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i_have_thick_loads t1_ivj7o57 wrote

>I was talking about a nonlinear relation between the actual crimes committed and the crimes discovered - this 'non-linearity' is moderated by the amount of police activity

And again, police presence is driven by homicide rate and reports to police.

>The discovery rate is higher in poor neighborhoods compared to rich neighborhoods.

We know what you said. Just because you typed out a stupid thought experiment doesn't make your concern valid. There are independent measures of crime to which you could measure reasonably appropriate level of police activity. One measure is homicide rate. And there's more or less a general factor for crime. Areas with higher homicides will most probably have higher rates of other crime.

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carpeson t1_ivjktpv wrote

>And again, police presence is driven by homicide rate and reports to police.

I understand where you are coming from, I really do, but this discussion is not about what is driving police precence but about a possibly-not-considered interaction between the "local arest rates" (=the documented crime) vs. the "real number of crimes commited" and the moderator of "police activity".

You keep explaining to me - over and over again - that our moderator is determined by x, y, z and I am very proud of your attempt of taking part in the discussion and this information is surely great for any later (and very basic) modeling but at this point it is redundant at best.

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>We know what you said. Just because you typed out a stupid thought experiment doesn't make your concern valid.

The subreddit you are dwelling on right now is called r/science; a heavily moderated forum for people that want to talk about science. The thought experient was for the purpose of understanding solely, it´s redundancy can be measured based on the general r/science-users ability to know what a "non-linear interaction between x and y, moderated by z" means.I must also question not only your temper but also your comprehention of basic-research - the field I wanted to expand my ideas on where questions are asked not because they have a direct implication for anything but because we like to understand things. Coincidentally also my field of research in the real world.

>There are independent measures of crime to which you could measure reasonably appropriate level of police activity. One measure is homicide rate. And there's more or less a general factor for crime.

Now we are getting somewhere. Let´s take the general factor for crime and call it g. g is great but how do we actually find out the g of a zoned area? Well we can´t but we can approximate it. Let´s call this approximation g´. Does this approximation take into account that more police activity from a higher g will probably also result in a g´ that is closer (maybe even further away - we don´t know yet) to the original g? Well what I propose is we find out whether or not the distance between g and g´ (let´s call that distance d) is always the same regardless of how big g is. What I propose as a reasonable hypothesis is that d is moderated by police activity.

If you were so kind to NOT give me another analysis of what factors contribute to police activity because I feel like I am talking to a toddler. What I really wanted was people comming up with intresting study designs or recommentations for papers that tackled similar ideas. I don´t want to conduct the study myself but a few hours ago I was still intrested in talking about it. I should have research the topic myself - would have saved some time but probably missed the opportunity to talk to other scientists that might criticise my approach or my idea in a well thought out manner.

>Areas with higher homicides will most probably have higher rates of other crime.

Let´s have a little quiz, shall we? Why is this information redundant to me?

Yes, because it talks not about what I was talking about but rather about a general positive correlation between g and g´. Well done.

Give me a break.

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i_have_thick_loads t1_ivk68nx wrote

Yes; you continue claiming i didn't understand your point that police presence mediates a lower actual - documented crime gap in low income urban settings, but this is unlikely. Homicide rates are measurement invariant, and because there's a positive manifold for criminality, you should be able to extract theoretical actual crimes rates from homicide rates plus a few other hopefully somewhat orthogonal (and measurement invariant such as reported stolen vehicles to insurance companies or law enforcement?) input variables. The gap between theoretical crime - documented crime would give you the evidence for which regions have the highest crime gaps, and whether crime gap variance is associated with law enforcement presence variance to establish an unlikely hypothesis.

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carpeson t1_ivl15ep wrote

Great input. I still don't believe that's the whole picture. In most of Europe less weapons have a strong positive correlation with less homicides so we can't use this metric to encompass most of the crime spectrum. Car theft is much more common and can definitely be used as another way to approximate g. This still doesn't include drug trade and prostitution. Most of the times such cases of organized crime have their own Para-justice systems in place where allowing one crime doesn't automatically mean you allowed every crime (most notably homicides, which are a big no-go even in communities where crime is normalized).

I also believe we are working with a moderating force, not a mediating one but that's besides the point and might be quite a high-level criticism.

There is still much to be discovered in this field. Looking forward to some new discoveries.

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