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2/ I'm not going to defend cops or prosecutors who do this. I am going to talk about an underlying problem, though, and point out how there are no good solutions.
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3/ Poor people commit violence at a staggering rate, compared to wealthy people. Violence is the first resort of poor impulse control, high time preference, low IQ people. ...and poor impulse control, high time preference, and low IQ --> poverty.
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4/ So, yes, poor people commit robberies, murders, rapes, assault, domestic violence, and child abuse at rates far higher than do upper middle class, etc. people. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137 …
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5/ So if there's a base rate of X accidents per thousand (constant across all demographics) and Y rate of violence to children in middle class households, and Z rate in poor households, it might very well be the case that 10% of middle class kids coming to hospitals are abused
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6/ and 80% of poor kids coming to the hospital are abused. (or 1% and 99%, or 49.1% and 49.2% ; I don't have hard data here) But either way, based on data we have, we SHOULD expect that a higher percentage of poor kids arriving at hospitals w broken bones are there bc abuse
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7/ So now we've got a classic Type I / Type II or, in my preferred terminology, false negative / false positive problem One algorithm you could use is "define heuristic H, and apply it to all kids". E.g. "if the situation is 5+ points on a scale of dubious evidence, call cops"
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8/ But heuristic H is likely going to UNDER protect poor kids and OVER protect middle class kids. So a better algorithm is to use heuristic H1 for poor families and H2 for middle class families. I mean "better" here if we want to minimize child abuse and false allegations.
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9/ So...THAT SUCKS. We've just talked our way into explaining why, if we want to maximize justice, we HAVE to discriminate by family income....which in turn means, effectively, by race. whew lads! anyway, tweets like this are why I'll never be elected to office.
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10/ also, all the OTHER tweets
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