Re: Abducted!

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
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.
>
>
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--

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



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