Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Abducted!
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:32:22 -0700
________________________________________ From: Benjamin Kuipers [kuipers () cs utexas edu] Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 6:50 PM To: David Farber Cc: ip; Bob Frankston; Benjamin Kuipers Subject: Re: [IP] Abducted! The statistical, utilitarian approach to reducing casualties is useful, but it misses an important distinction. Compared to the relatively rare stranger-abduction, you can save more children's lives by focusing your efforts on bicycle helmets. And perhaps even more by prohibiting bicycle riding altogether! But there is a good deal of value to children in being able to take a certain degree of risk that is mostly under their control. (This is not an argument against bicycle helmets. It's in favor of moderate risk and learning from moderate mistakes.) There is also great social value in establishing that genuine evil (like strangers abducting children) will be hunted down and stopped, even at great cost and even when it is very rare. The goal should be for children to know, justifiably, that most people around them will protect them when necessary. Amber Alerts are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they emphasize that everyone works together to stop something evil. On the other hand, they distort public perception of the likelihood of the evil. In the case of Amber Alerts, I suspect the trade-off is reasonable. But many news outlets spend far too much time publicizing evil, distorting the perception of risk with miniscule benefit to society. Let me try to summarize: (1) Fighting evil is more important than reducing risk. (2) While reducing risk of catastrophic accident is clearly good, reducing moderate risk of moderate mistakes is a significant cost. (3) Publicizing bad things to mobilize help is good, but distorting people's perception of risk is a significant cost. Cheers, Ben At 12:50 PM -0700 7/20/08, David Farber wrote:
________________________________________ From: Bob Frankston [Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com] Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 3:32 PM To: David Farber Cc: 'Dewayne Hendricks' Subject: Abducted! This is a very good article it gives perspective on our efforts to do good, especially when children are involved. It¹s very rare to have a sober look at this issues. The article doesn¹t address the issue of ³Internet porn² directly what makes it different is that it has a strong political agenda that goes well beyond concerns about children. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/ Excerpts: Of the 17 children Massachusetts has issued alerts on since it created its system in 2003, all have been safely returned. These are encouraging statistics - but also deeply misleading, according to some of the only outside scholars to examine the system in depth. In the first independent study of whether Amber Alerts work, a team led by University of Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that Amber Alerts - for all their urgency and drama - actually accomplish little. [later the article notes that it isn¹t obvious that the Amber alert played a vital role in most of these cases] #### What Amber Alerts do create, its critics say, is a climate of fear around a tragic but extremely rare event, pumping up public anxiety. Griffin calls it "crime control theater," and his critique of Amber Alerts fits into a larger complaint on the part of some criminologists about crime-fighting measures - often passed in the wake of horrific, highly publicized crimes - that originate from strong emotions rather than research into what actually works. Whether it's child sex-offender registries or "three strikes" criminal-sentencing rules, these policies, critics warn, can prove ineffective, sometimes costly, and even counterproductive, since they heighten public fears and distract from threats that are at once more common and more tractable. [And ruin lives] "The problem with these politically expedient solutions is that they look good but do very little to solve the problem," says Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern. ### Critics, however, measure the price of the program not in money but in broader social costs, in anxiety, panic, and misdirected public energy. Amber Alert and other measures "generate the appearance, but not the fact, of crime control," Griffin and Miller wrote. In so doing, such crime-fighting efforts reinforce misconceptions about what we should and shouldn't be afraid of. ### This is, of course, little consolation to parents who have lost children to kidnappers. But, according to Fox, if we want to save children's lives, we'd do better to worry about loosely enforced bicycle helmet and seat-belt laws, or the safety standards of school buses - all of which are much more statistically dangerous but lack comparably high-profile systems for stoking public concern. ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
-- Benjamin Kuipers, Professor email: kuipers () cs utexas edu Computer Sciences Department tel: 1-512-471-9561 University of Texas at Austin fax: 1-512-471-8885 Austin, Texas 78712 USA http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kuipers ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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