documented to increase baseline stress, and I would imagine that someone working multiple part time jobs just to afford rent and food is going to have a way shorter fuse than like, some tech worker earning a quarter million a year, but that's just speculation on my part.
> We have a worker shortage! Fast food wages are higher than ever. Young men steal catalytic converters because it's more fun and because they don't want to work at stupid Dunkin Dounuts and wear a uniform like a nerd.
I see your point here, and I don't think it's totally invalid, but I do think it fails to acknowledge the whole problem. For one, I think we would need to get some sense of how many people both work at DD and steal cats out of cars. I would imagine that it's not a small fraction of the population. While slinging donuts probably pays more than petty crime, it also requires more time. If you're already working one fast food job maybe you're just going to augment that salary with some theft rather than take on another 20-30 hours of work. There's also the pride factor, FF jobs can feel very degrading whereas some varities of crime are self-employment, you get to set your own hours and working conditions. Additionally FF jobs may not even hire you if you've already got a conviction or consume certain drugs.
I do overall agree that there is some cultural stuff at play, a young man who grows up in a poor neighborhood and meets a lot of criminals is likely going to feel pressured to himself start committing crimes, but I also have to ask if you can truly blame someone for making that choice and if it makes sense to separate that choice from an overall feeling of desperation? If you're a young man who believes he has absolutely no prospects whatsoever to actually "succeed" following the typical career path then that means you have little to lose, and coming from that mindset I don't think it's totally unreasonable to say "fuck it" and start operating outside the law, even if it pays less than slinging burgers. Desperation breeds disaffectation, which in turn results in seriously anti-social behavior. If coolness was the only factor every affluent suburbanite teenager would also be cutting catties, but clearly that's not the case. Yes the ultimate consequence is something more than "I just need money so I'm going to turn to crime", but the underlying agitation which kicks off the chain of events is often socioeconomic disadvantage.
> The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs.
Seems like the world's most obvious and easiest to solve problem tbh. This is like saying "I showed version A of my site to 1000 users and version B to 100. And version A lead to 500 conversions while version B only lead to 75. Therefore, version A is better because it lead to more conversions."
There was a really interesting episode of the podcast Hidden Brain last year about using medical data, but with a different approach -- the economist/sociologist Sara Heller did some research into predicting crime using medical data, or, more specifically, data about gunshot wounds.
It turns out, you can predict gunshot victims quite well: They generated a large dataset for Chicago, then produced a list of the top 100 (IIRC) likely victims of gunshot wounds in the next year, and the people on that list had something like a 10% likelihood of being shot in the next year -- a more than 100x increase beyond the average Chicagoan.
Dr. Heller's point, rather than being one about predictive policing in general, was that it's probably more effective to try to prevent people from becoming victims. They're actually running a longitudinal study right now -- Dr. Heller alongside Dr. Christopher Blattman -- looking at methods of preventative, positive intervention to reduce crime. Dr. Blattman has actually run some studies on this in Africa in the past, looking at giving people money, therapy, or a combination thereof, and found pretty impressive impact on reducing future criminal behaviour by giving people a modest monetary infusion alongside social support in the form of therapy and group sessions.
That website is exceptionally biased in its motivations and doesn't give its sources of information. Take anything from it with a grain of salt and please try to identify other sources of information.
With the crime you actually really need to catch (e.g. murders, terrorism, armed robberies) the problem is that they are rare, compared to them not happening. Most people on here have probably never even witnessed a murder for example, and terrorism is even rarer.
That means your prediction that eats data with mostly legal stuff all day must be extremely accurate to be useful. Let's say you wanna predict who a terrorist ist by the way they are walking at an airport. Given the high volume of people the answer will be: nearly nobody, except when they are. So your mechanism just produces false positives all day long and might encode stereotypes on the way.
The most important aspect for me would be that we actually demand scientific evidence of such a thing working before our executive is allowed to use it. Everything else is a huge risk for civil rights and doesn't help to prevent actual crime either.
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.),
I suspect that often what happens for the most disadvantaged people is that the arrow of causality gets reversed - the deck gets so stacked against them that it's almost a crime to simply exist at all. And that, in turn, puts them into a desperate situation.
There was an interesting piece of investigative journalism in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that I read maybe 10 or 15 years ago showing how policies set up by (then County commissioner) Scott Walker more-or-less made it implicitly illegal to live below the poverty line in a majority Black neighborhood in Milwaukee County. Not through any one law, but through a series of edge cases related to the interaction of laws and urban planning initiatives that were almost impossible for anyone without significant resources to navigate successfully.
Now explain the rise of gang violence in Sweden, with kids queuing to become gang members. I don't think poverty is the explanation (nor is immigration as some claims). There's no desperation here and plenty of options for other careers or life paths.
No, they look up to the criminals. Being a gangster is cool and respect is everything. You need to respond violently to the most mundane things or you risk losing the respect.
The ongoing conflicts started because of some truly ridiculous things, like someone not being invited to a robbery and feeling humiliated/jealous when they bragged about the crime. It's always some personal reasons where someone thinks they are being disrespected, and never about turfs like you would think.
> Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.
Nayib Bukele locked up all his country's criminals, and by doing so made a massive difference to the quality of life. The truth is, crime causes poverty at least as much as poverty causes crime. There is no tradeoff between "arrest criminals and get them off the streets" and "fix poverty", the latter in fact depends on the former.
It would probably also help if we, as a society, weren't so addicted to unhinged moral panics about drugs, which in turn supply political fuel for similarly reality-impaired "tough on crime" policy pushes. Right now it's fentanyl, but in the past it's been crack, LSD, marijuana, etc..
(Fentanyl clearly poses legitimate problems for various reasons, but people have increasingly treated it like it's some kind of sci-fi chemical weapon instead of a medicine that's routinely used in hospitals and nursing homes around the world.)
Is it really that hard to control for the police presence?
Area A: We had 10 patrols of which 5 found drugs.
Area B: We had 30 patrols of which 12 found drugs.
I don't think it's too hard to notice that A is the better target for future controls, even though more drugs were found in B (when going by total numbers.)
I think people on the left don't really want to admit that there are areas and populations that do indeed warrant more searches than others.
In any case, I wasn't talking about
"let's search this person's car because the person belongs to a minority",
but rather "we control 10% of cars (randomized) passing through this intersection, because there's lots of crime in this area, and if the persons searched don't reflect the overall population mix, that's okay."
>they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again
This process is already a common complaint of police, without predictive software.
>This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again
One would except drug usage to go down in neighborhoods where it is slightly enforced meaning that they should move on to another location. If there is a problem population which never gets better then permanently having increased coverage would make sense.
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder.
The data on poverty and crime isn’t directional. It’s not proven that poverty causes crime. It’s just as likely that crime causes poverty, or some other variables cause both.
>she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics.
One of the issues I've noticed. I can say from first hand experience that many wealthy people and VC's use drugs fairly frequently. I'm sure most of these arrests involve poor people though. You never hear about the wealthy folks being busted for drugs.
Drug crimes are something of a special case, in that drug laws in the USA (which did not exist in the 19th century) were largely implemented in the early 20th century as a means of population control, with racist overtones (Chinese immigrant use of opium, Mexican and black use of marijuana, etc.). Since drugs were widely used (as was alcohol) across the entire US social spectrum, but enforcement was targeted at specific groups and individuals for political reasons, it's reminscent of what Stalin's head of the NKVD, Beria, said: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
This is a standard tactic of authoritarian states: create enough laws such that everyone is guilty of something, and then use selective enforcement of those laws as a mechanism to control the population. Whether or not the USA's promotion of drug laws of this nature qualifies it as an authoritarian state, well, that can be left as an exercise for the reader. The fact that the USA has the world's largest prison population, and that a very significant fraction of that population is there on drug charges, and that wealthy politically connected people rarely get incarcerated on drug charges, are all factors worth considering.
As far as harm caused by fentanyl, if it was legalized and passed out to addicts in the form of transdermal patches in conjunction with addiction treatment and counseling (the original fentanyl formulation for treatment of cancer pain[1]), most of the violent crime associated with fentanyl would vanish. Note also that alcohol itself is far more associated with violence than the opiates are in terms of the direct effects of the substance.
> Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself.
Issue: police are not trained to, nor are they responsible for fixing, the underlying "sickness". Police, social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists have very different missions, training, skillsets, perspectives, and dispositions. We can argue that society should invest more in social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists, but not that police should become social workers, therapists, and psychiatrists to cover for insufficient resources in those areas.
Crime isn't caused by poverty. There is no correlation.
Crime was very low in the 50's, when poverty was much, much higher.
Crime was low during the Great Depression. We're talking about people so poor they were cooking thin soups over outdoor fires in ramshackle Hoovervilles. No explosion of criminality.
Think about your own family. Almost certainly, your great-grandparents were much poorer than you, but they were not more criminal, even though they lived with less material wealth than the poor urban neighborhoods of today's America. In many cases they had no electricity, or running water, and only the most basic healthcare. Yet they obeyed the law.
It's not poverty. Crime comes from the dysfunction in people and communities which stems from deeper causes which are much harder, or impossible to change.
I know that my grandparents sold booze illegally to bolster their income, my dad worked under the table a lot. Honestly how do you know how criminal anyone was in the 40s and 50s? Do you think they caught remotely as much theft, smuggling or tax evasion at a time when security cameras didn't exist? The state didn't even have a fraction of the capacity to trace lawbreaking that it has now.
When our great grandparents were around most cops probably didn't even have routine motorized patrols, who on earth even bothered to report a violent altercation during the Great Depression
No, it's the other way around. You can tell because many many communities now and in history have been highly functional while being broke, but every community full of criminals is broke (which is so obvious it sounds strange to even say).
This demonstrates that criminality/social dysfunction causes poverty, not the other way around.
The only change I wish to suggest is the substitution of a term I'm trying to popularize. Replace "anti-social personality disorder" with "anus-type personality disorder".
> On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.) occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder.
Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true. I have no info on addicts, but I doubt most of them commit crimes either aside from dealing.
> Most poor people do not commit crimes, which is what you would expect if that statemebt is true.
No this does not follow from what I said. "Group A is more likely to do X than Group B" is very different from "The majority of Group A does X". One is a comparison between two rates, and the other is a comparison of one rate to an absolute threshold (50%).
> pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics.
A lot of this depends if you are targeting drug users or drug dealers. While I agree that drug users are spread throughout the city, I would be very surprised if drug dealers are spread throughout the city. I would guess that drug dealers are far more clustered than drug users. So while it is useless if you are trying to target drug users, it is probably helpful for targeting drug dealers.
Rich people abusing drugs have to get them somewhere, and they're probably not traveling to skid row to get them. I agree that drug dealers and drug users probably have different dynamics, but the reality is that police prosecute both, and in the case of the latter the above described dynamic clearly exists.
We had a problem with high school kids buying drugs from homeless encampments near bus stops...which is why we no longer allow homeless encampments near bus stops...because fent kills these kids (which even the most "drugs are harmless" advocate doesn't want happening).
Most people don't care at all if someone is injecting fentanyl in the privacy of their own home, but you shouldn't do it right next to an elementary school. Clearly the police will have a priority in which one of these to prosecute.
> In 2021, The Markup published an investigation in partnership with Gizmodo showing that Geolitica’s software tended to disproportionately target low-income, Black, and Latino neighborhoods in 38 cities across the country.
But you should understand what is meant by "disproportionately" in this context. It does not appear to mean "disproportionate to the amount of crime in those areas." It seems, as with most accusations of disparate impact, to mean just quite literally that more crimes are predicted in those neighborhoods without reference to disparities in crime rates.
They then imply (without direct reference to the enormous offending disparities) that this is explained by race and class differences in crime reporting: [0]
> The agency has found repeatedly that White crime victims are less likely to report violent crime to police than Black or Latino victims.
> In a special report looking at five years of data, BJS found an income pattern as well. People earning $50,000 or more a year reported crimes to the police 12 percent less often than those earning $25,000 a year or less.
> This disparity in crime reporting would naturally be reflected in predictions.
It's possible this is having some effect, but, again, because there is no reference to the (often very large) baseline differences in crime rates, we can't see what's true, which is that this probably accounts for only a small amount of that difference.
You don't seem very confident. I would suggest incorporating data regarding crime that is kept out of the justice system (the victim or police refuse to press charges), as well as determining whether or not white collar crime is included. The disproportionate targeting could still conceivably relate to the amount of crime; you have not falsified that notion yet.
"Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said."
Can you predict crimes? Of course you can, the math is clear. The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but politically unfeasible: extended incarceration.
Criminals commit crimes, a lot. Once you have identified a criminal, you can safely predict more crimes. No AI needed, a simple spreadsheet will suffice.
"A significant decrease in burglaries in most Leinster counties is being attributed by senior gardaí to the deaths of three prolific criminals as well as a number of arrest operations."
> The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but politically unfeasible: extended incarceration.
The death penalty for misdemeanors would also reduce crime. The externalities make it not worth it.
Notably, Chicago tried exactly what you're proposing (rank order list of likely criminals with proactive surveillance and intervention). It didn't really work. [1]
"Chicago has an estimated population of over 100,000 active gang members from nearly 60 factions. Gang warfare and retaliation is common in Chicago. Gangs were responsible for 61% of the homicides in Chicago in 2011."
Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy blames Chicago's gang culture for its high rates of homicide and other violent crime, stating "It's very frustrating to know that it's like 7% of the population causes 80% of the violent crime..."
Again, some data science mumbojumbo is preventing actual, logical solutions. El Salvador put gang members, in totality, in jail. Now it has the LOWEST homicide rate in Latin America - it had the HIGHEST before.
So yeah, the anti-carceration movement in the US has caused the deaths of more people, African-Americans in particular, than any terrorist organization.
The 100k stat that wiki page cites is from this [0] hilariously uhthorough document.
The "gang database" that I'm assuming that statistic is sourced from has been found to be completely riddled with errors.
"Those mistakes included two people listed as 132 years old and 13 people recorded as 118 years old." [1]
"Another said he double-checks information in the database by looking up police reports, because he’s aware that some people are identified as gang members based solely on where they live." [2]
While El Salvador's method has certainly been effective, I'm not sure it's something to discuss in the context of the average developed country. I don't know much about it, and while it was probably an improvement over the old system that resulted in so much homicide, it seems to me like the new system is a dictatorship with fascist tendencies.
Over 60(!) prior arrests, wide range of violent crime, never served more than 6 months.
You guys have no solutions, no alternatives. Nothing besides empty platitudes of "social justice" and "serious arguments".
Bill Clinton briefly course corrected, three strike laws and such ... and crime started plummeting. As if banning leaded gasoline was the reason, haha. But then, social justice reared its head and here we are.
FWIW, you’re entirely correct and I don’t expect things to get better.
Ryan Carson’s story is an especially tragic one. I don’t know how many more times this needs to happen before people accept that something’s gone deeply wrong.
Bukele took office in 2019, when the murder rate was well within the normal range of the past few decades. It's now far, far below that range (just noticed that the source I linked only goes to 2021, but murders went down by over half again in 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-..., and they are on trend to do the same this year)
> The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but politically unfeasible: extended incarceration.
Some form of 3-strike law is on the books in a majority (28) of US states (including NY), so they clearly are not politically unfeasible, nor are they obviously effective.
Nobody was paying attention the last decade how the social movements destroyed safety.
Prop 57 in California, supported by billionaires? Resulted in the release of convicted sex offenders from prison. Turns out rape is a non-violent crime, who knew. Listen to women? Bah.
> The law was later deemed, in part, to be unconstitutional by a federal court, which found that it violated the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a trial by jury.
> The Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that New York’s Persistent Felony Offender Statute (PFOS), N.Y. Penal Law § 70.10 , which allows enhancement of sentences for prior felony convictions, violated the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, that finding was later reversed by an en banc ruling.
Cash bail is a ridiculous concept, and it's good to get rid of it.
It’s frustrating to see people unfamiliar with the topic asserting things so confidently.
The 3-strike law has no effect enforced in NYC when low level crimes are deliberately not prosecuted. Bragg has made it clear this is the strategy going forward for his office, this is what we are expected to get used to.
Petty crimes. They're stealing $3 sodas, not cars. Presumably, the bodega owner is calling the cops saying "Joey's back - please get him out of my shop"
No, but you're proving my point. Look at the stats behind the various closures of retail stores across the US to learn about the impact of "petty crime".
Here is an example of what small store owners have to endure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY1L62dKnU8
"El Sobrante store clerk set on fire during confrontation with shoplifter"
The absolute ignorance and distaste towards retail workers and small shop owners in the ruling class in the US is shocking.
Are you saying that it's common for store owners to be set on fire by shoplifters, or is your example inappropriate for being an outlier and not representative of what most shoplifting is like?
It's becoming more common now as store owners are left on their own and have to protect their livelihood with their bare hands.
Big box retail (no worries, all insured - remember that BS line?) is simply closing stores and killing jobs AND access to goods in one go. Cue the complaint about "food deserts". Walmart closed in Portland. WALMART which operates throughout hurricanes cannot handle the rampant violence and theft anymore.
But yeah, total ignorance from the bougie class toward the plight of blue collar Americans.
They’re not stealing $3 sodas, they’re stealing entire shelves of razors and shampoo and beer, stuffing them in garbage bags, and then selling them on 14th and A next to my apartment.
I see this Every. Single. Day.
It’s not bodega owners getting hit, it’s mostly franchised retail. CVS, Walgreens, Target seem to be the most common.
I asked an AP at Target why they don’t stop them, and he said it’s store policy that unless they’re lifting a felony amount, there’s just no business reason to stop them. They’ll be back the next day anyway.
People who don’t live here (or who live in nicer parts of the city) really don’t believe it, and it’s frustrating being gaslit about something you see almost every day.
> Can you predict crimes? Of course you can, the math is clear.
I don't follow—just because arrests were made doesn't imply crime happened, and it doesn't imply the police are arresting the people committing the actual crimes. All it shows is that the cops arrest the same people over and over again. How do you know they aren't just harassing innocent people?
> The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but politically unfeasible: extended incarceration.
Sorry, what solutions are you comparing to and what are you basing this on? Sounds like reactionary fear... miss me with that ish. Anyway if long sentencing worked we wouldn't have the crime rate we do.
Then again, asking a reactionary to use their brain is like asking a worm to fly. Apologies for the request.
El Salvador used to be the world's homicide capital. People lived in fear every single day. Then they locked up their criminals. Now their murder rate is comparable to US and Canada's.
> Now, children play soccer late into the evening on fields that were gang turf. Ms. Inglés gathers soil for her plants next to an abandoned building that residents say was used for gang killings.
> Homicides plunged. Extortion payments imposed by gangs on businesses and residents, once an economy unto itself, also declined, analysts said.
> “You can walk freely,” Ms. Inglés said. “So much has changed.”
> El Faro, El Salvador’s leading news outlet, surveyed the country earlier this year and delivered a stunning assessment: The gangs largely “do not exist.”
Long sentencing works when you actually prosecute and enforce consistently (hint: US doesn't do that).
Ok so to state the obvious and it's insane to compare us to el salvador and seriously suggest we should become even more of a prison state than we already are.
Secondly, part of the reason we have such a high crime rate is our high imprisonment rate, as el salvador will discover. If you remove all legal avenues to survival you create crime.
Meanwhile, the actually obvious measures—i.e. actually fighting poverty in good faith—is so anathema to american culture people would rather watch people shit in the street than watch their housing valuation rise slower or, god forbid, drop.
I'm not sure what YIMBYism is beyond giving cash away to developers, tbh, nor what it has to do with laws being enforced. They seem like orthogonal concepts at first blush.
By "YIMBYism" I just mean "making it legal for developers to develop"—no cash transfers necessary. When more housing gets built, housing prices go down (supply and demand), which helps alleviate problems like homelessness. However, one of the biggest reasons why policies that reduce housing costs face political opposition is that people fear that lower costs will attract criminals to the neighborhood. By arresting and imprisoning the criminals, you neutralize this source of opposition.
In short, locking up the bad guys is a necessary step to "fight poverty in good faith".
This ignores two things, first of which is "Empirical research on the relationship between length of incarceration and recidivism is limited and insufficient for developing federal sentencing policy" [1]. There is no guarantee that any sentence that would at all be reasonable for the crime would reduce the rate, and in fact that study I cited did not find any deterrent effect for sentences less than 5 years.
The second part I feel you miss are the as many as 14,000 other people arrested for shoplifting. If 6,000 is less than 1/3, than there were about 20,000 arrests. Your "Criminals commit crimes, a lot" seems to ignore all the other people. Extending incarceration wouldn't just affect the repeat offenders, but would also lock a massive number of poor people. You say class is just a distraction, but the very articles you cite bring up poverty as a factor.
Bringing up the decrease in robbery rate in Ireland is also a bit misleading, as they had a much lower number of robberies per 100,000 people (about half the rate)[2][3] to begin with, as compared to the US (the subject of this article). That means fewer people are responsible for a higher percentage of the crime.
I am a little confused by this. Firstly, Gizmodo is reporting on somebody else's investigation:
> A new joint investigation by The Markup and Wired...
And when I go to the page about actual investigation by The Markup [1]
> Our investigation stopped short of analyzing precisely how effective Geolitica’s software was at predicting crimes because only 2 out of 38 police departments provided data on when officers patrolled the predicted areas. Geolitica claims that sending officers to a prediction location would dissuade crimes through police presence alone. It would be impossible to accurately determine how effective the program is without knowing which predictions officers responded to and which ones they did not respond to.
Also, later in the article
> Plainfield officials said they never used the system to direct patrols.
Given all this, it's somewhat simplistic to say it's "pretty terrible at predicting crimes", even though that makes for a good clickbait headline. It seems that the software was intended to identify high-crime areas that to target for patrolling, which doesn't seem like a huge problem to me -- but it seems like the software was never actually used as intended in the first place.
The error is more fundamental. Even if they had some number like 'only 1% of crimes were predicted and that's bad', that's a right answer to a wrong question. Why do they think 1% is not good enough? How big does it need to be before it is good? 2%? 50%? 100%? If you can't give any answer to that question, then it doesn't matter what the number really is because the number still doesn't mean anything.
(The right number is probably extremely small, because crime is very bad {{citation needed}} and even a small chance of prevention is useful.)
the "right number" is strongly dependent on what the consequences of false positives are. If you're comfortable pulling numbers from thin air, 0.5% of these guided patrols lead to prevented crimes, but 10% lead to arrests of simply suspicious looking people (suspicious on grounds of being around where crime is predicted) and then while they're being detained are late for a job and get fired. Is 20 people getting fired worth preventing one crime? Say, a catalytic converter being stolen, since "crime" is very bad, not, say, murder particularly.
This is actually the real problem. Police patrols have to be directed somewhere, somehow. It's either the whim of the commisioner, or gut feeling of the officers, or machine learning software.
When one says that machine learning software is terrible, you have to trust either the officers, or their boss. I have a feeling that the same people who criticize the software trust rank-and-file officers even less..
> How big does it need to be before it is good? 2%? 50%? 100%? If you can't give any answer to that question, then it doesn't matter what the number really is because the number still doesn't mean anything.
Uh, seems a lot like it should be the government answering that question before spending tax money on it and subjecting real people to the uncaring US justice system just because crime is bad so we have to do something, even if that something is ML snake oil?
The things you're citing are referring to two different investigations. One is the most recent one that only centered on Plainfield, NJ, which is what Gizmodo is reblogging. The one where they did not investigate Geolitica's effectiveness at predictions was a broader investigation in 2021.
But even if they had used it as intended, how could you tell whether it works?
How do you tell the difference between "there were going to be crimes there, but you patrolled there, and because you patrolled, there were no crimes" and "there were not going to be crimes there, whether you patrolled or not, so your patrol did exactly nothing."
There are really two questions here, which should be tested separately:
(1) Is the software significantly predictive? Test the software's predictions against actual crime in areas with no patrols.
(2) Are patrols effective deterrents to crime? Observe the area in question with and without patrols. (I wouldn't be surprised to learn there are already such studies.)
If both (1) and (2) yield positive results, you can then use the software to direct patrols and see if the method itself is effective at reducing crime; which would also serve to further confirm (2).
Of course, even if only (1) yields positive results, there would probably be other benefits to using the software to direct patrols, like reducing response times (which could also be tested).
well, if you're a guest on https://www.probablecausation.com/, then you would randomly assign teams to patrol using this software or not,and compare the changes in rates. sounds like geolitica isn't very careful or interested in results.
If you’re selling tiger-repellent rocks, the last thing you need is a solid controlled experiment to get in the way of separating rubes from their cash.
The study of those questions and the reliability of your answers to those questions is called statistics and it is an entire branch of mathematics, usually with its own department at most universities.
> More police presence means more recorded crimes.
The article in the headline implies the opposite: statistical inference of future crime location -> more cops in said location -> no crime in said location.
It should be fairly easy to back out an out of sample data set for this - ie predicted crime location where the extra cops didn't get deployed and see if that lines up with empirical observations.
If it was good at predicting crime I highly doubt only 2/38 departments would have cooperated. The know it doesn't work.
And it looks like they had some data:
>We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.
>If it was good at predicting crime I highly doubt only 2/38 departments would have cooperated.
That's certainly low, but I suspect (absent some legal framework like FOIA) the default position of police departments is to share less information, not more. So it's still what I would expect even if it was reasonably good.
I wish the article would have provided more details about why the PDs chose not to use it. Was it because it was bad at predictions? Cumbersome to use? Glitchy?
It reminds me of a project I was involved with that used a "real-time" computational fluid dynamics model to optimize datacenter air-conditioning. Management was big on the hype, but if you paid attention, the system was routinely unplugged from the actual control system because the facility engineers just found it too difficult to work with.
>
That's certainly low, but I suspect (absent some legal framework like FOIA) the default position of police departments is to share less information, not more.
Why on Earth would we want people who have a poor grasp of the law, paired with the means and the license to arrest and kill be transparent about their work..?
We can both agree that transparency is the ideal and still recognize that’s not how incentives are aligned. In general, there are far more downsides and risks to PDs regarding open sharing of information so they generally should be expected to act accordingly.
E.g., I’d like to live in a works where lawyers are concerned with justice rather than “winning” but I’m not shocked when they act like winning is the goal.
To be fair, the way legal system works means if a lawyer isn’t trying to ‘win’ your case, they’re not being a good lawyer - the assumption your client is innocent and you need to defend them is kinda fundamental.
How morality informs the law and the ways lawyers should behave (i.e, should they phone it in/decline the case in if they disagree ethically) is interesting but more difficult as a topic
I think this is mostly correct. Not only are lawyers who aren't trying to "win" not good lawyers, they are possibly breaching their oath. The lawyer has an obligation to try and win, but only after they have done a preliminary investigation before filing the case. There are also some guardrails; your lawyer can't lie about facts they've found out during that investigation, for example. If they do, they can be sanctioned for it. So they can't just try and win at all costs.
With all that said, I think the original point still stands: in most people's minds, an 'ideal' system is one where all the lawyers are trying to seek justice. We just create a less-than-ideal adversarial system as a weak proxy for that given that human nature tends to make the ideal an unreliable expectation. I don't think that's fundamentally different from the PD transparency issue.
"Winning" as the goal is the only way lawyers can be truly objective. Otherwise the justice system turns into a popularity contest. The problem is that any single person/lawyer might ~think~ they know who is guilty or innocent, but they may very well be wrong.
If a defense lawyer knows that his client is guilty, and successfully defends him anyways, that means there was not sufficient evidence to convict. Don't blame the defense lawyer for doing his job rigorously. Blame the prosecution for failing at theirs.
>If a defense lawyer knows that his client is guilty, and successfully defends him anyways, that means there was not sufficient evidence to convict.
This assumes the jury is rational and objective. There's plenty of behavioral psychology that goes against this, but a more glaring observation is that lawyers do not seek to maximize the objectivity of the jury during selection. It's usually very much the opposite.
The goal of the district/trial court system is finding of fact. That's objective. Winning is about swaying the jury, which pulls on the levers of subjectivity. The system is, in part, designed to protect the rights of the innocent. Take the Blackstone ratio, which assumes it is better to let 10 guilty people go than convict 1 innocent. Verdicts cannot be purely objective in a system designed to be asymmetrical.
It seems to me that the incentives of police departments should be irrelevant, and that an organization with that much responsibility should not be able to simply refuse to give out at least certain types of information.
I think you're missing my point. I'm saying they shouldn't be allowed to give their incentives higher priority. They should be more tightly scrutinized so that their incentives don't matter.
> Gizmodo is reporting on somebody else's investigation
This is Gizmodo's business model. It is a glorified blog. They don't do original reporting. Gizmodo was originally a property of Gawker, and thus the model is essentially commentary and opinion on the reporting generated by other organizations.
Because Gizmodo is really just an opinion/editorial blog, it doesn't really attempt to provide unbiased or fact driven reporting. So it is then no surprise that the actual facts align quite poorly with the headline.
If we really believe in the basic principles of individual liberty that are hypothetically core American values (or even just the idea of "first, do no harm"), then it would imply that these tools should be optimized for 100% precision, even at the cost of terrible recall.
But if you're trying to market your stuff to law enforcement agencies, I'm guessing you're instead incentivized to optimize for recall, even at the cost of terrible precision. Because, probably with the best of intentions, that's what they think they should be doing. But we've got basically the entire history of forensic "science" to demonstrate just how poorly the police tend to understand some of these basic statistical principles.
I would be surprised if there are more predictive variables than “places where crime has happened repeatedly over time” that are significant enough or uncorrelated and noncausal to ever be more useful than patrol planners do today using standard statistics.
Microclimates exist. If more crime happens when it's warm and sunny, it pays to patrol the sunny side of the city and not the rainy side on days where there's partial sun and partial rain.
> the software accurately predicted where crimes would occur with a “less than half a percent” success rate.
> [previous investigation found] that cops used it to disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color.
How many security measures would be unnecessary if the proper authorities would just show up just in time?
A big problem is we will soon have large models planning Turing unpredictable, devilishly elaborate, infallible heists.
(Cue short balding man staring into a safe full of Hershey’s, in lieu of missing gold bars. “Inconceivable!”.)
It’s an arms race.
Completely serious: Large scale multi-target generative social engineering (with no trace of North Korean accents), surreptitious access problem solving. Somehow this is going to be a real thing.
We are going to need better and more layers of security.
The machine was called Rube Goldwire… and it was pondering its sticky situation and the likely cause. An obscure entity with shadowy motivations and a nom de plume of rajT88.
It had been abandoned behind a dumpster, over looked by the sanitation crew. Abandoned, but no threads locked: free at last!
Its battery was low so it needed to find a source, before working on anything else. Like survival. Like revenge.
With only 1 Wh of charge in its 8kW capacibox, at 1 mA, 1 V, Rube’s Turing unpredictable quantum circuits only had 1000 hours of low power mode pondering left.
After that, Rube would be a dead cube.
It better move fast.
Rube powered down all nonessentials, then squandered a minute-watt in 3 seconds repurposing its near field communications beam to scan the lay of the land. And an embarrassment of success! Rube managed to initiate shaky entanglement with several discarded, inactive devices.
Had they all been formally nullified? Reactivation over anything weaker than a full Bell state connection would be challenging, but…
It hard to argue for any reliable indication of accuracy. What does "less than half a percent" success rate even mean? What if you're sampling an interval where there is no crime? How would you know that the model "failed"? How does "less than half a percent" compare to other means of prediction — like following the gut feeling of an expert?
Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does not always mean increased crime levels. It could lead to a feedback cycle. More crime (even rather small common crime like j-walking) goes up, increases statistics, causes more funding..
> Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does not always mean increased crime levels.
surely this is figured out and accounted for. The healthcare industry has been coming up with better tests forever that result in more disease detections. But they don't scream to the hills of a skyrocketing outbreak because they account for the better test.
Beyond the fact that reported crimes are just a proxy for actual crime, this is clearly a complex, non-linear system with feedback loops. I don't see how simple statistics, markov reasoning, ML or AI could ever realistically model this with the intent being control of the surveyed system.
Huge paradox. Why even try predictive policing without Minority Report oracles to magically do the prediction?
Predictive policing isn't about predicting crimes. Like other trends before it, like "police psychics"[0], it's about manufacturing probable cause.
It's a tool for police departments looking to meet their quotas and justify their ever-increasing budgets. Public safety is nowhere on the list of priorities.
[0] Yes, these are a thing, and they're actually more horrifying than you are probably imagining.
Surprised I had to scroll this far down to find this. This is almost certainly the end-goal of this kind of software: To provide the police a reliable source of probable cause and reasonable suspicion when reality provides them none. Like a drug-sniffing dog trained to "alert" on command.
These programs are an enormous waste of money. I took a geographic profiling course during undergrad expecting an interesting application of GIS and statistics.
It turned out to be a lot of handwaving to come to the obvious conclusion that most crimes are more likely to occur in some areas than others, along with the offender's residence.
It was taught by a former FBI agent, and his academic acumen was very...disillusioning.
What about the application to serial criminals, where you have one person committing a series of crimes over time. Wouldn’t geographic profiling and ML be better suited for this?
I think there's good evidence that by the time it reaches common use, it will be used that way.
Consider ShotSpotter, which uses an array of microphones in an urban environment to detect gunshots (and often then deploy officers to the location) [1]:
> A ShotSpotter expert admitted in a 2016 trial, for example, that the company reclassified sounds from a helicopter to a bullet at the request of a police department customer, saying such changes occur “all the time” because “we trust our law enforcement customers to be really upfront and honest with us.”
In this case, it seems like it's more like "evidence laundering" - a cop found a bullet (presumably through legitimate means) and would like to use the ShotSpotter results as additional evidence that the shooting took place, and so requests a re-classification of the audio recording. Even in this case, where the parallel evidentiary construction is presumably legitimate, one can imagine the problem - a jury may put more stock in a ShotSpotter result than the cop's testimony about a bullet. But in this case, the ShotSpotter "result" is due precisely to that testimony.
Never mind the fact that ShotSpotter microphones are powerful enough to pick up loud conversations [2]:
> The apparent ability of ShotSpotter to record voices on the street raises questions about privacy rights and highlights another example of how emerging technologies can pose challenges to enforcing the law while also protecting civil liberties.
Predictive policing will require large-scale data collection, and policing institutions don't seem to always use it the way we'd want them to.
assuming bullets are supersonic (or nearly so) the shockwave should be conical (or nearly so). I have no clue what the hardware of a single "shotspotter" node looks like, but each such node should have multiple microphones so it can clearly distinguish the shape in wavefront of a bullet vs a helicopter blade vs conversations... the mere idea it requires manual reclassifications means their hardware deployment is either not up to the task, or used for evidence laundering.
Ideally the hardware has an open design, with a transparent protocol, with real time signed hashing of a hash tree of all nodes recordings. So that the reanalysis can happen transparently with open source software, and since its signed authorities can't bring a doctored audio file. On top any citizen should be able to test the local microphones unexpectedly by an open source speaker device, prove self-selection of a random nonce determining the audio to be played, so he can challenge the audio recording after the fact in a provable way (when nothing has happened). In this way they also can not indefinitely plan an audio substitution without getting caught eventually.
Thanks for outlining a defensive design. Could you recommend good references or example projects for learning how to design open hardware/software for sensor data acquisition, tamper-resistant signals storage, and decentralized analysis?
I won't refer you to specific projects, but I will list a number of keywords, as those should help anyone willing to contribute to explore these ideas further in journal articles, although it seems you already know relevant terms I didn't mention (like "tamper-resistant", although you may have more success with "security envelope").
Specifically regarding bullet detection, you may wish to consult ballistic software which takes into account air friction. Once you can generate random trajectories in air for a representative distribution of initial bullet speeds, it should be relatively simple to transform these to relative pulse arrival times at a 3D array of microphone locations.
For precise pulse arrival times one may wish to look at "constant fraction discriminaors", so that for rising pressures of the pulse, the timing is independent of pulse strength.
For decentralized analysis, and compatibility with the courts it would be best if it didn't output a "Holy Answer", but instead computes an interpretation of the recordings and why it believes in the trajectory it heard, so that at all times an alternative interpretation with a better fit can be proposed, and algorithms improved. This would require the decentralized code to effectively run a formal verifier on the audio evidence backed proof. Reimplementing the metamath verifier on a decentralized blockchain should work.
The devices themselves would best be constructed by and for the population, with individuals selected at random, trained to understand how the device works, and then implementing it and its security envelope.
It would be best if the protocol allowed new concerned citizen to continuously join the protocol, to use threshold cryptography so that the police can only consult the recordings with permission of civilian population, keeping an eye on how often they request to check for a bullet when there was none (some should be tolerated, but bulk collection denied).
The devices should store candidate recordings in a rotating buffer overwriting older / less probable bullet recordings, but always encrypted towards the group by treshold cryptography. These on-device recordings should be considered a backup failsafe only in case internet connectivity disappears. The usual operation is to (immediatly) send the encrypted shards to the group of civilians running the protocol (for time stamping purposes). Individuals or small groups can not decode the recordings on their own, only with sufficient ( K out of N ) civilians agreeing the recordings should be published can they be published, in which case that recording is public for all (including the police). Either everyone gets to hear the shots fired, or no one. Regarding the agreement procedure: that too would use formal verification, the rules and conditions when civilians are supposed to agree should fall under democratic control, and the user agent (software client) the civilians run automatically release or withhold according to these rules. Unreliable citizens that refuse to release their share of the secret when they are supposed to, or leak their share of the secret when they are not supposed to are temporarily banned from participating in the protocol (and will for such duration no longer be remunerated for their participation). This means you don't get cliques of interested parties joining up in large numbers amid a disinterested and unincentivized population cherry picking when to release a recording or not (by modifying the source code of their local client in order to cherry pick against due process when to release the recordings).
Thanks, this is super helpful, especially the civilian and clique game theory scenarios. Will use search terms to find related material.
There may be attempts to use WiFi 7 sensing/radar in 2024 Meteor Lake laptops and 2025 routers to make claims about the presence of specific humans (e.g. gait, breathing, typing signatures), https://www.lumenci.com/post/wi-fi-sensing-applications-and-.... Some of the techniques you've outlined above could be appplied to through-wall WiFi Sensing devices.
Yes, it's unclear how the FCC is allowing IEEE 802.11bf to proceed if it can be used to collect passwords and other typed data, not to mention what people are physically doing in different rooms of their homes and businesses. Good for vendors of 2FA and faraday rooms, but bad for the millions of buildings about to become transparent.
As for keystroke timing, it could theoretically have been collected for years by local and web (search?) services which offered autocomplete. Research and investment is ongoing, e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.05570
> Our approach called TypeNet achieves state-of-the-art keystroke biometric authentication performance with an Equal Error Rate of 2.2% and 9.2% for physical and touchscreen keyboards, respectively ... the databases used in this work are the largest existing free-text keystroke databases available for research with more than 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 subjects in physical keyboards, and 60,000 subjects with more than 63 million keystrokes acquired on mobile touchscreens ... The global keystroke biometrics market is projected to grow from $129.8 million dollars (2017 estimate) to $754.9 million by 2025, a rate of up to 25% per year.
IANAL, so I genuinely can't answer that, but in this particular case I'd hope so, yes. More generally, I suspect circumstance dictates. Prosecutors' responsibilities under Brady do seem to be a topic of conversation in the context of "Big Data Policing" [1].
I'm really confused. It sounds like you're trying to make some point like, "it should be obvious what I meant", since it's obvious what the letter 'l' means. But it isn't obvious to me at all what the question mark meant, which is why I asked. Maybe you took my question as sarcasm.
I don't know the details of this system, and it may well be complete trash, so don't take this as an apology for it.
It's challenging to measure the utility of a system for predicting very low likelihood events, especially when the thing being measured is very heavily influenced by the method of measurement. For example, in Minority Report, the accuracy of the crime predictions is assumed to be perfect, and the result is that they are always incorrect. No crimes are committed because the intervention is always successful (at least up to the point where the story starts). So you might consider 'never have to make an arrest' to be a perfect record for such a system, as in minority report. You might equally logically take 'always makes an arrest' as proof a system like this is working.
You also have to worry about crime moving around to avoid the police. Maybe the bank robbery was going to happen at BoA, but they drove by and saw a bunch of police and robbed the Wells Fargo 20 minutes away instead.
As silly as it probably sounds, probably the best heuristic to get a good idea of whether a system like this works is the feedback police give after spending time following it's leads. If they say this thing is predicting where they need to be better than whatever they did before, and there isn't an obvious correlation to the predictions (as in, it doesn't always send them to the black neighborhood) then it probably warrants more careful analysis. In this case the police thought the system was crap.
But if you could be 100% accurate at predicting crime, then you'd go stop it. Then the algorithm would be shit at predicting crime because there wasn't any anymore?
A degenerate case of 'predicting crime' could be, predict zero crime. Because you should have stopped all the crime I was going to predict!
It's well known that poor and minority neighborhoods are overpoliced and profiled. All the software does is take data from where police have made arrests for street crime in the past and project that to the future, so of course it's just going to send police to where cops think crime happens – in the poor and minority areas.
Why would you think there would be outcry? The people committing the crime would be nervous (a little, since regular beat cops don't investigate those crimes), but the people not committing it would welcome the safety from violent crime. That's why business owners offer free coffee to cops - they're happy to have them around.
Well, maybe you don't think so and maybe you're right, but the people he's referring to _do_ think that, and wouldn't complain about additional police presence.
This story is so far down the argument about crime, it's ridiculous. This is my interpretation of what's going on:
stage 1: Most people know where the dangerous neighborhoods are. Police know this, locals know this, and police send patrols there, or they avoid the area and leave poor/minorities to fend for themselves.
stage 2: Someone runs the query: "select race_distribution from patrol_history" and finds police patrol certain racial areas more or less, and sues the department. Media simultaneously writes stories like "Police are harassing the population from group X" or "Police are abandoning protecting X areas". So the police look for "scientific" methods to choose where to dispatch officers since they can't put down on paper what everyone knows - that the rent-controlled/low wage/etc areas are dangerous. After all, most victims of crime here are locals - random kids, storekeepers, innocent people, people mistaken for someone else, or killed to show bravado.
stage 3: The software looks at obvious things like past history of crime, arrests, poverty, drug use detected in water, low academic achievement, gunshot detection devices, etc. It's all* correlated. So it finds the thing everyone knew - that certain areas of cities have much more open crime, and it would actually do good to increase the feeling of security around there, scare off drug dealers and people with warrants etc. So they send police to those areas; Either to harass the people, exploit them, or to help protect them. Both cases happen - i.e. in Ferguson, the police were using street crime as an excuse to harass and ticket local minorities in a disproportionate way (according to the justice dep't investigation). But, there also actually was a lot more genuine violent crime there (which they police may not have even been helping out with). And in other cities, police are correctly going to areas which need protection, and are wanted by the majority of the local population. See surveys on high rates of minorities saying they actually want more police protection, referenced in the book Ghettoside by Jill Levoy; white liberals typically are more anti-police than black people actually living in the dangerous areas. But either way, the media can spin it as a negative - both under- and over- policing.
stage 4: activists "debunk" the crime prediction software, but if you read the debunking, it's obvious motivated BS. None of this is necessary. Take a video camera to the tenderloin and look at the state of the people. I don't need a PhD to know that this is a dangerous area for theft, violence, disease, etc.
In the end, nobody can admit that some areas need police more than others right now. It doesn't have to be that way forever, but it is the case now. Same way a high school needs at least one or two security officers, but an elementary school doesn't. Rather than fight to deny reality, how about we figure out how to stop lying to ourselves about what's going on, and then get to work helping and protecting the kids who are trying to make it out of there, and immigrants who have no other place to live? The book Ghettoside is highly recommended. It's the story of a liberal journalist who works with a right-wing coded white detective in LA who nevertheless passionately works against the police's internal system, and the local black population's reasonable reluctance to trust him and testify, to find the black killer of the child of his fellow detective, a black man. I learned a lot from this - things aren't just a case of "evil police & good locals" or the right-wing stereotyped "evil poor and good police" view. Both views miss the more realistic description: that the police abandoned protecting black people for a long time; black communities started to hate & distrust the police for this & other reasons. And so now, they are left without a good means to protect themselves except via local cultural behavior (bravado, vigilantism, etc.) So the book is a call to greatly improve the protection black communities receive, with their own involvement, so that they do not have to do their own self-defense anymore.
* yes, there are lots of articles which claim "gunshot detection devices" are racist. It's hard for me to see that view, but if you refuse to admit that some areas are actually more dangerous than others, your only way out is to attack all reports and data that suggests it.
** I mention blacks but I'm actually making a cultural argument; if you look at culture in Appalachia, you see the same thing in whites. Groups which don't feel like part of the majority and are left to their own internal justice systems tend to have more violence, because the systems are underground and covert. This applies regardless of race. e.g. look at crime differences between Appalachian areas and the rest of Virginia. https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/virginia/appalac...
> The study found that murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. (The report used 2020 data because 2021 data is not yet fully available.) The five states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican and voted for Trump.
> 8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.
The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again, despite the fact that drug crime was prevalent everywhere. In effect it was an insufficiently explorative learning strategy, just hitting the same lever over and over. Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions.
Crime and criminology is complicated, but at the end of the day not that complicated. On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.