allonymist (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} allonymist) wrote,@ 2007-09-21 17:04:00 |
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Dear cops, re l'affaire Simpson
Dear cops and policymakers,
So, you're worried about terror and stuff, so you've decided that you're going to be extra vigilant. Go you. Now, you might not have studied statistics, but there are two kinds of mistakes you can make when you're trying to do this kind of thing: false negatives and false positives. False negatives (not reacting to actual criminals) can result in loss of life, or even cost a police officer his job. When policymakers tell the police, "be really careful and react to everything suspicious," they're saying "Minimize false negatives."
But low false-negative rates don't come free: when false negatives fall, false positives rise (all other things being equal). When err on the side of suspicion, sometimes you will be wrong and you will wind up coming down like a ton of bricks on some peaceful protester, some harmless guys with an art project, an innocuous running club, or, today, some kid with a breadboard and a battery.
So, what are your options when you get a false positive? You could say, "Heck, it looked dangerous to us. We're trying to be real careful, and that means we're going to react to non-threats sometimes. Sorry for the inconvenience, but for future reference: the kind of thing you were doing flips us out like crazy." Or on the other hand, you could arrest and pursue charges against the false positive, on the theory that if you did something that made the cops flip out, you must have been doing something wrong.
Too many locales have been doing the latter. It's a bad idea, though: when your first reaction to your own inevitable mistakes is to place the blame on others, you look petty. The average police officer isn't an expert in electrical engineering, demolitions, or germ warfare. There's no shame in admitting that somebody confused you: you don't need to go track down the people who did it and arrest them for "confusing an officer of the law" so that it won't happen again.
Now of course, they don't call it "confusing the police". In Boston, it seems to be "possessing/producing a hoax device". As far as I can tell, in Boston a "hoax device" is "anything that a cop mistakes for a bomb." It's possible that in Joe Previtera's case (see link above), a "hoax device" was "whatever a cop deliberately mistakes for a bomb in order to haul your ass to jail."
Angrily,
Dear cops and policymakers,
So, you're worried about terror and stuff, so you've decided that you're going to be extra vigilant. Go you. Now, you might not have studied statistics, but there are two kinds of mistakes you can make when you're trying to do this kind of thing: false negatives and false positives. False negatives (not reacting to actual criminals) can result in loss of life, or even cost a police officer his job. When policymakers tell the police, "be really careful and react to everything suspicious," they're saying "Minimize false negatives."
But low false-negative rates don't come free: when false negatives fall, false positives rise (all other things being equal). When err on the side of suspicion, sometimes you will be wrong and you will wind up coming down like a ton of bricks on some peaceful protester, some harmless guys with an art project, an innocuous running club, or, today, some kid with a breadboard and a battery.
So, what are your options when you get a false positive? You could say, "Heck, it looked dangerous to us. We're trying to be real careful, and that means we're going to react to non-threats sometimes. Sorry for the inconvenience, but for future reference: the kind of thing you were doing flips us out like crazy." Or on the other hand, you could arrest and pursue charges against the false positive, on the theory that if you did something that made the cops flip out, you must have been doing something wrong.
Too many locales have been doing the latter. It's a bad idea, though: when your first reaction to your own inevitable mistakes is to place the blame on others, you look petty. The average police officer isn't an expert in electrical engineering, demolitions, or germ warfare. There's no shame in admitting that somebody confused you: you don't need to go track down the people who did it and arrest them for "confusing an officer of the law" so that it won't happen again.
Now of course, they don't call it "confusing the police". In Boston, it seems to be "possessing/producing a hoax device". As far as I can tell, in Boston a "hoax device" is "anything that a cop mistakes for a bomb." It's possible that in Joe Previtera's case (see link above), a "hoax device" was "whatever a cop deliberately mistakes for a bomb in order to haul your ass to jail."
If that doesn't stick, they also seem to charge the cop-confuser with "disturbing the peace" on the theory that it's your fault the cops freaked out and shut down the area. This is the only legal theory they tried on the poor New Haven hashers, but it seems to be what they're charging Star with as well.
Of course, this might just be an attempt to intimidate everybody out of reacting to police and airports with anything other than complete predictable normality. In which case, oops, joke's on me.Angrily,
