> That's also when I learned that many people don't want to listen to statistics unless they agree with their own preconceptions.

This has been my experience with bodycam footage, I've found that there's been quite a few heavily protested police involved shootings that when looking over the footage and the facts of the situation, were by the book and completely justified, yet no matter how many times you say to someone "you do know there's footage of the entire event, uncut and unfiltered", it doesn't seem to matter.

EDIT: I just remembered what my throwaway username is.

The PoliceActivity youtube channel is interesting for this.

https://www.youtube.com/c/PoliceActivity/videos (For most of the videos, which show people dying, you must be logged into a youtube account to pass the "violent content" prompt)

Maybe 9 out of 10 videos are "good kills". Officer says something like "hey, stop committing a crime", the suspect says something along the lines of "fuck you pig!", pulls a gun, and is swiftly shot to death by the 50 SWAT guys surrounding him. These videos get around 100K views, and the comments are full of hooting MAGA types.

1 out of 10 show an officer doing something completely inexcusable, (Shouting "I love being racist!" and then hitting an infant with a baseball bat) and the video has 100M views.

The tens of thousands of comments then act out the exact same conversation every single time: the red team says something like "but it happens very rarely" and the blue team is outraged that it happens at all. They don't want the rate to be low, they want it to be zero. This is how you end up with blue-aligned media earnestly and in good faith calling for the police and all prisons to be abolished: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/abolishing-police-pris... https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-emerging-m...

I say "conversation" up there, which is of course incorrect. They're talking right past each other, since they come from two separate and completely divorced epistemological universes.

The problem with those ostensibly rare "bad cops" is that the supposed "good cops" tend to look the other way at best, and tacitly support them at worst. Cops who actually try to call their colleagues out tend to be heckled or worse. Here's a documented case of an entire police department ganging up against one whistleblower to the point of involuntarily committing him to a mental institution, with full knowledge, approval, and cooperation of higher-ups all the way to police commissioner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft

> They don't want the rate to be low, they want it to be zero

I'm not sure what the problem is with that. Of course mistakes happen but it should be the goal.

The red team also seems to have less of those "oopsie I just killed you" moments, so perhaps that might color things there.

And then you go on to the far end that calls for abolishing police/prisons and make that the general team blue zeitgeist. There's low hanging fruit of reform that needs more focus, e.g., not using police for mental health emergencies.

Anyway, your framing of the situation as a non-conversation is kind of meta -- it feels like you talked right past the problems.

Because when you have your target as zero then when you don't hit zero you push for ever more costly and suboptimal policy to achieve your goal. This is a problem both in that the incremental policy changes are highly unlikely to provide a larger benefit than their incremental costs and because it draws resources away from tackling problems that probably have a larger societal impact and smaller costs to achieve those goals.

That makes no sense and I'd be interested in examples supporting it that are not some person on the fringe shouting opinions.

What should the goal of the police department regarding killing innocent people? Should they aim for a dozen per quarter? Per-capita weighted?

Incremental changes have been hard because it gets down to the police policing themselves, and that has shown to be a failure.

Again, one of the "simplest" reforms would be to have other professionals deal with mental health crises.

A bigger reform with much more value would be ending the War on Drugs but that's way higher up the food chain. It is germane though, in that the whole point of said war was to give police more opportunities to oppress "others" (i.e., "minorities" and "hippies").

That you think it makes no sense means you do not understand statistics or cost/benefit analysis. There are tons of examples. People killed by drunk drivers, pedestrian road deaths, illegal drug usage in society, etc. Innocent people killed by cops is a bad measure because, by definition, pretty much all the people cops kill are innocent because almost all of them have not been found guilty by a jury of their peers for whatever the cops are trying to apprehend them for and are by definition innocent. The target for cops proven to have violated relevant policy related directly to the killing of a person should be zero but there is a non zero number of people killed by police each year society should be fine with. Even the target I said should be zero above should only be zero if the regulations pertaining to that are clear and concise enough to be easily understood and adhered to by police, otherwise situations where lethal force are justified will get tripped up on marginally relevant grounds because the probability the average police officer fails to follow some procedure increases with the number of procedures required.

All of these things have a pattern in common where the majority of the improvement can be had reasonably cheaply and capturing the last small improvement has huge costs that are usually much more costly than the benefit of eliminating the last bit and the population of potential events is huge. Road deaths are an illustrative example. Adding speed limits, traffic lights, crosswalks, moderate enforcement, etc. all dropped road deaths precipitously in the USA. If the USA changes its model from cars first to people first there are still some moderately costly infrastructure changes they could make to get their numbers down to Netherlands levels, which are still not zero. Beyond that you are left with hugely costly heavy enforcement among steadily more dystopian and invasive methods that will likely improve the number but not get it all the way to zero. It is really unlikley that these last improvements cost less than the benefit they incur between the direct cost of implementation and the negative effects on the total population of driving events.

On top of all this all those large costs you are incurring for very small gains come at the expense of being able to spend those limited resources on other things that likely have better cost to improvement ratios. You are foregoing a larger decrease in something else bad for society for small decreases in your target. In the road deaths example above that final small drop in road deaths might be coming at the cost of large drops in crime if you deployed those police there instead of on road deaths, as an example.

> That you think it makes no sense means you do not understand statistics or cost/benefit analysis

Maybe your writing was not clear enough, m'kay?

And now you play word games with my intent. I did not advocate for extreme measures -- simply to have clear targets of and rules of engagement; to identify workable solutions.

No, I am telling you what the problem is with having the rate set at zero, which is what I have been doing the entire time. Using your terminology, you don't get extreme measures initially, you walk yourself to extreme measures because everything you change does not hit your goal rather than just calling it a day when you hit the inflection point where the costs of your policy are roughly equal to the benefits of your policy and there are no obviously better uses of your limited resources that you should be doing instead.

I don't think you're willfully misconstruing me, but you are nonetheless.

You're manufacturing slippery slope reductions of a concept and therefore dismissing the concept.

What should the goal of police departments of pet dogs killed by cops? Should they aim for 10,000? A million? Just a handful? A logical answer is "we want to avoid killing any pet dogs in the course of service" (also known as zero).

Now they could take absurd actions to avoid that (leaving the scene whenever a dog is present), or they could add that to standardized training so that they're better prepared to deal with that situation.

So without providing real-world examples of you concerns you are just offering up florid conjecture.

Guy shouting fuck you pig while surrounded by 50 SWAT guys sounds like a mental health emergency. Can't do much about that. Ain't called first respondersfor nothing.

I mean, you can, but everyone involved has already ruled out doing any kind of root cause analysis because they don't like the obvious solutions to the causes, so both "gun" and "mental health emergency" and "shooting by police" are treated as natural events like weather that we cannot hope to understand or control.

>sounds like a mental health emergency

Sure, you can dose him up with Haldol and solve that particular emergency. What happens when he does it again next week? And the week after that?

Persistent severe mental illness is interesting in that it's a new problem. For all of human history, severe mental illness was a death sentence. Either you'd get beaten to death by your largest neighbor for acting weird, or your village would exile you and you'd starve to death in the forest.

The current compromise we've arrived at is that being crazy is not actually a crime, so you cannot be permanently imprisoned for it. So low-functioning schizophrenics cycle through mental hospitals-- they climb a lamp post and urinate on passers-by, get committed and then are put on antipsychotics, sober up, survey their surroundings and rationally conclude that inpatient mental health facilities are really awful places to be, (basically no rights or privacy, surrounded by crazy people, can't wear or handle any object that's on a very short list of approved suicide-incompatible things) and then check themselves out, which they are legally allowed to do. Then they go off their meds, (also legally allowed) and it's back to the lamp post...

This continues until they accidentally walk into traffic, or are shot by a cop. It's a miserable compromise that persists because all the alternatives are even less palatable.

Follow up response -- the meth epidemic seems to be manufacturing craziness at a rapid clip. Our current "solution" is failing us and we'd be well-served to reexamine how to deal with it.

The correct answer is to legalize, tax, and regulate all drugs and to create "mental health courts" that can administer the involuntary institutionalization of those that need it.

We need to take another try at involuntary institutionalization of the mentally ill.

It should be cheaper than prisons and more humane as well. The homeless crisis begs for this.

Just got to work out trivial details like how to not have that power be abused...

Second comment because I was responding without addressing your point properly: somebody in a crisis like that could possibly be helped if there weren't 50 SWAT guys eager to take target practice.

There's obviously violent scenarios that can only be addressed with violence, but bringing that on should be a last resort.

Putting someone already in crisis into a dangerous situation (surrounding them with SWAT) is going to make the crisis much worse. The film we see of people having a mental health crisis always comes from after the cops have shown up; they may have been much less agitated beforehand.

Yep. There are "simple" things we can do that will make things better but that can't happen until we agree to do it.

And for that to happen we need to understand it.

And for that to happen we need to talk about it.

Yeah, suicide by cop is a thing.

My point was that the comment about divisiveness between teams red and blue in this regard was divisive as well in how it was framed.

Police are granted incredible powers and have historically not had the best oversight, let alone relations with "minorities".

There are real problems and they can be addressed but that will never happen as long as we can't even agree that the "what" exists, let alone if the "how" is correct.

The problem is the ""good"" kills should also be regarded as failures of the system in a lot of cases.

> They don't want the rate to be low, they want it to be zero

Well, yes. "Thou shalt not kill" does not have an "unless you're a cop" footnote. There is no acceptable number of your children you would tolerate the shooting of.

> They don't want the rate to be low, they want it to be zero

As someone that cannot even vote in the US (and is therefore neither red nor blue) - that seems _eminently fucking reasonable_. This kind of thing just does not happen in the UK.

I'd wager there have been fewer police killings (let along just shootings) in the past two decades in the UK than just this weekend in the US.

For anyone that actually believes in small, limited government, the idea that government agents can wander around shooting effectively at will is so ridiculous that anyone claiming to be "red team" should hang their heads in shame.

>This kind of thing just does not happen in the UK.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chris-kaba-p...

>Chris Kaba: Protests held across UK after unarmed black man shot dead by police. Crowd of more than 1,000 demonstrators brandished ‘fight racism’ signs following the death of unarmed 24-year-old

Fewer in the last two decades than this weekend in the US.

What happened to "just does not happen"?

That's interesting -- but it certainly conflicts with macro-view analysis of the data[0][1][2] (I could link more, but there are more research links in the first linked thread and I do not wish to waste your most valuable time).

It seems to me that the only way to explain this is the lack of publishing of damaging videos by the youtube account -- i.e. the usual thing you need to pay attention to in the social sciences -- a) who chooses to release the data, b) the conditions under which they choose to release the data.

On the side of the YouTube channel -- based on the patreon channel, it seems to me that they are most likely not part of the police, or the judicial system. Thus they must obtain body camera footage from freedom of information requests.

This means that that information request is subject to filtering on the side of law enforcement, who can almost arbitrarily choose what videos they want to release -- while there are guidelines present, they really only apply if you can prove them being broken, which... due to the nature of FoI requests... you can't...

So, just as a baseline, legal advice holds that data that is currently being pursued legally should be held off from release to a general audience, and court cases can take many years to be processed. So it seems to me that that is one main reason that videos that show misconduct by police offers would be failed to be released, or would otherwise be redacted.

On top of that, you have whether officers themselves working in the police administration care to release the footage. It seems reasonable that an officer may be subject to workplace-based social pressure, and not wish to release footage of wrongdoing by one of his coworkers, it also seems reasonable that in some cases, they might indeed feel departmental pressure to not release footage that displays such wrongdoing, so that the department as a whole does not come under flak. You have cases in the UK where officers themselves deleted videos that would prove wrongdoing on their part[3]. Either way, this is inherently impossible to prove either way.

And then you have whether or not the police officer was recording at all, regardless of what regulations state. There have been a few cases recently where police officers thought that their body camera was off, and used that time to break the law[4][5]. Indeed, in some states, it's entirely up to the officers whether to turn them on in the first place, based on what they consider as "an incident".

And then finally, as a youtube channel accepting donations, they are heavily incentivized to draw "engagement" and game the algorithm, so what they release is not just going to be based both on the political opinions of those within the organization, but also will heavily cater to whatever established audience they have, to ensure that each video is liked and that they gain subscribers, so they can drive donations to keep on doing what they are doing.

So to me it seems that this isn't as nearly cut-and-dry as you assume to think that it is. At the very least, a random youtube channel that releases police video, cannot be thought of as a proper or correct sample from which to draw correctly proportioned information from -- as we can see, there are many reasons why it would misrepresent the number of cases of each involved. While research in this area is perhaps uncomfortable for people to accept, it broadly shows that police -- at least how they behave at the moment -- are universally flawed. I myself would prefer to trust the data.

[0]: https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1571898316295643136

[1]: https://resistancelab.network/our-work/taser-report/index.ht... (Disclaimer: I know some of the people who worked on this. Interesting Note: 118 cases of taser use against children, 8 against children aged under 11)

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/28/hunted-one-i...

[3]: https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Documen...

[4]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/baltimore-cops-turned-off-body... (I admit this is rather a famous case!)

[5]: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/art...

It's the same sort of thing with body cameras. If anything they capture a lot more context about situations. Generally I think the police will start to want to have the safety of the record keeping rather than not.

I sort of agree, but one thing the last few years showed me was how little people (especially in the media and parts of the academy) care about the truth. overwhelming, easily accessible, incontrovertible evidence might save you from the law, but the media, activists, and other partisans are still happy to make your life hell.

Police are already notorious for turning off their body cameras when it's convenient for them. Some police shootings result in no bodycam footage at all even though most or all officers were wearing one.

Tougher to answer, but maybe more useful, would be “What harm reduction strategies are being tried in other cities? Are they working?” this is at the intersection of policy and outcome and takes a lot of context.