Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
I worked my way through your post backwards, as it helps cut down on the number of heuristic based cognitive stop points. Just wanted to point out a few things that stood out.<p>&gt;On dogwhistles. 
I&#x27;m tired of hearing this term thrown about. This word more than any other cements the ostracization of those who have fundamentally different slices of world view from you into the social space of &quot;I can&#x27;t be bothered to try to convince you or build a bridge across the gap of our misunderstanding.&quot;<p>Are there hopeless cases? Yes, Absolutely. I consider myself a socially liberally inclined sort of fellow who embraces a &quot;do as thou wilt, but don&#x27;t break anything&quot; attitude toward life. The don&#x27;t break anything part being tacked on there in recent years based on immersion in and attempts to understand where more conservative mindsets come from. Believe it or not, conservative != racist. It doesn&#x27;t equal stone wall, What it does encompass is a way of evaluating the world and proposed changes in terms of harmful malbehaviors that may be introduced. Whether you like it or not, you <i>must</i> appreciate that force at work to bridge the gap with a conservative. Show them you thought about it, took it seriously, and have means to minimize harms and you can get them on board.<p>Call everything they say a dogwhistle and paint them all as racists, and you will be amazed at how tightly ranks close.<p>&gt;on the Fryer paper...
Haven&#x27;t read it yet, but I&#x27;ll give it a go. No comment til then.<p>&gt;Uncle Tom and lack of academic experts<p>Thank God the world isn&#x27;t run solely by academics, and statisticians! Give two statisticians the same set of data, and they&#x27;ll generate two different models and stories for the same damn thing, and clearly there has been absolutely nothing like any sort of reproducibility crisis is the social sciences or economics fields, nor have their been controversies with the academic environment being gamed through innumerable submissions of low quality irreproducible papers!<p>Oh wait! Yes there has! If you&#x27;ve spent any amount of time here you should have more than a few to sample from.<p>Besides which, appeal to authority, while useful in fact discovery, does not score rhetorical points. Often for reasons alluded to above, and no, I&#x27;m not an anti-intellectual. I&#x27;ve been around the block more than once and I&#x27;ve seen some shit. Not the least of which is black holing of narratively inconvenient yet legitimate papers.<p>(See David Shor&#x27;s recent cancelling).<p>The fact is politics is not just about <i>facts</i> or the collection&#x2F;interpretation thereof. Politics at it&#x27;s core is about building something that works for everyone involved, without overly burdening any party unduly. Now where American politics may legitimately have a problem is that the first time a felony occurs, a person is discounted from the political equation effectively even after they have played their debt to society and served their sentence. That the taint of the felony persists so long after an official sentence is served, and that full rights are not restored automatically to that of a citizen in good standing, and that there is no semblance or measures, or protections in this age of interconnected databases to protect anyone unfortunate enough to have picked up that felon label, seems absolutely problematic to me. However, that stands as a political necessity, since in a purported land of the free, there is the assumption that no one else carries the blame for the choices you&#x27;ve made but you and your lonesome. Furthermore, I don&#x27;t think anyone has ever stopped to actually consider what would happen if a non-trivial fraction of the population was booted out of the political limelight entirely, because there is an implicit assumption the world is better off without accommodating the &quot;demonstrably morally bankrupt&quot; holding the reins of power. Not my view, but an observation of one of the terminus points of the Overton window in my experience, and one I don&#x27;t see much point in arguing with beyond in the sense that we have an imperfect, by men justice system, so it sure does seem rather odd that there is no clean process for handling reintegration back into society. That&#x27;s getting into completely different areas of how our political system and incentives are screwed up, but nevertheless, the point to take away is, the direct route in politics is frequently <i>not</i> the most expedient.<p>&gt;Lee Atwater et al.<p>Well, seems to be a self-correcting problem does it not? Redlining is getting the scrutiny it deserves as well as myriad other forms of proxies for racism like Euclidean zoning; and no, the black community are not the only ones who noticed the gem of zoning laws contributing to continued segregation, I assure you. It just tends to take a while for people to hit that point in life where they&#x27;ve got other things nailed down enough to start asking juicy questions like &quot;What&#x27;s up with this zoning stuff anyway?&quot; Like it or not, not everybody is terribly tuned to the difficulties of shaping public policy for resource consumption.<p>&gt;on black fathers<p>So are you saying early adulthood incarceration causes bad fathers? Because I can see a case being made by many people for that causality to be the other way around.<p>&gt;on greater likelyhhod of being arrested for marijuana abuse.<p>Don&#x27;t know about anyone else, but when I was growing up and still in the primary grades (when marijuana based crackdowns was generally considered worthwhile), I always found it interesting that there were two distinct usage groups. Those who&#x27;d light one up in front of God and everyone, and those who&#x27;d do it somewhere private, and generally <i>not</i> when they were busy doing something for someone else. Furthermore, a large number of marijuana related cases I&#x27;ve heard of tend to result from consent being given to search a vehicle containing it, or from someone having hotboxed, and generated plenty of probable cause for an officer to suspect driving under the influence. The fact that it&#x27;s practically a boutique charge (much like most firearm regulation charges are treated as) used to sweeten the list of crimes to be potentially prosecuted for never really helped matters. Point is, the disproportionate arrest rate of black vs. White may come down not on racial divides, but consumption pattern lines and ability to meld into the environment, and capacity to adhere to patterns of behavior that do not escalate you into the limelight of being noticed. A police officer&#x27;s primary evaluation loop involves working out what isn&#x27;t right given their environment. I&#x27;m willing to wager that cops would love to just let &quot;endemic&quot; crime slide, but that&#x27;s not really an option given their need to act with integrity. Remember, statistics only reflect those who got caught. Those who didn&#x27;t are, to the limited resources of the justice system, not worth going after. Does this infuriate me? Yes. I want white collar crime to be gone after with the assumed exuberance the police allegedly demonstrate going after people of color. That&#x27;s reality though. The constraints of what we can get done are necessarily bounded by that which we can do.<p>&gt;redlining&#x2F;housing &amp; the War on Drugs.<p>The war on drugs was in general aimed at the principle destabilizers of public order at the time; hippies&#x2F;anti-war Protestors and the civil rights movement. If you&#x27;re really annoyed the legacy still exists today, I&#x27;d advise you to read up on the concept of legislative sunset dates, and how their mandated inclusion forces choices in terms of prioritization of laws worth keeping on the books.(1&#x2F;2)