It's not that Bayesian stats can't help or can't offer insights, it's that it can easily reinforce underlying societal biases, and then it's harder to question because "it's science" and no one has to take any responsibility for its effects.
I'd guess violent crime mostly "comes from" people calling 911, not from officers stumbling into rapes/mugging/murders/home invasions.
I would still argue that it's not "premature" to look at crime and policing data; in fact, I'd say it's high time we did it.
tl;dr you are not addressing what I was arguing
(and to everybody else here, I was not advocation Bayes Theorem, I was relying on it as a baseline truth for synecdoche for statistical analysis. If you want to object to Bayes Theorem, that's on you, it wasn't my point...)
saying "inherent bias" is very vague and has more value as a political dog whistle than anything else... unless you'd like to suggest what the biases are and point out how you have this special knowledge and other crime experts don't.
for example, what is the bias in incoming 911 calls?
There's a difference between a team of academics/statisticians analyzing policing and crime data and then debating the resulting conclusions, and a widespread set of predictive policing tools that are designed to be used by feet on the ground. The former is great! and important. The latter is the problem.
> saying "inherent bias" is very vague and has more value as a political dog whistle than anything else... unless you'd like to suggest what the biases are and point out how you have this special knowledge and other crime experts don't.
The entire point I'm trying to make is that it's very _difficult_ to figure out what your data biases are because usually the data is _all you have_. My point isn't that I have "special knowledge" about where the biases are. I do not have any such special knowledge. Domain experts will have more "special knowledge" and by that I mean through their experience they will have hopefully learned difficult lessons about the limitations of certain types of data available to them, but even they will not have perfect knowledge about where all of the biases in their data are.
> for example, what is the bias in incoming 911 calls?
again, I do not know! Do you? Do you feel 100% sure to say that the propensity of someone to dial 911 would not be dependent on socioeconomic factors, or on the nature of the crime, or on the alleged perpetrator? Do white people feel more comfortable calling 911 on black or brown people than black or brown people calling 911 at all?
You can try to correct for certain biases if you have access to all of the relevant info (e.g. in the above example, we could in fact try to answer this question if (1) we had the actual background rate of crimes being committed, independent of 911 calls, (2) all of the relevant information (e.g. race/income of caller and perpetrator, the crime type, etc.), and even then we would be missing other biases that we may not be consciously trying to "correct" for). But even this is subject to lots of error (how do we get the actual baseline level of crimes? hint: you can't), and will miss other factors that we haven't thought of.
The stock market is anti-inductive by design. Statistical patterns that reflect market inefficiencies are supposed to disappear over time.
Most problems are not anti-inductive.
So yeah, "you can't even predict the stock market with your methods" is a pretty terrible argument against methods that were never meant to predict the stock market.
> far stricter processes should be in place, more similar to getting approval for a new airplane or medicine
maybe, but you have no idea yourself so your fear does not carry enough weight to carry that statement. It's basically like you are saying "it's too early to try Bayesian policing" when in fact Bayesian policing might be a great idea, and it was a great idea 10 years ago too.
Conditional probability, if there have been a lot of rapes in a 2 block radius, do you think it might be a good idea to look in that radius? If you try that and the crimewave continues but moves 2 blocks away, do you think there might be information to glean from that?
considering individual cops as bees in a hive, can individual bees make good Bayesian decisions about where to fly next? No, the information needs to be consolidated centrally. Who's better at Bayesian calculations, people or computers?
I'm sure there is all sorts of defective software out there, just like there are all sorts of other lazily/cheaply produced products that don't live up to our needs. That doesn't mean it's too early to try improvements.