Identifier Creeps
This is an interesting story by a journalist with significant “good story” form, James Colley. It’s worth a read, but not essential for the purposes of why I’ve gathered you here today. I’ll cover it myself.
This is just a tiny fragment of a hugely complex discussion, so apologies if it seems narrow:
There is endless development of powerful weapons that can destroy the world many times over….if some tiny fraction of that budget were put into the development of more effective non-lethal arms for police, and advanced training…
Another major obstacle in remedying police misconduct and abuses has been the blanket indemnification that police officers receive when they are sued. Joanna has done an amazing job of researching and writing a piece on this issue.
Officers are rarely ever subject to punitive damages and when they are the agency or…
So there’s not much accountability on any front: it’s extremely rare for an officer to actually get convicted and incarcerated (handy graphic from FiveThirtyEight below), pretty hard for a police officer to get fired, and they’re protected from facing the financial pain, too.
This is April Joyner, a freelance business/tech writer. Does this necessarily have to be the case: that reliance on statistics leads to abuse? Any instances where data science has helped improve police-community relations or cut back on abuse?
Unfortunately Bill Bratton is the father of COMPSTAT, a data driven “tool” that is used and abused by police departments nationwide. Like most tools currently in vogue throughout law enfacement, COMPSTAT has some theoretical applications. The main focus however is on statistics, and statistics are what help to create abuses and corruption in law…