Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Quickies: A Few Gedankenexperiments

     Hold on tight, Gentle Reader: we’re about to go adventuring. Linda’s citation below has charged my capacitors, and I feel a great need to discharge them. So here we go.

     First: Imagine that, by techniques of investigation and correlation that are effectively beyond reproach, a government were to determine that all the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed within a single, well defined sector. ALL the crime, not just most of it. Where would that government be best advised to send its police assets? Would there be any rationale for spreading those assets evenly over its entire jurisdiction?

     Second: Imagine that by the irreproachable techniques mentioned above, the government were to determine that all the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed between certain hours: say, between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. How would that government be best advised to schedule its police assets? Would there be any rationale for distributing those assets uniformly around the clock?

     Third and most upsetting: Imagine that by the irreproachable techniques mentioned above, the government were to determine that all the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed by persons of a particular race or religion. How would that government be best advised to allocate its investigative assets? Would there be any rationale for investigating persons of all races / religions?

     Go ahead: call me whatever names you have in mind. Get it out of your system. They really do slide right off my back. But the challenge is yours to answer those questions. And I have one more:

     Fourth: Imagine that by the irreproachable techniques mentioned above, the government were to determine that a majority percentage — i.e., more than 50% — of the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed within a single sector / between certain hours / by a particular race or religion. How would that affect your answers to the challenges above? Would your answers change if the percentage was 60%? 70%? 80%? 90%?

     I await your thoughts.

4 comments:

Arthur said...

"Imagine that by the irreproachable techniques mentioned above, the government"

Honestly I'm having a problem extending credulity to the premise: government + irreproachable.

I assume a modern government will just blame whitey no matter what. And gulag or mass grave for anyone asking questions on methodology or anything else.

NITZAKHON said...

Not that I would recommend proactive incarcerations, but... something like 50% of the murders in this country are committed by young black men.

Jess said...

From personal observation, most crime can be attributed to one section of a community, and the criminals not only prey on the other citizens, they branch out to surrounding areas to commit crimes. The only way to stop such things is to isolate that section, treat everyone in that area as a criminal, and allow them to prey on each other. That would violate rights demanded by the Constitution, and remove the liberty of anyone in that area.

Local police forces avoid such areas due to the lack of cooperation of the citizens in this area. Even terrible violent crimes have no witnesses, even if it's obvious there were more than one. When a patrol is called into these areas, they usually have plenty of backup, and their efforts are more of cleaning up the mess, and hurrying back to safer locations.

Manu said...

The usual Leftist response is to blame racism/poverty/some other such thing. So they do want to direct unequal attention to particular demographic groups as a result of this data... it's just that their idea of unequal attention is to give the group in question free money/free stuff.

It's like paying the Danegeld, really.

The question is, did the Danegeld ever get rid of the Dane?