Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615

Bloomberg talks about stop and frisk.

https://www.politico.com/state...op-and-frisk-1227227

I am disappointed that anyone here does not understand that stop and frisk was racist.

The rules are simple. To seize someone (meaning detain them), you must have reasonably articulable suspicious that they committed a crime, are committing a crime, or will commit a crime.

Police cannot just walk up to you and demand to frisk you. There is no excuse for it.

It is indefensible, so please stop defending it.

It is a joke that anyone believes Bloomberg has any chance at all. It just shows how out of touch New Yorkers are.

While you’re here, what are your thoughts about Mayor Pete?

quote:

Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
It is a joke that anyone believes Bloomberg has any chance at all. It just shows how out of touch New Yorkers are.

I honestly don’t know anybody who thinks he has a chance, New Yorker or not. I know plenty that would love for him to be President and think he was a great mayor. But those are two different things.

quote:

Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
I am disappointed that anyone here does not understand that stop and frisk was racist.

You left out two critical words.

As implemented.

To avoid the usual misinterpretation of what I say, let me be explicit: I don't believe stop and frisk is Constitutional. But whether it's Constitutional or not is a separate question from whether it's racist or not. Assuming that we are using the definition of racism currently in vogue, which is that discriminating against white people can't be racist because white people have all the power.

You could design a system where you could only stop and frisk people whose skin color appears to be Caucasian. That couldn't possibly be discriminatory against black people.

Or, you could design a system where you identify which locations have the highest likelihood of criminal activity, and then design some automated way of picking the people who are stopped and frisked ... taking the human element out of the equation. Every fifth person, for example. That wouldn't be racist either, assuming the locations chosen weren't picked with racial considerations in mind.

Or, in a particular place, you could stop and frisk everyone. After all, the security lines at airports are the equivalent of stop and frisk, where everyone is stopped and frisked, and no one (who is worth listening to) claims that checking every passenger in the same way at the airport is racist.

So yes, as implemented by Bloomberg, stop and frisk in New York was racist. And, while it's possible to implement stop and frisk in a non-racist way, I'm not sure that was feasible in New York.

And it was also unconstitutional, and I'm not sure there was any good way to cure that defect.

“As implemented”?

Well, that is what we’re talking about, isn’t it?

What Bloomberg authorized was a violation of both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment. At a minimum, it had a disparate impact on black people.

You cant behave as though you’ve declared a state of emergency against one race of people. There are methods for addressing crime without blowing off the constitution.

If you are interested in this, check out the work done in Camden, NJ.

Quirt, referring to my initial post, what’s your null hypothesis? What’s the reference for measurement?

Do I need one?

Isn't it plainly obvious that any system that allows human beings to take action based on gut-level choices is going to be subject to whatever biases those individuals bring to the table? So, if there is a tendency toward a particular bias in a group, that tendency will be reflected in behaviors based on their gut-level choices?

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:
NYC was a cesspool the 11 years I lived there (1981-1992) and people lived in near constant fear. If you didn't have your wits about you, the city would shred you. I left just before Giuliani and Bloomberg transformed the place into Topeka, by comparison. Some of their methods were draconian, but the city was unlivable as it was. I'm pretty sure that I never would have left Bloomberg's NYC for Montana. I haven't been "home" now for five years, but friends tell me the place is falling apart again under DeBlasio. Not as bad as when Reagan was president and cut off funding for the homeless and the mental hospitals, but not Topeka any more.

I think extraordinary situations can justify extraordinary measures. I think you had to have been there to understand just how bad it was and while I cannot condone how black young men are often treated by police, I can understand the entirely justifiable fear that motivated this policy.

I lived in NY for shorter periods during that time, and worked there (as a messenger boy in the city, so I traveled EVERYWHERE in the city) for five summers in the late 70's, and I traveled to NY extensively for work. I had a vastly different experience than you did. Yeah, you had to keep your wits about you, but I've felt the same way in any major city I've ever visited. I never once felt that the city would shred me. I never once felt unsafe in a different way than I've felt in London, in Boston, in DC, in Philadelphia, in Paris, in Hong Kong, in San Francisco, or anywhere else. In every one of those cities, I've had a moment of "be careful, this is not necessarily a spot you want to be in".

My personal anecdote: in the summer of 1983, I was living in the Mormon church building across from Lincoln Center. (There's a Mormon church in the bottom, and the Mormon church owns the entire apartment building, I believe.) One night, my roommate and I went to a party on the East side. At about 1 AM, we left, and decided to walk home. We were a little drunk, we were young, we were insanely stupid. Instead of cutting down to 59th Street, we took the straight path.

Right through Central Park.

In retrospect, it was a stupid decision. Central Park at night was dangerous in 1983. We should have walked around. We could have taken a cab. But we didn't.

Nothing happened. We made it home safely, without incident.

Nevertheless, I remember that every time I am in a questionable situation in any major city. I remember that a small degree of inconvenience is sometimes smarter than a stupid risk.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
Do I need one?

Isn't it plainly obvious that any system that allows human beings to take action based on gut-level choices is going to be subject to whatever biases those individuals bring to the table? So, if there is a tendency toward a particular bias in a group, that tendency will be reflected in behaviors based on their gut-level choices?

I think you do need one. I think the ‘the cops had biases’ argument falls flat unless the biases show up in the outcomes. You might find, for example, that those cops have net unfavorable attitudes towards Asians Or even women but you wouldn’t then say the S&F discriminated against them unless there was some support for that in the outcomes.


Putting aside 4th amendment objections to
S&F, which I have tremendous sympathy for, what baseline would you use to determine if the outcome was a racist one?

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
Do I need one?

Isn't it plainly obvious that any system that allows human beings to take action based on gut-level choices is going to be subject to whatever biases those individuals bring to the table? So, if there is a tendency toward a particular bias in a group, that tendency will be reflected in behaviors based on their gut-level choices?

I think you do need one. I think the ‘the cops had biases’ argument falls flat unless the biases show up in the outcomes. You might find, for example, that those cops have net unfavorable attitudes towards Asians Or even women but you wouldn’t then say the S&F discriminated against them unless there was some support for that in the outcomes.


Putting aside 4th amendment objections to
S&F, which I have tremendous sympathy for, what baseline would you use to determine if the outcome was a racist one?

I disagree that I need one.

In a police department that has a history of racism, allowing police to make gut-level choices without extrinsic evidence is per se a problem.

So I reject your effort to shift the burden of proof to me. Rather, the burden of proof should be on the person attempting to justify a system that is obviously prone to racial bias.

It's not a burden of proof. I'm just asking where your intuitions lie.

It's a tough question, I think, and people don't want to grapple with it. In fact, I think people are uncomfortable if the question is even asked.


Our intuitions don't seem to be bothered by the fact that the friskees are overwhelmingly male and young. (again, we may be bothered by the program overall, but there isn't a lot of noise being made that it discriminates against men). Surely that is in recognition of the fact that males are the vast majority of perpetrators of violent crime, and young ones at that.

Back to the original article, about a decade ago, either here or next door, I said something like the following:

'I'm not a very good programmer, but I'm pretty sure that in a week or two I could write a bot that could put out plausible Charles Blow op ed pieces.'

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
It's not a burden of proof. I'm just asking where your intuitions lie.

It's a tough question, I think, and people don't want to grapple with it. In fact, I think people are uncomfortable if the question is even asked.


Our intuitions don't seem to be bothered by the fact that the friskees are overwhelmingly male and young. (again, we may be bothered by the program overall, but there isn't a lot of noise being made that it discriminates against men). Surely that is in recognition of the fact that males are the vast majority of perpetrators of violent crime, and young ones at that.

Yes, the fact that the friskees were male has not escaped everyone's attention.

Gender bias is judged under a lesser standard than racial bias, however.

One thing I will quickly mention is the concept of hit rates. A hit rate is a measure of how often an officer's search of a person/vehicle/home turns up evidence of a crime.

There are many places where the hit rates for blacks are lower than for rights. That suggests that blacks get searched more often when they have no contraband, which also means that officers have more factual basis for suspicion when they search whites compared to blacks. This means blacks are being searched for some other reason. Like racial bias.