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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Replying to @MorlockP
I'd argue we should look each case on the evidence, and leave out assumptions based on the parents' social class. Such assumptions were why medical conditions were mistaken for evidence of shaking (which happened often), or why clear accidents were charged as criminal neglect.
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Replying to @radleybalko
Yes! Agreed! But we can't just (at least in our current system) posit "a very good and fair minded person is available at each and every hospital"...because obviously we don't have that. We're dealing with cops and social workers (neither of which I'm a fan of) so the best >
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Replying to @MorlockP @radleybalko
we can do is to create some process (e.g. the way we have processes that cops must follow re reading of rights, proper use of force, etc.) and then make the people follow it. And even then "make" is wishful thinking, so we need to think about systems AROUND the systems, like >>
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Replying to @MorlockP @radleybalko
we do with police (e.g. body cams, defense lawyer access to those body cam footage, etc. etc. etc.) My point is neither "this is insolvable and lol poor people, suck it", nor "this is fine, carry on!" My point is "building systems is HARD af"
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Replying to @MorlockP @radleybalko
(and, to be clear, my point is ABSOLUTELY not "cops and social workers are great people, doing their best". I've had terrible interactions with both, and tend to think the worst of them). the problem, tho, w "OMG, there's racism here, this is terrible, let's adjust ONE KNOB" >
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is that often we are on an "efficient frontier" that trades off between problem X and problem Y, and merely adjust that one knob slides us back and forth moving to a different better isocline is HARD WORK
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Replying to @MorlockP @radleybalko
ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs Retweeted Radley Balko
we are in complete agreementhttps://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1166716969619472389 …
ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs added,
0 replies 0 retweets 1 likeThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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