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Police Data-Mining Done Right
enharmonix writes "Courtesy of Bruce Schneier, it's nice to hear something good about data mining for a change: predicting and stopping crime. For example, police in Redmond, VA, 'started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.'"
"I'm losing my nerve," Benny said mournfully. "Six times this past year we've flicked into flash crowds, and three times I threw away everything I had because it looked like the cops had time to put us under riot control. Once I was right. Twice I was wrong. That's just not good enough." He braced himself. "I think I'll quit." There, he'd said it.
A hole in space. Larry Niven.
Are the police going to share the location information?
I might want to watch. Cops live!
liqbase
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Video Production Support
Do they really need to spend thousands of dollars analyzing data to determine there's more crime around check-cashing stores on paydays?
I don't really tend to think in terms of the police having the job of preventing crime. I think there job should be to apprehend criminals who are involved in or have committed a crime. That said, I guess it is good if they have tools that better help them to schedule and plan enforcement. Like anything, it can be taken too far. I would think that what would separate 'good' data mining from 'bad' data mining would be transparency and over site in the process.
On a side note - I'm willing to bet that if someone had asked most street cops in that area - they wouldn't have needed software or data mining tools to tell you that cash checking places in bad parts of town, on pay days were areas of higher crime.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Looks like someone's been watching Numb3rs.
Technoli
Well, more than that, CopWatch...keep an eye on 'em. I think it's good to publicize this as well, as it will discourage criminals, but it may also point out places that are vulnerable.
In any event, I'd prefer the police look at "independent" factors and correlation to recorded crimes than "community policing" where they stop people and then see if they can find anything suspicious. Bravo to the police...if they park in front of a likely target, it'd probably discourage crime, thusly proving its effectiveness if the trends noticeably change. This may be an interesting one to keep an eye on.
The city that won the business intelligence award for data mining is Richmond VA, not 'Redmond'.
Chip H.
Seriously with less cops on the street and more behind their desks they didn't do research like that 15 years ago ?
I mean, any cop who had been on the force for a year could've told you that robberies go up on payday and even the most likely of spots.
How long till it catches on with the criminals?
Some people don't go to places at peak time to avoid queues, if criminals realise the police know the peak times, they can anticipate the strength of guard and where police are?
Knowledge like this can be used to both party's advantages. Some facts are obviously public knowledge such as weather.
I don't think it even takes well-organized crime to understand this.
How about the police force has a counter-itself division? It uses the public knowledge and works independent of the police to outsmart it -- the police can use this knowledge to anticipate counter knowledge usages...
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
... crime is in the process of relocating, and we are back to square one.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
( "Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.')
is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C..
How much more information do you need to detain, try, convict, and sentence for crimes against everyone?
From The United Gulags Of America With Love,
Kilgore Trout, M.D.
This technology will be perfect for the Drizzle! This will give him plenty of lead time to get the clouds going-with the sheets and sheets of rain-it drenches the criminals!
you come to one undeniable conclusion:
cop work is one of the most criticized, and yet at the same time vital, aspects of modern life
almost all the comments here have some sort of negative thought or smarmy remark on an aspect of this story. and yet a cop is the first person these same people will call upon and depend upon if they are ever victimized or robbed. and what are the cops doing? no, what are they actually doing? i'm not asking your paranoid distrustful hollywood-addled alter ego, i'm asking your cognitive ability to look at and perceive the reality of actual police work
typical human shortsightedness and lack of gratitude
it must be so thankless being a cop. you're there to protect people, and all they can do is reflexively depart negativity at you
humanity sucks. you are all so ungrateful
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not really. Jail time and such has almost no effect on changing criminal behaviour.
Possibly. Or maybe they are trying to prevent crimes.
The criminals are not worried about going to jail AFTER the crime is committed. But if there is a cop there at the moment they would have committed the crime, most criminals will not commit it.
Means
Motive
Opportunity
With a cop right there, the "opportunity" is removed. So no crime occurs. In general, the crime rate should go down because this isn't something that can easily be displaced. It seems to be tied to the area around a check cashing storefront. Increase the patrols in those areas and the crimes are not committed.
Well, duh!
Times like this make me unhappy that this information is being revealed to the public. Don't get me wrong, I think what they're doing is great, but this is just another example of information being revealed to make the public feel more safe that in actuality only bolsters the criminals the public is supposed to feel safe from. Granted, this isn't as bad as coverage of ongoing investigations which sometimes seems to reveal -way- too much information, but still.
Did we really need data mining for that, though?
imho
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
Sounds like they're working on the Pre-Crime Unit from Minority Report, but with computer analysis instead of involuntary, drugged slightly-mutant people. Overall, a good idea as long as they wait to capture enough evidence to prove that the crime was inevitable if they hadn't intervened.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Scientists found out that you get wet with water
what exactly does that mean? what are the qualifications in your mind to becoming a cop? i'm going to take a wild guess and say that you would like to see higher standards when hiring cops. ok: now look at the way cops are treated, in your mind, and in the mind of the typical citizen: distrust, fear, hostility
now ask yourself why your stellar qualifications aren't met in new recruits. gee, maybe it has something to do with the general attitude towards cops? highly qualified people seek out jobs that are highly rewarding. if the general populace doesn't reward them with a feeling of gratitude for just doing their job, and in fact outright hates them, then you tend to not get qualified people. imagine that. treat cops like shit, get shitty cops. what a wacky consequence, huh?
in my mind, cops are like teachers. you think the power to use force and spy on people is a big deal? how about the power to shape young people's minds? both professions are extremely powerful, and yet both professions get little respect, teacher's financially get shitty little respect
it's so odd to me, but there it is: hostility, fear, negativity, disrespect, hatred... if society has a problem with their cops, society needs to look at it's own attitude towards the profession as the culprit, not the actual cops themselves
we now return you to your regulalrly scheduled cop-bashing thread
gee, i wonder why cops don't live up to your high standards (rolls eyes)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Strategic and tactical placement of resources to maximize effect without resorting to profiling or harassing citizens is a good thing.
I almost never called a cop. One time I did because neighbor was making noise after midnight, and nothing happened. The second time I wanted someone to mediate between a tenant and a landlord, they wouldn't do it.
The only cases that I actually talked to a policeman were on the highway, and I had to pay hundreds of dollars and time to show up in traffic court.
Oh, and occasional phone calls to ask for a donation. "No thanks, I've paid my fine share of speeding tickets this year."
So don't lecture us what to think about police. We are taxpayers that pay them to do the work for us. We appreciate what they do but that's still their duty, and we'll not look up to them more than they deserve.
The cops busted him outside a check cashing joint on payday.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Which check-cashing place do you go to?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
The NYPD's CompStat system has been doing that for about ten years now. It's working reasonably well. At first it was really effective, because career criminals tend to fall into predictable patterns. Crime in NYC has dropped enough that there's more randomness, and prediction is less effective.
there are silences in your anecdotes that speak volumes
... is? or rather, i just don't think the way you view your place in the events of your life to be very trustworthy. you are editting stuff out
of course there are cops that take out their frustrations on innocent people. these cops are far and few between though, and they always quickly overstep their bounds in such a way as to be removed from the street
meanwhile you talk about rudeness, rough handling, screaming and threats being the norm. so there seems to be a disconnect somewhere, since cops just don't go apeshit for no reason. cops are human beings. they act the same way you and i do. and yet you want to impart on us that cops are some sort of strange exotic force that is always abusing your fragile sensibilities. right
what's interesting about your anecdotes is that you don't frame any of these behaviors in any context. not that you deserved to be rudely treated, ever, no matter what you did. but it makes your depiction of cops nonetheless less trustworthy, because you seem to conveniently forget to mention aspects of your own behavior, any behavior, good or bad, that would make a cop go apeshit, regardless of you deserving it or not: miscommunication, for example
you were just merrily going along, and on most occasions, suddenly there were cops abusing you. "how'd that happen?" pffft
abcd...wxyz
doing nothing wrong...suddenly being abused by cops
hmmm- i wonder what the
i know people like you, who think like you, who tell anecdotes like you: you are always the victims, and never the aggressors, and you always wind up being victimized by the wheels of justice, somehow. of course, knowing something of the actual lives of the actual people who view their lives this way, i know some of what they edit out of their interesting depiction of themselves as constant victims
you leave too much out of your own bad behavior in how you see your life my friend. i don't trust you. you have a blind spot on your conscience when it comes to seeing your bad behaviors, i think, from what i know of people who's lives are led like you depict your life. always getting in run ins with the cops, and they constantly speak of their essential innocence and victimhood at the hands of angry pigs. never doing anything wrong (actually doing plenty wrong)
so all i have to say to you is "uh huh. right"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Remember that movie with Mark 'y mark' Wallberg? Where they kidnapped and wanted to ransom the japanese gangster's daughter?
...whoever is trying to bust the trace on my trace buster!
Dumbass Friend: Yo I'm ready to do this!
M.W.: What if they trace the call?
DF: That's why I have a tracebuster! To bust the trace on my call dog!
M.W.: But what if THEY have a tracebuster?
DF Yo I'm on it! Thats why I got a trace-buster buster! That way I can bust the trace on
M.W: Cool.
some time later at the the girl's house...
(phone rings)
Girl's Dad: Hmm... Okay I turn on my trace, and my tracebuster, and my trace buster-buster, and my trace buster-buster BUSTER. Herro!? Stalls for time and get's him.
So what happens a year from now when hypothetically they can show statistics that they've reduced crime by 5 - 15% while not increasing the use of department resources (i.e. patrol manpower, overtime, detectives)? Wouldn't that be rather solid evidence that it's working? If this data mining really is just fluff to make the public feel safer, then the numbers of actual committed crimes should show whether or not it's working (and if it isn't, then abandon it and try something else).
As for revealing what they found, I'd have to agree with several other comments that the police haven't tipped their entire hand as to what they've uncovered. Besides, you need to remember that the results are dynamic and that by implementing a strategy (which they've also not fully revealed) that strategy may change how criminal activities might shake out during the next operational period (i.e week, month). In essense, what they tell you this week is likely to be somewhat obsolete by next week. Also keep in mind that most of the crime they are trying to prevent are ones of simple opportunity, not necessarily ones of careful planning (like a jewelery/art heist).
To me, this is a prime example of a government entity making an attempt at trying to work smarter rather than harder. Rather than go and ask for another tax levy to fund more officers, squad cars and related equipment, why not try to make what the police already have as resources more effective and efficient? Save the taxpayer a little money and potentially give them a greater return on their tax money.
So I guess they can't be called Random Acts of Violence anymore! :) Hehe, I wonder who the spokesperson for the software is. "You don't know Crime, I know Crime" (Obligatory Tom Cruise reference twisted to the story since he did play in the movie about detecting crimes before they happen).
So are they deploying more cops on Wall St. just before quarterly earnings are announced?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Now for all those computer/techie types, how many bugs or problems/issues seemed remarkably simple after you noticed/fixed them? How many times have you slapped your head and said "geeze, that was really simple."
Sometimes it just helps to have somebody checking up on your work, even if that "somebody" is an automated process or machine.
The second time I wanted someone to mediate between a tenant and a landlord, they wouldn't do it.
Well if you called me to do that, I wouldn't either. Why? For the same reason the cops won't... it's not their job!
Unless the dispute between the landlord and tenant became abuse/violent, or there was an actual crime being committed, then it's not a job for the police. It may be a job for the courts system, but it's not something I'd expect the cops to shop up and deal with.
Hippie!
Quack, quack.
Prosecutors generally have a lot more freedom to act independently than cops do, especially cops on the street. Prosecutors can, at their discression, dismiss charges where they think that justice won't be served or there is a good reason to let the defendant go (ex. the cops arrested a guy purely on technicality). Some of the examples of prosecutor misconduct can be quite tragic, and show far less ethics than their police counterparts (which can be very bad in their own right!)
I noticed that your comment was modded the same way it was titled... This is a test.
This would never work as a movie, its almost too predictable. Maybe as a Wester...
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Where do you people come from? Humanity sucks? People with your shit attitude suck. I scanned the comments, they where a typical mix. I don't love or hate police. I don't like it when they abuse their power (power has that problem) but I know there are plenty of people out there working in law enforcement that do what they do because they care about it. Same as with a lot of other things, but like doctors, paramedics, firefighters and countless other occupations what they do often helps save lives.
Maybe if you could do more then reflexively see the negative part of 'humanity' you could have posted something worth the +5 insightful. All I hear is adolescent clap-trap. Grow up.
Quack, quack.
well duhhhh you think, what a bunch of losers just now realize that.
After you've been robbed if the police don't respond quickly enough simply call back and tell them not to worry about it, you've caught the thieves and you shot them. It's amazing the turnaround time.
The reason is that cops are not allowed to profile ppl. As such, they would get busted. Now, they have proof as to WHY they should be there. Any court is going to say that the police force was simply being stationed where crimes were LIKELY to occur without regard to color, sex, etc. Keep in mind, that most of the check-cashing stores are NOT located at high-end shopping malls. They will be located in down-trodden areas.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and spend money.
I worked for a decade in the IT division of one of the largest and most automated police departments. I know whereof I speak.
So one day a lieutenant with visibility gets the idea of buying a mapping and data-mining system and pushes it up the chain with gee-whiz descriptions (like those in the OP) of how crime can be predicted. I did simulation and analysis of the proposals and concluded that there was little to no value in the proposed projects. Everything that could be predicted by the system was already being done by experienced cops and detectives. But nobody wanted to hear that: they wanted a show-and-tell for the public.
$20 million later what do they have to show for it? A system that prints slides of criminal incidents for the chief to show when he meets neighborhood associations. Despite throwing systems and people into prediction, they have come up with absolutely nothing new.
Unless your entire police force is composed of total morons, such systems are not cost-effective.
Is it just me or the description of the data mining sounds like an article The Onion would write for how obvious this is?
"We found that robberies happened in places where there was money, on the days that there was money".
Call me crazy, but I get the feeling that this is hardly news. The police officers that hang out in the banks are not there because the bank offers a nice shade during the hot hours of the day.
Sorry, loan-sharking inside check-cashing stores has been declared legal. Unfortunately.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
but why do these run ins color your perception of cops?
in my past i:
1. have been pulled over by cops and ticketed for doing 5 miles above the speed limit
2. have been pulled over in harlem at gunpoint. the reason given was that my inspection sticker was expired. that's all i got pulled over for. at gunpoint
3. i got sucker punched in the face when i was a teenager. i filed a report. the attitude in the station house was completely as you describe: it was palpable how much they didn't care, even smirky, as if i deserved it. like they were going to laugh at me as soon as i stepped out the door
4. been verbally abused by a cop giving me a speeding ticket (another occasion). accused of not caring about the well being of the people in the car (granted, not as harsh as your pull over)
so my personal experiences have been no better than, perhaps even worse than yours. so why is your attitude so poor towards cops while mine is more equitable?
perhaps because, of my situations above, i think that:
1. i was speeding. oh well
2. it was harlem, high crime area (this was awhile ago, now harlem is gentrified)
3. on the scale of crimes, being punched in the face (or in your situation, petty theft) just aren't that big of a deal for the police force to go all SWAT team dragnet
so why do you think you have the right to besmirch the entirity of police work because of some vaguely less than stellar experiences of yours? so, in the end, perhaps you aren't as you desribed above. however, i still don't think your opinion is valid. because now i just think that you're one of those annoying, overly nitpicky types. which is valuable for a programmer to be, but doesn't impress me as to your ability to properly gauge police work, which is another set of mental strengths that perhaps tehe overly anal and easily chafed tpye you aren't the best kind of
humanity gets the police force it deserves. and humanity seems to be populated with genreally ungrateful people. if you have no gratitude, you've removed the incentive for a cop to do a good job
we will never get better cops. mainly because the general population is full of assholes who don't deserve any better because of their own failures at behaving well when faced with authority, good or bad authority
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
LA Times has a complete list and map of that city's homocides.
a p/
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/homicidem
this is you:
"an airline stewardess treated me rudely. therefore, airline stewardesses in general are abusive"
in SPITE OF my abuse, i can see how that thinking is wrong. meanwhile, you willingly admit you were less abused by me, and yet you STILL think your gross bias is ok
pffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Tools are a special case and deserve extra consideration. They can be used in many unpredictable ways so often the way to look at them is with a risk / benefit analysis. What are the best results from the use of the tool, what are the worst results. Does the good outweigh the bad in the use of the tool? If not, it should not be produced.
Data mining is a tool; it can be used in many different ways by different people. Figuring out how to reduce street crime is a good thing - but what else can this tool be used for. What kind of evil can be done?
History offers a clue: the Nazis kept track of their Jewish problem using tabulating machines custom built for them by IBM.
Anyway, what kind of uses for this kind of data mining would some other people find? How about Karl Rove - he'd find it very useful. There's plenty of others who'd be thrilled to put this technology to work in ways that would cause great harm to our society. You know that the current administration has been busy collecting every bit of data they can from any and all sources - TIA is alive and well, its just gone underground. Does the thought of GW sitting down at a terminal to discover who is loyal to him and who is not trouble you? It sure does bother me...
...if it was Batman doing it?
By saying "all you're doing is moving the crime around", I don't see any real difference between saying that and saying "We either shouldn't bother with police or we need them to be so pervasive that there are at least 2 on every street corner".
Some of the crime will move. Some of it won't happen at all - and it's that bit that the police are interested in.
Police departments have been doing this for a couple of decades now.The NYPD was doing it (with great sucess) back in the 80's.
The some damm liberal activist noticed cops showing up in the poorer areas on the days that welfare checks came out... Never mind that the number of muggings, knifings, and murders went down 60-70% with the cops on concentrated patrol in those areas - it was declared profiling and thus deemed illegal and unconstitutional.
You can program the system to look for other things. But at the same time, it's also good backup material for police departments and national databases to keep track of trends and directions. Heck, if you could program it to follow trends you could overlay it with a GIS to figure out where to buy land cheap and in 20 years retire because you'll have the most crime free land that you can sell at exorbant prices. You can also use it to predict budgets for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years.
From what I gather, cops move quicker when the homeowner gets in contact with the burglar because, in general, they're more worried about crimes (real or otherwise) directly against people (or corps.) than crimes against property.
Once there's contact between homeowner and burglar, the odds of things escalating beyond mere burglary and theft increase dramatically. The cops had to come when you met the fella who was trying to walk off with your backpack so that the burglar in question couldn't claim you assaulted him (I'm sure you used some force to reclaim that backpack) or take revenge on you later.
In my area, the actual detective work for most petty robberies I hear of is left to the general public. "If you've seen this robber, please call the Tips Hotline at...."
And the local cops' attitude toward non-violent robbery can get ridiculous. There's a 7-11 I know of that, according to the local news, gets majorly robbed once a month every month.
No, I don't know exactly where speeding tickets fit in this hierarchy--though the authorities do like to claim that "speeding kills."
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Yes, but if he had used his gun in either of the situations he described, he likely would be setting off, or maybe escalating, an all-out gang war. At least some police departments seriously up their efforts in their investigations once a gang war has started, and they'll want to bust both sides.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Strategic and tactical placement of resources to maximize effect without resorting to profiling or harassing citizens is a good thing.
What about cops walking a beat? That's right, walking down the same streets over and over everyday. Walking a beat means getting to know the locals and the particulars of a neighborhood in a way that doesn't happen in a squad car. Gangs don't hang out on a corner if once an hour a cops walks by a says hello, but the neighborhood kids still can hangout and could even end up viewing that cop as part of their neighborhood. From a squad car, no relationship is established and any stationary pack of teens can look like a gang to a biased eye. You don't have to profile when you actually know the people you see, but if you are just cruising along looking at a sea of nameless faces, then ethnicity and clothing style are about all you have to go on. Profiling is almost inevitable without establishing officers with good personal knowledge/relationship with the locals.
We are all just people.
> It seems to be tied to the area around a check cashing storefront.
> Increase the patrols in those areas and the crimes are not committed.
Wrong, it only proves that the crimes are no longer committed in those areas specifically. The criminal activity just moves somewhere else, because the motivation to commit those crimes still exists.
So now, instead of being close to the storefront, it's further away...for instance, maybe distributed between three further locations where the people leaving the storefront commonly traffic (local grocery store, local pawn shop, local gas station).
I've been mapping out locations of government surveillance cameras in Chicago for about a year. I'm hoping to eventually overlay the location of surveillance cameras with Chicago-area crime statistics in order to provide data showing the long-term effectiveness these cameras have in deterring or preventing crime in Chicago.
http://chicagocrime.org/ has been a huge inspiration for this project. Chicagocrime.org obtains it's crime data from the Chicago Citizen ICAM database (http://12.17.79.6/) and overlays that data onto Google Maps, providing a visual representation of exactly when and where crime occurs in Chicago.
...and that they're doing it with computers just makes it faster.
Most decent-sized PD's employ a Crime Analyst who's job it is to compile and analyze crime stats and present trends and other important notes to the Command Staff so that better protection strategies can be implemented. They also are used for serial criminals, such as a cat burglar who starts hitting neighborhoods.
Modern CAD/RMS systems (Computer Aided Dispatch/Records Management System) include pretty good crime analysis modules that make a lot of this easier, and it's just getting better. These days, most of these systems provide the ability to search on various types of crimes, MO's, etc., and will provide spreadsheets, density maps, predictive analysis reports...the whole 9 yards.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
Look at the CEOs who stole and are now facing prison for it. You are not talking about poor people here, they were incredibly rich in jobs with incredible perks. They just wanted even more, and thus ripped a whole bunch of people off. While having the basic needs met certainly can help crime, anyone who thinks it is a magic bullet is kidding themselves.
Part of the problem is that a shocking number of people, about 7%, are just incapable of caring for others (sociopaths basically). Their world is all about them. I'm not talking about being selfish at times or caring more about your and yours than the rest of the world, that's fairly normal, I am talking about literally being unable to empathize with others. While this doesn't mean those people will necessarily be criminals, they are much more likely to be. They can't care about or empathize with others and thus have no problem causing them harm or distress. It doesn't matter if they have everything, that's just who they are.
Many departments don't have quotas on tickets. They by and large don't need to. People violate traffic laws (speeding especially) ALL the time. So all you have to do is get cops that like to write tickets (bastards basically) and set them to work in areas that are a problem. You get loads of tickets.
That's how it works here. You'll essentially never get a ticket for doing less than 10 over (except special cases like school zones and such) and there's no quotas at all. They just put the jerks, the people who will write other cops and even the own family tickets (really) on ticket duty. They have no problem issuing a book or more a day each.
There's not really much reason to whine, either. Yes, the ticket cops are jerks, but if you are going 10 over you can't really say you didn't know.
One is likely payoff vs time spent. Usually, if someone robs a place and isn't caught in the act, there's almost no chance of finding them. Many man hours could be wasted and nothing would come of it. Those are man hours that could be used on other things. Another is the amount of harm involved. Burglary is a low harm crime. Yes it sucks that you lost your stuff but it is just stuff, you weren't hurt, you weren't killed, etc. In most cases, people are insured so nothing is lost in the long run. However something like murder? Well that gets a rather big response. Huge harm there, an innocent life was ended, it's worth a lot to stop someone who does that.
In the case of your situations it comes down to two things that make the difference:
1) The likelihood of catching the suspect is much higher. If he was just there that really makes a difference. You probably could give a somewhat accurate description, you had an item that presumably had valid prints on it, he only could have gotten so far from the scene, etc. Much more worth the time as there's a more likely payoff.
2) The danger to you. The crook very well could have decided he was pissed off at you for ruining his plan and/or worried that you'd be able to finger him for the cops and thus decide to come back and get a little revenge on you, or even kill you. As such it is much more important to the police to find this guy so that he can't harm you.
I certainly won't say the police have 100% straight priorities, but they do have reasons for things. As personally devastating as a robbery might be, you have to keep it in perspective with the other crimes that must be dealt with. You are just going to be lower priority than a rape victim, or a domestic violence victim and so on.
... your goal is simply to find out what these crime patterns are and use the appropriate algorithm to plot a course around where police are likely to be.
Make a few bad jokes on
I wish your comment could get modded higher than 5, you just nailed it. I don't know when it happened, but at some point in time, cops decided that being friendly was not the way to enforce the law but rather to rule with fear. The Denver police chief at one point did not support a policy because it "removed the necessary fear of police." I believe that this has become a serious problem in the US, and is driving a stake between citizens and law enforcement. How many people actually like police officers? I would guess not many. They are not seen as people who are there to protect you, but with the "fear", they are always the bad guys who will arrest you if they so wish.
-AC
From a squad car, no relationship is established and any stationary pack of teens can look like a gang to a biased eye.
This is the difference between "civilian police forces" and an "occupation army". Why do you think police have become so militarized? It's not because the criminals are worse than they were 70 years ago.
I love the rant on that website. Is it yours? Very... insightful. 'Course, just try and get anyone to admit it's true.. nobody wants to admit they're a slave to manufactured ideals that they'll never live up to.
I've learned to reject that propaganda.. it makes it hard to be around people who haven't, because they look at me like there's something wrong with me, when I know better.
Consequently, I generally feel quite isolated. Always have.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
RTFA!
It's RICHMOND, VA, CANADA! Not Redmond! And definitely NOT the US.
I'm in Australia (miles away from either), and even I know that's wrong!
PS: I'm sure someone really had Microsoft on the brain here!
determine that robberies occur where hard cash that can relatively easily be robbed exists?
That sound like a good job? Is the governor mansion in Alaska a nice place to live? Should someone with that kind of job and all the perks be content with life?
Then please tell me why the current senator of Alaska felt it neccesary to commit a crime WHILE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ALL AROUND THE WORLD MAKING A FRACTION OF HIS SALARY, HAVE NOTHING AND NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TOO DO NOT COMMIT CRIMES?
Your comment is not just stupid, it is plain insulting.
As if somehow being poor makes you a criminal, yuch. So everybody who comes from a poor background, from a bad neighbourhood and wants more is going to resort to crime while the rich in good areas are offcourse innocent as a newborn kittens.
What you might have meant (unless you truly are a bigot) is that some low value economic crimes might not happen if people weren't forced at times between the choice of paying for basic needs or obeying the law.
These types of crimes are however rare. Even a poor person who robs someone else for a pair of Nikes does NOT qualify, you do NOT need brandname shoes to life. Not even to be "content".
Most crime originates from a sense of entitlement which becomes criminel when society judges that you ain't entitled to it. You are NOT entitled to my paycheck (well unless you happen to be Mrs. SmallFurryCreature), you are NOT entitled to have sex with me if I say no (anyone?), you are NOT entitled to have another million dollars in your bank account by pandering to the needs of big business, etc etc.
At most society can give its citizens a basic income (job? What about those to young, to old or sick to work?) enough to meet their most basic needs. Society can NOT make all its people content.
Either you are a hatefull bigot who really thinks that all poor people are criminals and rich people are innocent, OR you expressed yourselve extremely poorly (even by slashdot standards) or you are just a plain fucking idiot.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you are a bit older you might remember a time when the police was respected, perhaps I was just younger then, perhaps it was a different society BUT the current attitude to the police hasn't always existed.
The problem you describe does indeed exist, but you forget to name one reason for it. The police is the face of a whole system that has been screwed up.
The cop on the street gets the blame for the whole system that has been broken down by, well ultimately us, the voters.
I am going to take the dutch situation because that is were I live, your own country may be different but I am sure you might regonize this.
The bleeding hearts, who just do not want to punish people, period end of story. They will always find an excuse for every criminal because if society ain't to blame then they might just have to admit that some people are rotten to the core, end of story.
The right wingers, who just not want to pay for the punishement of people. They want more police, more convictions and longer jail sentences, but not a penny spend on it. The bleeding hearts may be nuts, but at least they regonize that if you want something, you need to pay for it.
The liberals who think society doesn't need enforcement, lets take the conductor out of public transport, people can regulate themselves. If you want to see how well people can regulate themselves, disable the traffic lights at a busy intersection, enjoy the anarachy.
The press, going to have go with a british example from a few years back. Woman gets sentenced for a drunk driving charge, press up in arms because she is a mother and sending her to jail would be too harsh. A bit later, similar case, but the woman gets a very light sentence, press up in arms because this sends the wrong message and smells of reverse sexism. The press puts whatever angle on any story that they think might sell them most copies at the moment and then we all act suprised when politicians just seem to have given up on trying to get our opinion on things. Take slashdot itself, rabid privacy nutcases or people who publish the personal details of spammers online?
The legal system was once extremely harsh, were just being the child of someone in debt could land you in jail often to die.
In more modern time this has slowly been changed, on the whole for the good BUT perhaps we have gone too far. A recent dutch letter-to-the-editor noted that a 18 year old who has stabbed a gay man received 6 months (minues time already served during arrest, resultint in his immidiate release) while a group of puppy thieves got two years.
While hanging every thief might be a bit too drastic and hacking the hands of childeren who steal an apple is perhaps not fitting the seriousness of the crime, perhaps the above example shows that we have gone a bit too soft.
Do you know that in some western countries you are free to commit any crime you please as long as you are below a certain age?
Do you know that in holland sentences do not stack? So if you commot a serious crime you can just as well commit a whole lot more because it won't incrwease your time in jail?
Do you know that if a mentally insane person (holland got a special system for dealing with those, they get two sentences, regular jail time and a sentence to be treated for their insanity) excapes during their many outings their guard may NOT use force to restrain that person and the escape itself is NOT a crime? This has been an extremely common thing recently.
While the amount of incompetence in this system is now slowly coming to light the real cause of it, years of cost cutting (the clinics are often COMMERICIAL! they are being PAID by the number of people they cure. Can you say, quanity over quality) years of the public voting for whoever promised tax cuts is not being examined.
If you want to improve society you should enforce the following law. Every newspaper story should list the people who voted for that policy. Prisoners getting parolled because they need the spaces for the next batch, thank the right-wingers for their tax-cutting. People being given trivial sentences for serious crimes, thank the leftwingers for their bleeding hearts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The details are perhaps in what you DON'T say.
First of in general, your tagline seems to be in favour of soft-drugs, I also take it that you are a US citizens. Soft-drugs are to my knowledge illegal there. So your attitude to the police might be a tad colored by the fact that you favour the use of a substance that they are supposed to stop being used. This is not a debate about softdrugs. Just think how you would judge a comment about students (you are one right?) who has a tagline "Education leads to communism".
The the first case:
The way you talk seems odd. You are the brother of some kid with hom he had (a) beef). Eh, some kid? I smell something fishy here. The sentence just doesn't make sense and is not how a normal person would express themselves. Either the guy knew your sister/brother or he didn't but you seem to be describing your own brother/sister as some kid.
So even if the above is true, what kind of brother/sisters do you have that know people with guns?
You also sound pretty young, so what are you doing with 5/6 little kids in a car? That seems like a lot.
You never seen the kid before, yet you have the police the punks name? What is missing here? How did you learn the name of a person you never seen before?
While it does seem odd that the police does not want to take out a report about the case I think there is an awfull lot you ain't telling us.
Case two:
There are assholes on the road and even ones who do this on purpose. No doubt about that. Yet often people also suffer from an angry reaction to someone elses driving behaviour. You would be suprised to see how often people curse someone else for cutting them off, when they have just cut those people off moments before. Road rage is offcourse wrong BUT your account MIGHT just be leaving out the little details of what you did to get that other person so angry with you. Not that you are lying, you might not have noticed you cut them off for instance and think yourselve innocent.
Perhaps it was someone who had a beef with some kid who might be related to you?
Case three:
You got a ticket, for non-inspection. I think this might be similar to the dutch system off APK, a system that requires cars to be checked every so often for roadsafety.
So, your complaint is that you got a ticket for having done a mandatory safety check. Mmm, you are breaking my heart here. Call Amnesty International! Perhaps you should have left a note, "It is too cold to drive this bike any further, please do NOT ticket it for not having gone through the safety check, because else I think you are a meanie".
As other posters have noted, an awfull lot of these "bad cops" stories seem to be colored by the person telling them and I see no sign that your case is not the same.
I see a young guy, living in a country that has outlawed his drug use, telling just his side of the story whining about getting a ticket for something he admits doing and complaing the police doesn't handle every little incident. Oh the humanity.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is "the police doing something right"?? WTF! "robberies spiked on paydays outside check cashing businesses in certain neighborhoods" was discovered in a criminology/sociology book entitled Armed Robbers in Action and beat these geniuses by several years. Rather than waste so much money "discovering" something that researchers have already known for years, maybe they could spend $8 at Amazon and read. You'd think the police would find research that interviews active armed robbers about their motivations and techniques to be relevant to their line of work. Hell, I had this as required reading in a criminology class I took as an elective. Maybe the police could just go to a local university and ask the criminology/sociology departments for their required reading lists each semester and they will leapfrog into the future without any need for data mining.
--Dave
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
A figure I carry in my head after reading it some years ago and can supply no reference to is that there is an 8 million to 1 chance of a English policeman encountering a serious crime (burglary upwards) in progress whle walking the beat.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Actually, in many places they do. Beat cops and homicide cops often have somewhat amicable relationships with drug gangs so that they have informants when violent crimes happen. Narcotics cops are another issue, but they don't walk beats and it's rarely useful to arrest low-level players who are selling at street corners.
I'm from sweden and I'd say it's about the same here.
One thing I thought about reading your post is that this is because nobody wants to be their work anymore. Especially not in one place all their life, what kind of a career would that be? Fifty years ago you pretty much were "the police officer" or "the butcher" in the area you worked.
Nowadays everybody is this anonymous person who happens to work with x at a given point. I'm not that nostalgic about it though, there are good and there are bad things that come out of it.
"Removed the necessary fear of the Police?"
Jeez. It should be "To protect and to serve" not "To fearmonger and to terrorise"
Do they really need to spend thousands of dollars analyzing data to determine there's more crime around check-cashing stores on paydays?
Exactly. Apparently they aren't bright enough to follow the money without computer guidance, even when it is actual cash used in predictably occuring/recuring transactions right in front of their noses. But then again, there's little profit motive for the police themselves to stake out check cashing shops on paydays. That doesn't line their own coffers nearly as much as making gestapo-style drug raids that net them cash, cars, homes, and boats via asset forfeiture and seizure. Nor does it provide a steady cash flow like a bunch of speed traps that nick motorists a few hundred bucks for trivial violations of absurdly low speed limits.
No, I'm waiting to find out how the police are really utilizing data mining technology to skin an extra few bucks off of their vict^H^H^H^Hemployers, the ordinary taxpaying citizens.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Wow. Over here, companies use direct bank transfers to pay their workers' salaries, and have done so for at least 30 years now. I've no need to ever carry large amounts of cash or cash-analogue paper (checks).
Is the US banking industry really that backward? How come?
You cannot both be friendly and operate assault teams that break in people's doors.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You're joking, right? You mean that the cops haven't been using common sense* for the last century or two, and doing that all along?
mark
* There is no such thing as common sense. The only thing that's common is stupidity - (c) whitroth, 1970-2007
I tend to agree. I know two former cops that walked a beat and they tell some interesting stories. But the most common theme was that there were never any serious problems in the areas patrolled by beat cops.
They're bringing them back to some degree. We now have bicycle cops, beat cops, and even equestrian patrols in addition to the cruisers that normally patrol.
Good policing comes down to very local areas. That's also why Providence is now split into 16 districts for police, each with their own commanding Lieutenant.
However in the ultimate act of stupidity, the city of Providence uses a thing called Provstat to monitor the functions of the administration. The police still have to rely on HTE for data extraction.
Beat cops and homicide cops often have somewhat amicable relationships with drug gangs so that they have informants when violent crimes happen.
Wow. Do their badges read "Not My Job" instead of "To Protect and Serve"? Maybe this new software will the police see the link between small time drug gangs and increased violent crime. Or do the homicide detectives just view allowing such an environment to persist as job security?
We are all just people.
I really liked Jello Biafra's notion that communities could vote for the policemen who would walk their beat. In a country like the US with such a low voter participation rate, I don't think it could really work though.
That's "lose", not "loose". Please don't do that again.
If only the world actually was the way it seems to be in your minds...
Well, they stopped that because they would drive to the neighborhood they patrolled and after walking the beat, they would return to find their cars stripped of everything. It got too expensive to have a substation in every neighborhood and it costs too much to place a guard on the cars taking them to the places they patrolled.