That’s the key factor that outsiders looking into the criminal justice system overlook. They think it’s easy. “Just stop being racist, corrupt, etc.” It’s a system where day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a really shitty human being. Reforming the system is important, but it’s much harder than people think.
This is categorically not true. Police have to deal with some very problematic people, sure. But bad days are far more common that bad people, and most interactions aren't even that.
Every police force has its share of assholes too, who are net cause of more problems than they solve. The most effective ones I've known have been aware of the systemic problems of thinking like you suggest, and intentionally work against it.
But randomly pick out some sentencing hearings one day at your local federal court. They’ll go over the rap sheet of people who actually go to prison. It’s eye opening.
You can even see this in the criminal justice advocacy materials if you read carefully. I love the ACLU but if you read beyond the headline in many cases it’s quite revealing. I remember a case a few years ago where the headline was some “child” was imprisoned simply for being at a scene where a pizza delivery guy was murdered in broad daylight. Turns out he was actually in a gang, who murdered the guy in cold blood, and the legal theory is that the cops can’t prove which kid actually fired the shots. You can find the legal theory compelling (and I do) while acknowledging that this is the kind of shit that turns up even when social justice types are trying to pick impact cases.
Or heck George Floyd. I think the media overlooked a really important angle on this story that would have spoke to religious people. Floyd was a guy who spent most of his life being a pretty bad person: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-us-news-ap-top-new...
But he had found Jesus, he was turning his life around and reaching out to kids, and when Derek Chauvin murdered him he cut short what could have been a path to redemption. Reflexively saying “criminals don’t deserve to be murdered” when Floyd’s background comes up is a tautology. Sure. But does pretending that stuff never happened help you understand the real human story of Floyd, Chauvin, and the people in that community? Why making progress on criminal justice reform is so hard even as it’s extremely necessary? Is your phat dismissal and reduction of people to a demons and angels binary persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you?
It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point; lots of people make excuses for the excesses of these systems based on this sort of "98%" (or whatever big number) argument; mostly those excuses are pure fertilizer.
Good people don't rob their neighbors because they're "having a bad day." They're shitty people. And no, poverty doesn't excuse it. People in Bangladesh, where I'm from, are vastly poorer. If poverty caused crime, they'd go around stealing, joining gangs, etc. But mostly they don't. In Bangladeshi villages, crime is lower than in U.S. cities. And when they do those things, nobody hesitates to call them shitty people!
I'm extremely sympathetic to police reform, because I think even shitty people don't deserve to be abused by the state. But let's not mince words here.
> It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point
That may be your point, but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding. My point was in the context of this article, which is about someone who was prosecuted for brutally raping and murdering a woman.
> but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding.
Neither was I. I was talking about the majority of all the work they do.
Everyone can identify clearly horrible behavior, and often it is police who have to deal with this as part of their job. This is difficult and unfortunate, but it is not the defining characteristic of the work. Pretending that it is in order to somehow excuse bad behavior on their part doesn't do anyone favors.
Fertilizer is good and useful (it helps plants grow); what you're talking is raw sewage, complete with draino and hastily-disposed medication.
If your job is to do image/video forensics on hard drives of people already arrested or served with warrants, it’s generally either unremarkable or traumatically upsetting. The latter is going to have the most impact on your perception, and would likely color your worldview on things like encryption or the overall goodness of humanity.
My comment was more aimed at general policing, the vast majority of which fits my characterization.
Due to the nature of the job, and the perks and impunity of it in the US, it actually self selects for assholes. The military does as well, to a much lesser extent. There were some days when I went to bed thinking, "everyone I talked to today was a self important asshole."
Nope, the attitude of "I never make mistakes" still baffles my mind. I get that most people they're dealing with are causing some amount of trouble, they should still regularly doubt their instincts. That would also go a long way to answering demands to "stop being racist."
>It’s a system where day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a really shitty human being.
If they hold that mindset, they should just extend it to themselves and the other people in the criminal justice system.
If the officers don't realize, upon bringing five separate people in on the same description, that at least four of them have to be the wrong guy, then they fail the test. If they end up eliminating four of the five but then concluding that the last guy actually did it, they also fail the test.
INSERT fake_actor() 5 TIMES SELECT suspects() CHECK officer_state_of_mind()
In the real world, as somebody already said, the logistics of hiring 5 actors to act "suspicious", get themselves arrested, set up plausible backstories that you would somehow have to keep from the police, potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong, etc?
I'm going to assume you're proposing this as a thought experiment and not something that could actually work.
[And I mean this in the nicest of ways, I construct these kinds of "solutions" constantly too]
> potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong
Presume that the FBI is staking out the police building and has (compelled) the cooperation of the local sheriff, in exactly the same way white-hat social-engineering pen-testers work in cooperation with the management of the organizations they attempt to penetrate. Presume also that, unknown to the police, no real suspects are being simultaneously processed (all have been redirected to other neighbouring precincts) and so all police suppression equipment has been swapped out for non-working versions. (If you try to taze or shoot the suspect, you lose.)
To be clear, this is a setup that already happens when there is an officer under FBI suspicion of being complicit/involved in criminal activity. The FBI comes in and works with the precinct to set up an internal sting. The only difference, here, is that this involves all the officers of the precinct, rather than just one.
I get the whole purpose of "yes, people are stopped every day because they resemble someone wanted", but this is "I am going to go out of my way to purposefully resemble and act like someone who the police will take a negative interest in".
Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR. It's extremely easy to justify bad deeds and fool yourself that the ends justify the means.
There will always be some megalomaniac, whether dictator, president, cop, or some authority figure, who "knows best".
Individual rights are the brakes. They're the lines we've agreed not to cross as a society, even when we're really sure we "know best". Example: property rights. No matter how sure you are that there's stolen property in the building, even law enforcement doesn't get to enter without a warrant.
Individual rights limit what others can do.
Imagine if each of your cells had individual rights or every bee in a hive has freedom to do its own thing.
Sometimes (most?) having centralized systems of power can be misused but that doesn't mean that centralized systems shouldn't be tried, there are evolutionary advantages to them.
How am I not surprised that you're the founder and CTO of a proctoring company that does facial recognition + AI to detect lying with "100% unbiased results". Fucking gross, man.
> Based on established models such as Big 5 and intrinsic values, TBI adds AI-powered Natural Language Processing to process data and help you make unbiased hiring decisions 100% of the time.
> TBI stack ranks candidates according to their performance in the assessment with regards to the competencies predetermined by the enterprise, ranging from 'essential' to 'good' and then 'critical'.
> Leverage psycholinguistics to analyze a candidate’s response and predict behavior in half the time.
So this company has layered AI on top of pseudoscience and is selling it as an automated hiring tool. I guess the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the results are indistinguishable from noise? Or maybe your hiring decisions are "unbiased" if you launder them through this software to produce a team that looks like your existing team?
Either way, this Talview company is doing some really evil stuff.
To be fair, that is actually true, although I don't think that's the (false) claim they're actually making.
A personal attack is not appropriate for this forum. I wouldn't have a made personal attack on you even if you had put what is you do in your profile.
FWIW I am proud of what I build, our products for half a decade have helped people to be able to take assesments from their home, whether it's disabilities or those cannot lose time on their jobs or would have to travel hundreds of miles just to an exam center to be certified. I am proud to have helped all of them.
There are plenty of discussions to be had on universities or certification bodies insisting on stringent requirements to do remote assesments to protect their integrity but a personal attack is not really the way to engage on this topic
Cells or bees have nothing to do with the wrongfully imprisoned minors in question.
Hitler as well.
I went to Catholic school. Had quite the debate with a nun over why I thought Hitler and Stalin both went to heaven, since both thought they were doing the right thing and were just horribly misguided.
I think a better way to phrase this would be that Stalin often said that what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR.
Stalin remained true to the Marxist ideal of a classless and stateless world society until his death in 1953. This is the conclusion of researchers at Amsterdam University (UvA) who studied Stalin's annotations in books by Marx, Engels and Lenin in his private library.
The notes originate from the period between 1917 and 1953 and show that the dictator continued to adhere to such Marxist goals as the abolition of the state and the creation of classless society. Moreover, Stalin's correspondence and discussions with such Communist leaders as Mao Zedong and Palmiro Togliatti show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2000-02/NOfS-SwfM-22...
A false preacher using his power for selfish purposes will carry a bible for show, maybe have a few stowed away. A false preacher certainly wouldn't have accumulated years of theology literature in his personal/private library over his lifetime. Seems like a true believer to me, but you may see it differently. Him being a true believer and having done what he did makes his particular flavor of human nature even more frightening.
Still I'd think that primarily important thing for him was himself and personal power, and that if he had had to make a choice between ideologies and himself, he'd done what was better for him personally. I wonder if he looked at communism etc more like a powerful tool (or so he thought) for him to use, and then not surprising if he spent time studying it
From the article:
> show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".
That'd almost made him the dictator over the world? Who knows if that might have been a main goal, and communism a tool?
It's slightly less disturbing to think that the cops legitimately think they're doing a good job over the alternative of intentionally ignoring their responsibility. Still troubling to think they could be that deluded.