I have a story to tell that I have to get off my chest.
Two nights ago I was falling asleep and I heard faint screaming. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but I decided to look out my window. Across the street is the parking lot of a different apartment complex. There was a car with a woman on top of the windshield. She was screaming and periodically would punch and kick the windshield of the car.
Then I saw the car accelerate and decelerate around the parking lot in an attempt to get her off, like a bull trying to get a bull rider off. I was appalled. I immediately called the police and gave a quick yell out the window saying “Hey, stop!” or something. She very well could have fell off, been run over, and died. At the end of it my girlfriend also was screaming out the window to tell her to get off and stop. She was able to get the girl to start talking, then the man inside the car started talking. Turns out she cheated on him, the man wanted to break up and get away, and she didn’t want to let their relationship end. When my girlfriend said we were calling the police the woman finally got off the car, the man opened the door, let her in, and they drove away.
The next day I called the local police department because after having hung up with 911 that night, I learned that the man in the car’s name was Alex. I figured that providing that information to the police might be useful. Hopefully there’d only be one male resident named Alex in the apartment complex who is living with a girl and owns a hatchback car.
The lady I talked to sounded annoyed that I called and thought that this was nothing. When I described what happened she immediately blamed the woman, saying that she shouldn’t have been on top of the car kicking and banging in the first place. Of course. But two wrongs don’t make a right. That doesn’t give the man the right to w recklessly endanger her life like that.
Then she got to asking me what my new information was. I said how I learned that the guy’s name is Alex and that maybe they could track him down. She said there’s nothing to track down and to call back if I see anything violent happen. But she also asked me what my thinking is. So I explained that a) what the man did seems illegal and probably worth pursuing criminally, and b) he might be a danger. The lady looked at me like I had two heads. She asked me: did you see a gun? A knife? Punches? Shoving? Anything violent? No, but the guy could have ran her over or seriously injured her. Seems like a dangerous person. Domestic violence seems very plausible. Seems worth following up on.
Here’s where we get into rationality a little bit. After hearing me out, she explained that all of this is just my opinion. I don’t have any “facts”, like seeing a gun or a punch being thrown. To her, “facts” like those would be a sign that the man was dangerous and maybe worth following up on, but here it’s merely my opinion that a guy who tries to whip someone off the roof of his car is dangerous.
I am seeing three (related) errors in her logic. The first is having an arbitrary cutoff for what “counts” as evidence. As explained in Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence, rational evidence is anything that “moves the needle” but in various social institutions they may have arbitrary cutoffs for what “counts” for whatever reasons, like how science often has the cutoff of p < 0.05. It’s possible that there is a good reason why she is drawing the cutoff here. It seems highly unlikely though. But more to the point, she seemed to be saying that because it is merely my opinion, it doesn’t even count as rational evidence. That “I have nothing”. I would have thought that someone working in law enforcement would be better at assessing danger than this.
But this brings me to the second error: belief in belief. I don’t think that she actually would predict this man in the car to be an average threat. I don’t think she would be happy to find herself crossing paths with him in a back alley. Yet she professed as if all of this is merely my opinion which I’m not basing on any “hard facts” and thus there’s no reason to suspect anything of this man.
Third error: fallacy of grey. Even if you want to draw an arbitrary line between opinion and fact, all opinions aren’t created equally. Some shades of grey are darker than others. Some opinions are stronger indicators than others.
It’s sad because there really does seem to be a practical path forward here. Maybe there were cameras that captured it. Maybe there were other witnesses. I’d imagine that there would be. They were screaming pretty loudly, the car was screeching, and there were a lot of other apartments in the vicinity. Most of which were closer than mine. Mine was across the street and my window was closed. And even if you don’t want to prosecute the man for some sort of reckless endangerment it seems worth following up with the woman to see if there is any domestic abuse going on and if she feels safe.
Maybe this just doesn’t relate to me and so I should stop talking about it? Maybe. Or maybe the police officer’s rationality is my business, given that I am a member of the community that she is policing and trying to keep safe. It’s certainly the business of the girl who could have been ran over.
Another sad thought: there is a security patrol that is usually stationed maybe 200 feet away from where this all happened. I couldn’t see if they were out there from my window, but last night I was out for a bike ride, saw a security car stationed in that usual spot. I told him what happened the previous night and asked if he thinks there might have been someone stationed there. He said there probably was because they’re supposed to be out all night, but that they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. They are contracted by some factory nearby and if he said if he left his post for something unrelated to the factory like that that he’d be fired on the spot. These experiences have all shifted my beliefs about just how inflexible and inhumane bureaucracies can be.
Perhaps the police officer simply thinks that your average person will easily do dangerous things like shaking someone off their car without thinking much of it, but will not take a knife to another’s guts. Therefore, the car incident would not mark the man as unusually dangerous.
There is no mathematically canonical way to distinguish between trade and blackmail, between act and omission, between different ways of assigning blame. The world where nobody jumps on cars is as safe as the one where nobody throws people off cars. We decide between them by human intuition, which differs by memetic background.
Perhaps the police officer simply thinks that your average person will easily do dangerous things like shaking someone off their car without thinking much of it, but will not take a knife to another’s guts. Therefore, the car incident would not mark the man as unusually dangerous.
Perhaps. That is something that I personally would disagree with, but respect that it is the place of the officer to make that judgement.
The bigger issue I see is how the officer distinguished between fact an opinion. She called things like a knife or gun “facts” and the car thing merely my opinion. I worry that by drawing hard lines like these, she isn’t giving serious enough consideration to the danger that the guy Alex might pose. Eg. “That’s not hard evidence or facts. Therefore I’m going to dismiss it and not think more about it.”
Great work by you and your girlfriend! It takes courage to intervene in a situation like that, and skill to actually defuse it. Well done.
I don’t agree about what you’re calling the first error. Her job is to take in statements like yours, and output decisions. She could output “send police to ask questions”, or “send a SWAT team now”, or “do nothing”. She chose a decision you don’t agree with, but she had to choose some decision. It’s not like she could update the database with “update your prior to be a little more suspicious of Alexes in hatchbacks”.
I also don’t think it’s correct to call it arbitrary in the same way that the p < 0.05 threshold is arbitrary. I don’t really know how to say this clearly, but it’s like… the p < 0.05 rule is a rule for suspending human thought. Things you want to consider when publishing include: “what’s the false negative cost here? false positive cost? How bad would it be to spread this knowledge even if I’m not yet certain the studied effect is real?”. The rule “p < 0.05 yes or no” is bad because it throws all those questions away. It is arbitrary, like you say. But it doesn’t follow that any questionable decision was made by an arbitrary decision rule. If she thought about the things you said, and decided they didn’t merit sending anyone out to follow up, that isn’t arbitrary! All it takes to not be arbitrary is some thinking and some weighing of the probabilities and costs (and this process can be quick). You did that and came to one decision. She did that and came to another. That difference… seems to me… is a difference of opinion.
I don’t know the actual conversation you had with her, and it sounds like she didn’t do a very good job of justifying her decision to you, and possibly said obviously incorrect things, like “you have literally 0 evidence of any sort”. But I don’t think the step from “I think she was wrong” to “I think her decision rule is arbitrary” is justified. Reading this didn’t cause me to make any negative update on police department bureaucracy. (the security company is a different story, if indeed someone was there just watching!)
Great work by you and your girlfriend! It takes courage to intervene in a situation like that, and skill to actually defuse it. Well done.
Thank you :)
But I don’t think the step from “I think she was wrong” to “I think her decision rule is arbitrary” is justified.
To be clear, I’m not making that step because I think her output was wrong. It’s the way she went about it that made me think that her decision rule was problematic.
She treated things like guns and knives as “fact” and everything else as “opinion”. It sounded to me like because she categorized the car thing as an opinion, she was very quick to dismiss it, rather than pausing to consider how dangerous it actually is, and perhaps ask some follow up questions, perhaps regarding how fast and reckless the driving really was. On the other hand, if she had the mindset that it all counts as Bayesian evidence and her job is to try to judge how strong the evidence is, I think she would have spent more effort thinking about it.
I guess that’s the crux of it to me: giving things appropriate thought and not dismissing them. Thinking in terms of Bayesian evidence rather than fact vs opinion is a means to that end, but I think there are other means to that end. I even think fact vs opinion could be a means to that end, if you actually think carefully about whether the thing should be considered fact or opinion. But here, I don’t think that was happening. It sounded like a snap judgement.
It is possible that hard cutoffs like these are actually for the best. That if you give officers more freedom to make judgements, bad things will happen. However, I’d bet pretty strongly against it. I don’t have any experience in the field so I can’t be too, too confident, but I’d imagine that a 911 operator would be presented with highly, highly varied situations and would need to use a good amount of judgement to do the job. If you give that operator a list of things that “count” as fact/evidence, there are surely going to be things that you forget to include, if only because they are too obscure to imagine, such the situation here with trying to fling someone off the roof of your car like a bull.
Reading this didn’t cause me to make any negative update on police department bureaucracy.
I’m curious how you feel about the more punitive aspect of it. Ie. one reason to go after the guy is if you think he is a danger to society, but another reason is because he did something wrong and wrong things are supposed to be punished, either for punitive reasons or preventative ones. Personally, I updated pretty strongly towards thinking that people often get away with things like this. Previously I would have imagined that they’d come after you for something like this, but now it seems like that usually doesn’t happen, because of a) poor judgement and b) lack of resources.
Yeah, maybe a highly structured algorithm + hard cutoffs for what counts as evidence is the way to go. I’d bet pretty confidently against it, but not super confidently because I don’t have any experience in that domain.
I have a story to tell that I have to get off my chest.
Two nights ago I was falling asleep and I heard faint screaming. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but I decided to look out my window. Across the street is the parking lot of a different apartment complex. There was a car with a woman on top of the windshield. She was screaming and periodically would punch and kick the windshield of the car.
Then I saw the car accelerate and decelerate around the parking lot in an attempt to get her off, like a bull trying to get a bull rider off. I was appalled. I immediately called the police and gave a quick yell out the window saying “Hey, stop!” or something. She very well could have fell off, been run over, and died. At the end of it my girlfriend also was screaming out the window to tell her to get off and stop. She was able to get the girl to start talking, then the man inside the car started talking. Turns out she cheated on him, the man wanted to break up and get away, and she didn’t want to let their relationship end. When my girlfriend said we were calling the police the woman finally got off the car, the man opened the door, let her in, and they drove away.
The next day I called the local police department because after having hung up with 911 that night, I learned that the man in the car’s name was Alex. I figured that providing that information to the police might be useful. Hopefully there’d only be one male resident named Alex in the apartment complex who is living with a girl and owns a hatchback car.
The lady I talked to sounded annoyed that I called and thought that this was nothing. When I described what happened she immediately blamed the woman, saying that she shouldn’t have been on top of the car kicking and banging in the first place. Of course. But two wrongs don’t make a right. That doesn’t give the man the right to w recklessly endanger her life like that.
Then she got to asking me what my new information was. I said how I learned that the guy’s name is Alex and that maybe they could track him down. She said there’s nothing to track down and to call back if I see anything violent happen. But she also asked me what my thinking is. So I explained that a) what the man did seems illegal and probably worth pursuing criminally, and b) he might be a danger. The lady looked at me like I had two heads. She asked me: did you see a gun? A knife? Punches? Shoving? Anything violent? No, but the guy could have ran her over or seriously injured her. Seems like a dangerous person. Domestic violence seems very plausible. Seems worth following up on.
Here’s where we get into rationality a little bit. After hearing me out, she explained that all of this is just my opinion. I don’t have any “facts”, like seeing a gun or a punch being thrown. To her, “facts” like those would be a sign that the man was dangerous and maybe worth following up on, but here it’s merely my opinion that a guy who tries to whip someone off the roof of his car is dangerous.
I am seeing three (related) errors in her logic. The first is having an arbitrary cutoff for what “counts” as evidence. As explained in Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence, rational evidence is anything that “moves the needle” but in various social institutions they may have arbitrary cutoffs for what “counts” for whatever reasons, like how science often has the cutoff of p < 0.05. It’s possible that there is a good reason why she is drawing the cutoff here. It seems highly unlikely though. But more to the point, she seemed to be saying that because it is merely my opinion, it doesn’t even count as rational evidence. That “I have nothing”. I would have thought that someone working in law enforcement would be better at assessing danger than this.
But this brings me to the second error: belief in belief. I don’t think that she actually would predict this man in the car to be an average threat. I don’t think she would be happy to find herself crossing paths with him in a back alley. Yet she professed as if all of this is merely my opinion which I’m not basing on any “hard facts” and thus there’s no reason to suspect anything of this man.
Third error: fallacy of grey. Even if you want to draw an arbitrary line between opinion and fact, all opinions aren’t created equally. Some shades of grey are darker than others. Some opinions are stronger indicators than others.
It’s sad because there really does seem to be a practical path forward here. Maybe there were cameras that captured it. Maybe there were other witnesses. I’d imagine that there would be. They were screaming pretty loudly, the car was screeching, and there were a lot of other apartments in the vicinity. Most of which were closer than mine. Mine was across the street and my window was closed. And even if you don’t want to prosecute the man for some sort of reckless endangerment it seems worth following up with the woman to see if there is any domestic abuse going on and if she feels safe.
Maybe this just doesn’t relate to me and so I should stop talking about it? Maybe. Or maybe the police officer’s rationality is my business, given that I am a member of the community that she is policing and trying to keep safe. It’s certainly the business of the girl who could have been ran over.
Another sad thought: there is a security patrol that is usually stationed maybe 200 feet away from where this all happened. I couldn’t see if they were out there from my window, but last night I was out for a bike ride, saw a security car stationed in that usual spot. I told him what happened the previous night and asked if he thinks there might have been someone stationed there. He said there probably was because they’re supposed to be out all night, but that they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. They are contracted by some factory nearby and if he said if he left his post for something unrelated to the factory like that that he’d be fired on the spot. These experiences have all shifted my beliefs about just how inflexible and inhumane bureaucracies can be.
Perhaps the police officer simply thinks that your average person will easily do dangerous things like shaking someone off their car without thinking much of it, but will not take a knife to another’s guts. Therefore, the car incident would not mark the man as unusually dangerous.
There is no mathematically canonical way to distinguish between trade and blackmail, between act and omission, between different ways of assigning blame. The world where nobody jumps on cars is as safe as the one where nobody throws people off cars. We decide between them by human intuition, which differs by memetic background.
Perhaps. That is something that I personally would disagree with, but respect that it is the place of the officer to make that judgement.
The bigger issue I see is how the officer distinguished between fact an opinion. She called things like a knife or gun “facts” and the car thing merely my opinion. I worry that by drawing hard lines like these, she isn’t giving serious enough consideration to the danger that the guy Alex might pose. Eg. “That’s not hard evidence or facts. Therefore I’m going to dismiss it and not think more about it.”
Great work by you and your girlfriend! It takes courage to intervene in a situation like that, and skill to actually defuse it. Well done.
I don’t agree about what you’re calling the first error. Her job is to take in statements like yours, and output decisions. She could output “send police to ask questions”, or “send a SWAT team now”, or “do nothing”. She chose a decision you don’t agree with, but she had to choose some decision. It’s not like she could update the database with “update your prior to be a little more suspicious of Alexes in hatchbacks”.
I also don’t think it’s correct to call it arbitrary in the same way that the p < 0.05 threshold is arbitrary. I don’t really know how to say this clearly, but it’s like… the p < 0.05 rule is a rule for suspending human thought. Things you want to consider when publishing include: “what’s the false negative cost here? false positive cost? How bad would it be to spread this knowledge even if I’m not yet certain the studied effect is real?”. The rule “p < 0.05 yes or no” is bad because it throws all those questions away. It is arbitrary, like you say. But it doesn’t follow that any questionable decision was made by an arbitrary decision rule. If she thought about the things you said, and decided they didn’t merit sending anyone out to follow up, that isn’t arbitrary! All it takes to not be arbitrary is some thinking and some weighing of the probabilities and costs (and this process can be quick). You did that and came to one decision. She did that and came to another. That difference… seems to me… is a difference of opinion.
I don’t know the actual conversation you had with her, and it sounds like she didn’t do a very good job of justifying her decision to you, and possibly said obviously incorrect things, like “you have literally 0 evidence of any sort”. But I don’t think the step from “I think she was wrong” to “I think her decision rule is arbitrary” is justified. Reading this didn’t cause me to make any negative update on police department bureaucracy. (the security company is a different story, if indeed someone was there just watching!)
Thank you :)
To be clear, I’m not making that step because I think her output was wrong. It’s the way she went about it that made me think that her decision rule was problematic.
She treated things like guns and knives as “fact” and everything else as “opinion”. It sounded to me like because she categorized the car thing as an opinion, she was very quick to dismiss it, rather than pausing to consider how dangerous it actually is, and perhaps ask some follow up questions, perhaps regarding how fast and reckless the driving really was. On the other hand, if she had the mindset that it all counts as Bayesian evidence and her job is to try to judge how strong the evidence is, I think she would have spent more effort thinking about it.
I guess that’s the crux of it to me: giving things appropriate thought and not dismissing them. Thinking in terms of Bayesian evidence rather than fact vs opinion is a means to that end, but I think there are other means to that end. I even think fact vs opinion could be a means to that end, if you actually think carefully about whether the thing should be considered fact or opinion. But here, I don’t think that was happening. It sounded like a snap judgement.
It is possible that hard cutoffs like these are actually for the best. That if you give officers more freedom to make judgements, bad things will happen. However, I’d bet pretty strongly against it. I don’t have any experience in the field so I can’t be too, too confident, but I’d imagine that a 911 operator would be presented with highly, highly varied situations and would need to use a good amount of judgement to do the job. If you give that operator a list of things that “count” as fact/evidence, there are surely going to be things that you forget to include, if only because they are too obscure to imagine, such the situation here with trying to fling someone off the roof of your car like a bull.
I’m curious how you feel about the more punitive aspect of it. Ie. one reason to go after the guy is if you think he is a danger to society, but another reason is because he did something wrong and wrong things are supposed to be punished, either for punitive reasons or preventative ones. Personally, I updated pretty strongly towards thinking that people often get away with things like this. Previously I would have imagined that they’d come after you for something like this, but now it seems like that usually doesn’t happen, because of a) poor judgement and b) lack of resources.
The call taker may be required to follow an algorithm (e.g. https://prioritydispatch.net/resource-library/). This is not to discount all your points; everything you wrote is likely true too.
Finally, it’s possible that the high arbitrary cutoff for evidence is a reflection of the agency’s priorities and resources.
Yeah, maybe a highly structured algorithm + hard cutoffs for what counts as evidence is the way to go. I’d bet pretty confidently against it, but not super confidently because I don’t have any experience in that domain.