Submitted by giuliomagnifico t3_ynz2ey in science
Reply to comment by Artanthos in Examining 100,000 crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies between 2010 and 2019, researchers found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates by giuliomagnifico
Very good point to bring up. Let's look at the difference of "focusing more police activity somewhere where it is needed more" and the resulting better probability of crime being discovered there.
This comparison of two different ideas can be seen if you look at two numbers - the first is the number of crimes actually committed - let's say it's 0.05 in neighborhoods with less pigmentation (for different reasons - like more money and better education just to mention a few) and 0.2 in neighborhoods with more pigmentation. (numbers are made up but that shouldn't matter) Now the above number of crimes actually being committed is a hidden one - we can never know the exact number because we won't be able to find every crime that is being committed. Now we have somewhat of an idea that higher pigmentation neighborhoods are more prone to crime so we focus more police activity there simply because we assume the probability of us finding a crime being committed is higher than in neighborhoods with less pigmentation. Now what happens is we get a second number, let's call it "crimes actually discovered by police" (we work with fixed numbers but in reality we would work with probabilities here). This number is way lower in richer neighborhoods because police activity isn't as thorough there - we get 0.02. The number in poorer neighborhoods is along the lines of 0.1.
You see that there are two reasons numbers regarding commited crimes can be higher. Firstly because there are more crimes commited but also because we have more police activity there. It can be very easily overlooked but EVEN though it makes sense to have more police activity in regions where people are expected to commit more crimes this also influences the statistics towards a higher discoverage-rate in sich regions compared to other regions. This interaction is easily overlooked but should be known by researchers of the field.
If you didn't understand my question previously I now hope you know what I was referring to.
You know there are victim surveys and witness reports showing concordance with arrest rates by race?
Reread their comment, because it explores some of the reasons for that
Hey UP, do you have any tips for me how I could have differently formulated the 'non-linearity' between crime-rate and crime-discovery-rate (moderated by police activity)? What I mean seems to go over some people's heads - so maybe I missed something or didn't explain something well enough.
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Do you mean we have qualitative interviews of people who support consistency between arrest rates and the race of people being arrested? I don't quite see where you are going with this one but it doesn't quite resonate with what I previously said.
I was talking about a nonlinear relation between the actual crimes committed and the crimes discovered - this 'non-linearity' is moderated by the amount of police activity. Meaning: even though poorer neighborhoods commit more crimes and therefore get more police activity this in turn also leads to a higher discovery rate of crimes. The discovery rate is higher in poor neighborhoods compared to rich neighborhoods. Remember we are talking about discovery rate, not about crime rate.
>I was talking about a nonlinear relation between the actual crimes committed and the crimes discovered - this 'non-linearity' is moderated by the amount of police activity
And again, police presence is driven by homicide rate and reports to police.
>The discovery rate is higher in poor neighborhoods compared to rich neighborhoods.
We know what you said. Just because you typed out a stupid thought experiment doesn't make your concern valid. There are independent measures of crime to which you could measure reasonably appropriate level of police activity. One measure is homicide rate. And there's more or less a general factor for crime. Areas with higher homicides will most probably have higher rates of other crime.
>And again, police presence is driven by homicide rate and reports to police.
I understand where you are coming from, I really do, but this discussion is not about what is driving police precence but about a possibly-not-considered interaction between the "local arest rates" (=the documented crime) vs. the "real number of crimes commited" and the moderator of "police activity".
You keep explaining to me - over and over again - that our moderator is determined by x, y, z and I am very proud of your attempt of taking part in the discussion and this information is surely great for any later (and very basic) modeling but at this point it is redundant at best.
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>We know what you said. Just because you typed out a stupid thought experiment doesn't make your concern valid.
The subreddit you are dwelling on right now is called r/science; a heavily moderated forum for people that want to talk about science. The thought experient was for the purpose of understanding solely, it´s redundancy can be measured based on the general r/science-users ability to know what a "non-linear interaction between x and y, moderated by z" means.I must also question not only your temper but also your comprehention of basic-research - the field I wanted to expand my ideas on where questions are asked not because they have a direct implication for anything but because we like to understand things. Coincidentally also my field of research in the real world.
>There are independent measures of crime to which you could measure reasonably appropriate level of police activity. One measure is homicide rate. And there's more or less a general factor for crime.
Now we are getting somewhere. Let´s take the general factor for crime and call it g. g is great but how do we actually find out the g of a zoned area? Well we can´t but we can approximate it. Let´s call this approximation g´. Does this approximation take into account that more police activity from a higher g will probably also result in a g´ that is closer (maybe even further away - we don´t know yet) to the original g? Well what I propose is we find out whether or not the distance between g and g´ (let´s call that distance d) is always the same regardless of how big g is. What I propose as a reasonable hypothesis is that d is moderated by police activity.
If you were so kind to NOT give me another analysis of what factors contribute to police activity because I feel like I am talking to a toddler. What I really wanted was people comming up with intresting study designs or recommentations for papers that tackled similar ideas. I don´t want to conduct the study myself but a few hours ago I was still intrested in talking about it. I should have research the topic myself - would have saved some time but probably missed the opportunity to talk to other scientists that might criticise my approach or my idea in a well thought out manner.
>Areas with higher homicides will most probably have higher rates of other crime.
Let´s have a little quiz, shall we? Why is this information redundant to me?
Yes, because it talks not about what I was talking about but rather about a general positive correlation between g and g´. Well done.
Give me a break.
Yes; you continue claiming i didn't understand your point that police presence mediates a lower actual - documented crime gap in low income urban settings, but this is unlikely. Homicide rates are measurement invariant, and because there's a positive manifold for criminality, you should be able to extract theoretical actual crimes rates from homicide rates plus a few other hopefully somewhat orthogonal (and measurement invariant such as reported stolen vehicles to insurance companies or law enforcement?) input variables. The gap between theoretical crime - documented crime would give you the evidence for which regions have the highest crime gaps, and whether crime gap variance is associated with law enforcement presence variance to establish an unlikely hypothesis.
Great input. I still don't believe that's the whole picture. In most of Europe less weapons have a strong positive correlation with less homicides so we can't use this metric to encompass most of the crime spectrum. Car theft is much more common and can definitely be used as another way to approximate g. This still doesn't include drug trade and prostitution. Most of the times such cases of organized crime have their own Para-justice systems in place where allowing one crime doesn't automatically mean you allowed every crime (most notably homicides, which are a big no-go even in communities where crime is normalized).
I also believe we are working with a moderating force, not a mediating one but that's besides the point and might be quite a high-level criticism.
There is still much to be discovered in this field. Looking forward to some new discoveries.
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