The Fantasy of Accountability — how “Stop and Frisk” happened in NYC
The New York Police’s fixation on Stop and Frisk was a pretty crazy outlier, not a national fad: one that produced shitty results for everyone in the end. But how was it even possible? Contrary to rumor most cops don’t enjoy being mean, they like their days peaceable like the rest of us. Well, I’ve just seen a documentary that might have the clues to create some sense out of the nonsense. To quote from it, cops were “Fighting the numbers”
A near-inevitable effect of economic inequality is corrupt policework, because enforcing systemic inequalities slowly becomes their real job - without officers recognizing that, usually. Meanwhile, they are tempted (more than tempted) to massage their statistics because societal decline (such as jobs heading overseas to enable tax evasion by large corporations) is making their job genuinely harder in many respects.
As a result, I’ve pretty much given up reporting crime where I am, because I have experienced police (and front office volunteers who aren’t police but handle those critical duties) they’ll do almost any amount of squirming to keep crimes from being recorded, and will not investigate — actually send someone out - unless you can assure them that they won’t have to investigate — you have the solution, and sufficient, packed up with a tidy bow, for them. If you are given a file number, finally — don’t be surprised if, months later, you find out that someone you were given a fantasy file number that doesn’t exist. (Did I “misremember” a number I wrote down as it was given to me, in all four digits? Really? No, I did not.)
New York has it still worse. This documentary gives considerable detail; but what popped out at me was something that appeared between the lines. Just my interpretation, I’ll grant you: but suddenly I believe I understand why New York went all mad joy for highly ineffective stopping and frisking.
It started with a new much more accurate data tracking system for crime that was introduced in New York city. The new stats popped a lot of reality back into the system, but began a chain of unanticipated consequences. Crime stats went WAY up. Getting crime report stats down became much harder with this more realistic system, so in time that put pressure on police to get their solves up instead, as a way of making the ratio of convictions to crimes look better. But how?
Serendipitously the precinct heads realized that stop and frisks produce a 1 to 1 ratio of crime reports to solves — because the officer uncovered the crime and perp at the same time (however trivial the offense.) All of a sudden the word goes out that everybody on the beat has to devote themselves to stop and frisks. A large quota of them daily. Nothing is more important. But notice that now we’re still one MORE measure away from what actually matters or was being measured in the first place (much less worth measuring.) At this point, if you’re a beat cop, you only get love from your captain if your stop and frisks are high because that’s the suddenly cool number for management, even if you didn’t get one arrest/solve. But mind you, that trivial arrest/solve was a fantasy number in the first place, designed to falsify another statistical ratio! So now you have police chasing a fantasy number (stops) in the futile hope it will raise another now-fantasy number (ratio of solves) so that that can favorably distort once-useful tracking numbers that were originally meant to track normal crime rates (the sort of ordinary crimes police can’t investigate or solve while they’re busy doing stop and frisks instead.)
Madness, utter madness. The beat cops ought to be enraged at their leadership, but Stockholm syndrome prevents that. They turn their backs on the mayor instead. After all, he’s the one who started tracking crime much more accurately and caused this whole fiasco, right?
The lesson is that measuring isn’t the hard part. Keeping measures honest is the hard part, and staying honest yourself; which is one reason why startups are advised to zero in on a handful of key measures that they can also track in the field—anecdotally — while in touch with their customers, suppliers etc.
Measuring is nothing, knowing what you’ve measured, and whether you’re still measuring the same thing, everything (like, solvency-type everything.)
PS: Of course, the invisible changes to the meaning of investment-instrument credit-rating measures that led up to the subprime crisis (in the same era) are an even more poignant example of this kind of tragedy.
