beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2015-04-13 03:29 pm
beccaelizabeth) wrote2015-04-13 03:29 pm
Entry tags:
The Epic Inefficiency of Secret Police
Okay, so, I’ve been meaning to type this up for a while. I got down my sociology textbook for this. It’s two inches thick and a foot tall and I think removing it has done terrible things to the structural integrity of the book piles so it is possible some accident investigator will find this as the last thing I typed before bookalanche took me. Plus I’d forgotten what an absolute pigging pain it is to take notes out of that thing, I’d need to clear the full size desk to put it down next to a keyboard and no, that’s not happening any time soon. And the book itself is like a dozen years old? Haralambos and Holborn 6th edition. Huh, Amazon remembers things forever, I apparently purchased mine on 9th December 2005. They’re up to 8th edition in 2013. And the bit of research I wanted to dig out a cite for is from 1986, so, you know, classic.
Also I’m going to apply it all to Torchwood and S.H.I.E.L.D. , which is sort of far from the original intention.
The thing I was looking for: Losing the Fight against Crime (1986) Richard Kinsey, John Lea and Jock Young, Blackwell, Oxford, p.42 “The vicious circle of the collapse of consensus policing”.
As it turns out, not something I can pry out of google. So, y’all will have to imagine the little diagram:
Economic decay, deprivation, racial discrimination etc -> Rising level of street crime -> drift towards ‘military’ policing’ -> Alienation of the community -> Reduced flow of information to police -> collapse of consensus policing -> more military policing, rinse and repeat… er, I mean the arrows go around in a little feedback loop around there.
The page in H&H … p360… it’s in the chapter on Crime and Deviance and presents one of a number of different approaches to understanding crime. It’s the one that stuck in my mind. The idea is, they researched how police solve stuff, and it turns out 90% of the time they hear about crimes from the public telling them. Over 90%. Police seriously rely on information from the public. And it’s not just for the initial crime reports, they also mostly solve crimes by hearing stuff from the public. But the public, especially in certain minority communities, do not so much like the police. And when they did the research it was getting worse. Increasing numbers of people believed the police plant evidence and make shit up and do violence, and so they weren’t going to tell them shit. Er, H&H put it more precisely but it’s in tiny type and I can’t copy it without lifting the big book around, sorry. So what the police were dealing with was this vicious cycle where 90% of their job depends on people who were increasingly unwilling to provide that 90%. So instead they had to try and rely on other methods, including the ever popular stop and search, and increasing surveillance through various means.
Sounding familiar, yes?
So then there were increased numbers of interactions where the police were just stopping random people, and people’s idea of what the police do started to shift from ‘protect us’ to ‘mess us around’, and so they didn’t feel chatty. So again, their 90%? Shrinking. The police? Push people around more to compensate. And so it loops around and around, and all the while the police are getting less effective and more aggressive. Vicious circle.
“As trust breaks down between the police and some sections of the public, the flow of information from the victims of crime dries up”
Police resort to stop and search and surveillance
“Even those who are not directly involved with the police come to see police officers as part of an alien force intent upon criminalizing local residents almost regardless of their guilt”
Because there’s a whole big difference between an interaction where you start with a problem, take it to the police, and end with less problem, and one where you start with no problem, the police roll up, and your day is messed up.
Notice, the police are always trying to do their job. They know crime is happening, their job is to stop crime happening, they’re out there looking for criminals. And they’re probably pissed that people aren’t talking to them, because don’t they want criminals to get arrested? That seems kind of suspicious, right? So they’re thinking people are either criminals or cooperating with criminals, and they’re feeling pretty much under siege, and they know the crime rate is getting worse so they’re trying harder, and it’s working worse and worse.
Because over 90% of what the police do is listen when someone says a crime happened and get told who did it. And if people aren’t talking, then police are trying to get along on that leftover 10%. Not so worky.
So that research, it’s about ordinary police in the real world. But my brain is mostly full of unreal worlds, like Torchwood and SHIELD work in. They’re top secret organisations dedicated to protecting the world from things we’re not even cleared to know even happen, nobody is supposed to know they or the threats they combat exist… so how do they even hear about them in the first place?
Like, in the real world, bad stuff happens, someone calls 999 or 911, the phone place tells the police place, the relevant authorities hear about the bad stuff, they send someone to deal with it.
999 doesn’t know it needs to call Torchwood. Or SHIELD. So how does the information get to them?
If the answer is surveillance, well, okay, but who is watching what and how are they supposed to keep up with it all? There’s half a dozen people watching all of Cardiff, or there’s SHIELD watching the whole world. When they’ve got a clear image of a suspect SHIELD can apparently follow them through any camera anywhere, but by the time they’ve got a clear image of a suspect, a whole hell of a lot of police work is all done and dusted. Like, they know they need to fight Loki because he turned up and hit them, but most threats are a tad bit more subtle. How do they find out about them?
Their secrecy means they’ve given up on the toolset worth 90% of regular police work.
And then there’s the adversarial relationship they have with the public. “Bloody Torchwood” is a pretty mild response to an agency that can nick your stuff and indeed nick you with no trial and no possibility of appeal. SHIELD have that same level of scary black hole. Anything with a similar level of secrecy would have, because stuff and information and people would go in but you wouldn’t be cleared to hear about it after that, so nothing would get out.
So then even if people knew they could tell SHIELD, or Torchwood, or the super secret police-like entity of the day, would they? For all they know it’s a death sentence. People with enough of a social conscience to want to help out the authorities probably care quite a lot what happens to the people they report.
And then there’s the perception of faking evidence and accusations. Like, if stop and search pisses people off cause they reckon the police brought the evidence, yet they know that drugs etc exist in the real world, what the hell would they think about the kind of threats the secret agencies counter? They’re watching lives get demolished, life work stolen, people vanished, for what? Threats that purely don’t exist? I mean, according to the evidence that remains in the public eye, the kind of accusations Torchwood or SHIELD would level at people are just not plausible. And sure, the agents can say they’ve seen enough to be certain, but they’re asking the people without clearance to believe extraordinary claims without extraordinary or even ordinary evidence, just purely to take it on authority. Seriously, nobody should believe that shit, authority makes shit up and everyone knows it, authority will wave its power around and tell you the reasons and expect them to fly however thin they seem, this they know even without aliens being involved.
So again, even if people knew how to call them, even if they didn’t have pretty good reason to believe the scale of consequences would be through the roof, they’ve got no reason to believe they’re on the level anyway.
I know why the TV shows are set up this way: it’s just to make it fit in the cracks around the real world. The idea that this sort of thing can thrive just out the corner of your eye is an appealing one. You don’t have to sci fi your world, you just say everything is super rare and nothing has consequences cause it goes in the Indiana Jones warehouse. Cool, as far as it goes. And with the X-files I even found it plausible. … I was sort of tin hat about the X files, it wasn’t cool in my brain at the time, because as soon as you start thinking “but what if, aliens?” then you are left at three in the morning thinking “but what if aliens”. But still, it’s a way of telling stories in the cracks without worldbuilding. It’s just it’s a way that epic falls apart once you’re in Doctor Who or Marvel universes and everyone has seen shit.
I mean, once people know that aliens fall out of the sky, they’re going to be sold on the idea of police specific to deal with aliens falling out of the sky. It’s going to be a pretty good thing if there’s people who know what they’re doing. The public could be all reassured about it. It’s just, that doesn’t work if they act like Torchwood or movie SHIELD does. Because those are not reassuring agencies. Those are in fact acting like the bad guys. They just got that way because they know there are threats out there but they’ve left themselves less than 10% of the tools to find them, and it’s scaring hell out of them, so they crack down harder. Vicious circle.
This is why openness and accountability actually work better, and the more secrets you pile up the less effective people can be.
Well, one why. Another is to do with getting used to nonsensical orders, relying on authority to have more data than you do, because that breaks feedback mechanisms. But that's a whole other bit of writing.
Also I’m going to apply it all to Torchwood and S.H.I.E.L.D. , which is sort of far from the original intention.
The thing I was looking for: Losing the Fight against Crime (1986) Richard Kinsey, John Lea and Jock Young, Blackwell, Oxford, p.42 “The vicious circle of the collapse of consensus policing”.
As it turns out, not something I can pry out of google. So, y’all will have to imagine the little diagram:
Economic decay, deprivation, racial discrimination etc -> Rising level of street crime -> drift towards ‘military’ policing’ -> Alienation of the community -> Reduced flow of information to police -> collapse of consensus policing -> more military policing, rinse and repeat… er, I mean the arrows go around in a little feedback loop around there.
The page in H&H … p360… it’s in the chapter on Crime and Deviance and presents one of a number of different approaches to understanding crime. It’s the one that stuck in my mind. The idea is, they researched how police solve stuff, and it turns out 90% of the time they hear about crimes from the public telling them. Over 90%. Police seriously rely on information from the public. And it’s not just for the initial crime reports, they also mostly solve crimes by hearing stuff from the public. But the public, especially in certain minority communities, do not so much like the police. And when they did the research it was getting worse. Increasing numbers of people believed the police plant evidence and make shit up and do violence, and so they weren’t going to tell them shit. Er, H&H put it more precisely but it’s in tiny type and I can’t copy it without lifting the big book around, sorry. So what the police were dealing with was this vicious cycle where 90% of their job depends on people who were increasingly unwilling to provide that 90%. So instead they had to try and rely on other methods, including the ever popular stop and search, and increasing surveillance through various means.
Sounding familiar, yes?
So then there were increased numbers of interactions where the police were just stopping random people, and people’s idea of what the police do started to shift from ‘protect us’ to ‘mess us around’, and so they didn’t feel chatty. So again, their 90%? Shrinking. The police? Push people around more to compensate. And so it loops around and around, and all the while the police are getting less effective and more aggressive. Vicious circle.
“As trust breaks down between the police and some sections of the public, the flow of information from the victims of crime dries up”
Police resort to stop and search and surveillance
“Even those who are not directly involved with the police come to see police officers as part of an alien force intent upon criminalizing local residents almost regardless of their guilt”
Because there’s a whole big difference between an interaction where you start with a problem, take it to the police, and end with less problem, and one where you start with no problem, the police roll up, and your day is messed up.
Notice, the police are always trying to do their job. They know crime is happening, their job is to stop crime happening, they’re out there looking for criminals. And they’re probably pissed that people aren’t talking to them, because don’t they want criminals to get arrested? That seems kind of suspicious, right? So they’re thinking people are either criminals or cooperating with criminals, and they’re feeling pretty much under siege, and they know the crime rate is getting worse so they’re trying harder, and it’s working worse and worse.
Because over 90% of what the police do is listen when someone says a crime happened and get told who did it. And if people aren’t talking, then police are trying to get along on that leftover 10%. Not so worky.
So that research, it’s about ordinary police in the real world. But my brain is mostly full of unreal worlds, like Torchwood and SHIELD work in. They’re top secret organisations dedicated to protecting the world from things we’re not even cleared to know even happen, nobody is supposed to know they or the threats they combat exist… so how do they even hear about them in the first place?
Like, in the real world, bad stuff happens, someone calls 999 or 911, the phone place tells the police place, the relevant authorities hear about the bad stuff, they send someone to deal with it.
999 doesn’t know it needs to call Torchwood. Or SHIELD. So how does the information get to them?
If the answer is surveillance, well, okay, but who is watching what and how are they supposed to keep up with it all? There’s half a dozen people watching all of Cardiff, or there’s SHIELD watching the whole world. When they’ve got a clear image of a suspect SHIELD can apparently follow them through any camera anywhere, but by the time they’ve got a clear image of a suspect, a whole hell of a lot of police work is all done and dusted. Like, they know they need to fight Loki because he turned up and hit them, but most threats are a tad bit more subtle. How do they find out about them?
Their secrecy means they’ve given up on the toolset worth 90% of regular police work.
And then there’s the adversarial relationship they have with the public. “Bloody Torchwood” is a pretty mild response to an agency that can nick your stuff and indeed nick you with no trial and no possibility of appeal. SHIELD have that same level of scary black hole. Anything with a similar level of secrecy would have, because stuff and information and people would go in but you wouldn’t be cleared to hear about it after that, so nothing would get out.
So then even if people knew they could tell SHIELD, or Torchwood, or the super secret police-like entity of the day, would they? For all they know it’s a death sentence. People with enough of a social conscience to want to help out the authorities probably care quite a lot what happens to the people they report.
And then there’s the perception of faking evidence and accusations. Like, if stop and search pisses people off cause they reckon the police brought the evidence, yet they know that drugs etc exist in the real world, what the hell would they think about the kind of threats the secret agencies counter? They’re watching lives get demolished, life work stolen, people vanished, for what? Threats that purely don’t exist? I mean, according to the evidence that remains in the public eye, the kind of accusations Torchwood or SHIELD would level at people are just not plausible. And sure, the agents can say they’ve seen enough to be certain, but they’re asking the people without clearance to believe extraordinary claims without extraordinary or even ordinary evidence, just purely to take it on authority. Seriously, nobody should believe that shit, authority makes shit up and everyone knows it, authority will wave its power around and tell you the reasons and expect them to fly however thin they seem, this they know even without aliens being involved.
So again, even if people knew how to call them, even if they didn’t have pretty good reason to believe the scale of consequences would be through the roof, they’ve got no reason to believe they’re on the level anyway.
I know why the TV shows are set up this way: it’s just to make it fit in the cracks around the real world. The idea that this sort of thing can thrive just out the corner of your eye is an appealing one. You don’t have to sci fi your world, you just say everything is super rare and nothing has consequences cause it goes in the Indiana Jones warehouse. Cool, as far as it goes. And with the X-files I even found it plausible. … I was sort of tin hat about the X files, it wasn’t cool in my brain at the time, because as soon as you start thinking “but what if, aliens?” then you are left at three in the morning thinking “but what if aliens”. But still, it’s a way of telling stories in the cracks without worldbuilding. It’s just it’s a way that epic falls apart once you’re in Doctor Who or Marvel universes and everyone has seen shit.
I mean, once people know that aliens fall out of the sky, they’re going to be sold on the idea of police specific to deal with aliens falling out of the sky. It’s going to be a pretty good thing if there’s people who know what they’re doing. The public could be all reassured about it. It’s just, that doesn’t work if they act like Torchwood or movie SHIELD does. Because those are not reassuring agencies. Those are in fact acting like the bad guys. They just got that way because they know there are threats out there but they’ve left themselves less than 10% of the tools to find them, and it’s scaring hell out of them, so they crack down harder. Vicious circle.
This is why openness and accountability actually work better, and the more secrets you pile up the less effective people can be.
Well, one why. Another is to do with getting used to nonsensical orders, relying on authority to have more data than you do, because that breaks feedback mechanisms. But that's a whole other bit of writing.
no subject
Do you have a sense of whether ubiquitous surveillance technology has in any way changed that 90% ratio since 1986?
no subject
does sound plausible, but *big shrug*
no subject
no subject