All but literally every crime in my city (in the categories of, say, burglary, robbery, assault, etc) are committed by people who drive into town in stolen cars with no plates. It's totally ridiculous. If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.

▲

yannyu 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.

Then the question is, why don't they do that? Why do we need a surveillance state to enable police to do what residents might consider the bare minimum?

▲

aerostable_slug 6 days ago | parent [-]

A large part of the deal is that ALPRs flag on hotlists and cannot be accused of racism. There's no way to argue a vehicle stop is the result of profiling when it's a machine recognizing a plate on a list and issuing an alert. The stats don't go in the same bucket.

At the end of the day, avoiding accusations of racism is behind much of modern policing's foibles (like the near-total relaxation of traffic law enforcement in some cities).

	▲	kyboren 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think the broad thrust of your argument is right on the money. Officers' perception of heightened (or unfair) accountability has turned every police interaction into a risk for the officers and department, too. However, I think the problem actually goes even deeper. The incentives are all aligned to launder responsibility through automated systems, and we'll end up sleepwalking into AI tyranny if we're not careful. Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs. The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do? Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything! While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army. But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.

▲

jancsika 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.

Your efficiency gain in the size and complexity of the policies and procedures handbook would be unparalleled.

But why might the crime rate shoot up on day two of your short tenure as police chief?

Hint: a metric is distinct from a target.

▲

ahmeneeroe-v2 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very funny, thanks for the response.

I am concerned about the lack of follow through after police intervention. Lack of prosecution and convictions, light sentences, repeat offenders being released, etc.

If judges would simply keep someone with 3+ felonies in jail, crime would drop 80%.

	▲	aerostable_slug 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		That got labeled "mass incarceration" and even Joe Biden (a 'law and order Democrat' to the core) had to walk back support of what he viewed as one of his greatest achievements, championing the 1994 Crime Bill.

▲

mikkupikku 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> "If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, [...]

...they'd get called racist. Let's be real. The tint thing in particular gets filed as "bullshit excuse for racial profiling", never mind that illegal tint can be empirically measured.