Social justice crime response: "help there's been a crime!" Sorry, we can't respond because your area has had historic profiling, we will now dispatch a cruiser to a low crime area to look for violations, thanks for calling!

@1

"Help there's been a negro! I mean a crime!"

A whole story about how someone called 911 and the cops showed up?
Meanwhile here in Seattle my friend just got all of his shit stolen in an overnight burglary where the thieves smashed a glass door and hung around for almost an hour while loading an idling car.

This is the dumbest complaint I've ever heard. Sure, some 911 calls are false alarms, racist or otherwise. Why, for a predictive crime system, would you count these as data points for predicting future crime? You'd use the ones that were substantiated as actual crimes or the system lacks all predictive power. Are you suggesting that raw 'scary black man!' calls are what they're planning to use?

How is that aggregate data from any citizen's 911 call, that that is automatically fed into databases, be considered racially biased when it is later evaluated?

More importantly, why such a contorted use of the ACLU's time?

However the takeaway here is a gem. We now have a great example for politely saying "no" the next time we're solicited by the ACLU outside a grocery store.

Is this a news worthy article or a plug to attempt to get readers for the linked slog posts? Sigh. Half paid food advertisements pretending to be news, half crazy incoherent race posts by Charles.

I would argue that there are few better ways to allocate police services. I am not saying it is perfect, that racist events like the Washington Post covered don't happen, but I would say rather than attack this proposal, push for better quality policing, the type that brings police capable of deescalation to 911 calls.

Chez Vel-DuRay is in a rough-ish neighborhood, and I call 911 a lot. I call for the hookers who entertain their johns in our cul-de-sac. I call for the weirdo who cases our alley. I call for the schizo lady who wanders up from SODO from time to time and decides to spend a few hours screaming on the public stairs that bridge one block to another. I call for the drunks who decide to hang out on those same stairs and use it for a bar/toilet. Almost all of those hookers/weirdos/schizos/drunks are white or Asian, which reflects the makeup of Seattle.

I think the point here is that if the police use the data from 911 calls to proportionately staff officers throughout the city, that is great. But if they decide, in addition, that a lot of those 911 calls from a particular neighborhood means that Teh Blacks are overrunning the neighborhood, that's just dumb.

@9: But where in the cut-de-sac would they......? Typically such assignations occur near cheap motels.

@4
May you have received same protection by police at your home as the woman in Santa Monica did.

The goal of the call data analysis is to determine where the police are likely to be needed. If certain areas have unusually high rates of false alarms or whatever, find a correction factor and apply it. Problem solved.

@11, Ya know what? I have! A few times. It's kind of scary for a second, but then you realize what's going on and it's not that big of a deal. You can make it a big deal in your head, but that doesn't mean it really was. Cops make mistakes in figuring out who is who sometimes, and they usually figure it out fast enough, but until they figure it out you have to expect that they're going to treat you as potentially dangerous. Nothing that they did in that story sounds that outrageous if you ignore the writer's hyperbole.

@13
Well good. Hope you get much more of that protection. And good luck never stumbling or bumping into something or sneezing because you're ill or drunk or you are sleeping, and the nervous officers pointing their guns at you don't shoot.

@13

So how long is fast enough, anyway? Was she exaggerating she said the police wouldn't respond to her requests?

@13
Actually, if it happens to you again, and let's hope it does, please remember to follow police advice and do what the SMPD advised the woman to do: come out shouting.

Why do the writers at the Slog always flip their shit whenever it comes to matters relating to math or science?

@17: The short story is that they have no one on staff with any understanding of such topics.

The longer story is that we all know what crime stats say and to who/where they predict crimes will occur. The raw statistics are very bad for the social narratives The Stranger is required to view and report the world through. Any idea of predictive policing has to be "bad" because of what we all know they will predict.

@18 and others, that whooshing sound is The Point flying over your head. Read the article.

@19 I certainly read the article, and I'm still trying to understand why this data can't be useful without the SPD treating minorities like shit. A bunch of others have said the same thing, instead of ignoring everyone else, why don't you go into some detail and answer the question many of us are asking.

@20: If you have been on Slog long, you should know that JonnoN never has a point, or any answers.

A guy who yells things from the high seats is a needed part of any discourse, but responding or taking it seriously is pretty pointless.

@19 - what is the point of the article? It read to me like we really need to keep our heads in the sand and ignore objective data as much as possible. Is that really the position you want to take?

Seattle gets over 800,000 911 calls each year. You seem to be saying that because of 1 bad experience outlined in the article - *that didn't happen in Seattle* - SPD should not find ways to utilize the data contained in those 800,000 calls to be more effective. That makes no sense.

from the article:

It's racially biased because institutional racism is real; communities of color are historically less trustful of police, leading them to report fewer crimes; and white communities often over-report crimes. This could create a feedback loop in which certain neighborhoods get singled out by the software as being more prone to crime based on biased inputs, increased police presence is triggered for those neighborhoods based on the software's statistical analysis, and then those neighborhoods receive heightened policing that's based more on prejudiced 911 callers than on a true representation of crime patterns.

@22 this data isn't objective, that's the point.

@23 What data is objective? If we cannot find objective data, is the answer don't use any data?

And contrary to the way Ansel ended the article, the comment from the ACLU noted that the SPD recognizes the problems with their data set and wish to mitigate them to the greatest degree possible.

To some extent Ansel is arguing data bad... possibly because Ansel believes police = bad and police = unneeded.

Police reform is about better policing. Some people on the left don't want police reform. They just want no police.

@23 - so we need to make sure to never examine the actual 911 call data to determine whether those assertions are valid or not. Got it.

@23: So do what I suggested and apply corrections for over/underreporting