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pecuniumBruce Schneier points to article in the New Yorker about profiling, and why mechanistic methods (say, grabbing all young Arab males) are faulty at root (if you want I can point to some other stuff about this like, The Carnival Booth).
I also like it because it ties into something I ranted about last year, when the City of Denver lost its mind. One of the counter-examples, of profiling giving bad results, used in the article is Pit Bulls. He has a nice take-down of the problems with perception and fact on the issues.
An excerpt:
Before Kelly became the New York police commissioner, he served as the head of the U.S. Customs Service, and while he was there he overhauled the criteria that border-control officers use to identify and search suspected smugglers. There had been a list of forty-three suspicious traits. He replaced it with a list of six broad criteria. Is there something suspicious about their physical appearance? Are they nervous? Is there specific intelligence targeting this person? Does the drug-sniffing dog raise an alarm? Is there something amiss in their paperwork or explanations? Has contraband been found that implicates this person?
You’ll find nothing here about race or gender or ethnicity, and nothing here about expensive jewelry or deplaning at the middle or the end, or walking briskly or walking aimlessly. Kelly removed all the unstable generalizations, forcing customs officers to make generalizations about things that don’t change from one day or one month to the next. Some percentage of smugglers will always be nervous, will always get their story wrong, and will always be caught by the dogs. That’s why those kinds of inferences are more reliable than the ones based on whether smugglers are white or black, or carry one bag or two. After Kelly’s reforms, the number of searches conducted by the Customs Service dropped by about seventy-five per cent, but the number of successful seizures improved by twenty-five per cent....
There is no shortage of more stable generalizations about dangerous dogs, though. A 1991 study in Denver, for example, compared a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with a history of biting people with a random sample of a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with no history of biting. The breeds were scattered: German shepherds, Akitas, and Chow Chows were among those most heavily represented. (There were no pit bulls among the biting dogs in the study, because Denver banned pit bulls in 1989.) But a number of other, more stable factors stand out. The biters were 6.2 times as likely to be male than female, and 2.6 times as likely to be intact than neutered. The Denver study also found that biters were 2.8 times as likely to be chained as unchained. “About twenty per cent of the dogs involved in fatalities were chained at the time, and had a history of long-term chaining,” Lockwood said. “Now, are they chained because they are aggressive or aggressive because they are chained? It’s a bit of both. These are animals that have not had an opportunity to become socialized to people. They don’t necessarily even know that children are small human beings. They tend to see them as prey.”
In many cases, vicious dogs are hungry or in need of medical attention. Often, the dogs had a history of aggressive incidents, and, overwhelmingly, dog-bite victims were children (particularly small boys) who were physically vulnerable to attack and may also have unwittingly done things to provoke the dog, like teasing it, or bothering it while it was eating. The strongest connection of all, though, is between the trait of dog viciousness and certain kinds of dog owners. In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting. The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog. The junk-yard German shepherd—which looks as if it would rip your throat out—and the German-shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions.
It's a really well done job of using two, topical, ilustrations, to make a point about how we asses both risk, and it's amelioration.
Go read it.
I also like it because it ties into something I ranted about last year, when the City of Denver lost its mind. One of the counter-examples, of profiling giving bad results, used in the article is Pit Bulls. He has a nice take-down of the problems with perception and fact on the issues.
An excerpt:
Before Kelly became the New York police commissioner, he served as the head of the U.S. Customs Service, and while he was there he overhauled the criteria that border-control officers use to identify and search suspected smugglers. There had been a list of forty-three suspicious traits. He replaced it with a list of six broad criteria. Is there something suspicious about their physical appearance? Are they nervous? Is there specific intelligence targeting this person? Does the drug-sniffing dog raise an alarm? Is there something amiss in their paperwork or explanations? Has contraband been found that implicates this person?
You’ll find nothing here about race or gender or ethnicity, and nothing here about expensive jewelry or deplaning at the middle or the end, or walking briskly or walking aimlessly. Kelly removed all the unstable generalizations, forcing customs officers to make generalizations about things that don’t change from one day or one month to the next. Some percentage of smugglers will always be nervous, will always get their story wrong, and will always be caught by the dogs. That’s why those kinds of inferences are more reliable than the ones based on whether smugglers are white or black, or carry one bag or two. After Kelly’s reforms, the number of searches conducted by the Customs Service dropped by about seventy-five per cent, but the number of successful seizures improved by twenty-five per cent....
There is no shortage of more stable generalizations about dangerous dogs, though. A 1991 study in Denver, for example, compared a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with a history of biting people with a random sample of a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with no history of biting. The breeds were scattered: German shepherds, Akitas, and Chow Chows were among those most heavily represented. (There were no pit bulls among the biting dogs in the study, because Denver banned pit bulls in 1989.) But a number of other, more stable factors stand out. The biters were 6.2 times as likely to be male than female, and 2.6 times as likely to be intact than neutered. The Denver study also found that biters were 2.8 times as likely to be chained as unchained. “About twenty per cent of the dogs involved in fatalities were chained at the time, and had a history of long-term chaining,” Lockwood said. “Now, are they chained because they are aggressive or aggressive because they are chained? It’s a bit of both. These are animals that have not had an opportunity to become socialized to people. They don’t necessarily even know that children are small human beings. They tend to see them as prey.”
In many cases, vicious dogs are hungry or in need of medical attention. Often, the dogs had a history of aggressive incidents, and, overwhelmingly, dog-bite victims were children (particularly small boys) who were physically vulnerable to attack and may also have unwittingly done things to provoke the dog, like teasing it, or bothering it while it was eating. The strongest connection of all, though, is between the trait of dog viciousness and certain kinds of dog owners. In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting. The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog. The junk-yard German shepherd—which looks as if it would rip your throat out—and the German-shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions.
It's a really well done job of using two, topical, ilustrations, to make a point about how we asses both risk, and it's amelioration.
Go read it.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 01:12 pm (UTC)I have a Rottie I bought after seeing several that had been raised around children. Folks across the street have one, their kids ride it. Whe the dog is done, he lays down and refuses to move. The old letter carrier called her his angel and petted her over the fence every day. The bug man plays with her and goes in the back yard with her there without me. She likes the people who show up here on a regular basis and don't harm anything. She saved me from a mugging at a gas pump by sticking her head out the truck window and headbutting my would-be assailant and growling a lot. He left before she got around to biting him. A smaller dog attacked her once. She knocked him down and pinned him with a paw until he quit moving. She did absolutely no damage to him whatsoever. When he stopped moving, I put a leash on him and his owner was allowed to drag him away. She was on a leash the whole time.
OTOH, I have an 18 lb. Jack Russell Terrier who has attacked 2 Labs and a Rottie. One of the Labs fought back, but never actually harmed him. The other two dogs just batted him away several times until I could capture him. He loves people, and I can let strange children pet both dogs under my supervision. But I can't get the hate of other dogs out of that JRT. Of the 2, he's more dangerous. Neither dog is dangerous to humans, but he is dangerous to other dogs. I expect his end to come at the jaws of a dog he attacks, or that the county will take him. He's an escape artist and can jump straight up 4.5 feet to take treats out of my hand, which is not uncommon for the breed.
Islam is one of the faster growing religions. I have met Muslims of every race and color.
I have to police myself not to make too many snide remarks about damage caused by members of the religion of peace.
I have to keep reminding myself that most of them are just minding their own business and not hurting anyone.
After all, I know so many peaceful Rotties and mean little dogs that I know generalizations are useless.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 01:47 pm (UTC)