What do you do about murder?

[Rhea]

I agree that a scruffy guy (or any person) hanging outside a jewelry shop would in general not ping my radar either, since, as a place of business presumably situated to maximize foot traffic there would be a lot of people going by who might pause for one reason or another. It's a place with people, so people are not unusual.

 

[dystopian]

and dystopian again asserted, still not having answered the first two times he was asked,

Seeing an actual crime in progress or obvious preparation thereof. You did not describe either.

That *IS* the actual answer to your question. Does the term 'obvious preparation thereof' really need to explained in exacting detail to you? Someone just hanging around (regardless of where they do so) = not obvious preparation; someone taking out a slimjim as he cruises the dark parking lot looking for the most valuable car while trying to make sure there aren't any cameras around = obvious preparation.

 

[Rhea]

That's pretty subjective. Well, we shall all keep our eyes out for that and none of us will make a wrong call on it because breaking into cars with a lock-pick in a place where there are no parking lots and no one even locks them in the first place is so.... likely. Well, thanks for solving our crime problems!

Meanwhile, a person who bikes 5 miles into the middle of nowhere to sit down and stare at a house that has no one in it is doing something utterly mundane and unremarkable.

 

[Metaphor]

That's pretty subjective. Well, we shall all keep our eyes out for that and none of us will make a wrong call on it because breaking into cars with a lock-pick in a place where there are no parking lots and no one even locks them in the first place is so.... likely. Well, thanks for solving our crime problems!

Meanwhile, a person who bikes 5 miles into the middle of nowhere to sit down and stare at a house that has no one in it is doing something utterly mundane and unremarkable.

Does it give you pause that the cops did not, in fact, go out there, and merely logged your call (as they probably have to)?

 

[Rhea]

That's pretty subjective. Well, we shall all keep our eyes out for that and none of us will make a wrong call on it because breaking into cars with a lock-pick in a place where there are no parking lots and no one even locks them in the first place is so.... likely. Well, thanks for solving our crime problems!

Meanwhile, a person who bikes 5 miles into the middle of nowhere to sit down and stare at a house that has no one in it is doing something utterly mundane and unremarkable.

Does it give you pause that the cops did not, in fact, go out there, and merely logged your call (as they probably have to)?

No. They only come out once a month or so. They log the call so that if anyone else calls in with a similar concern they can link them, discern a pattern, then they investigate. But without the info to link _to_ they can't detect any patterns. The point of my call was not to get them to come out. It was not possible for them to get here before he left, nor was it imminent or emergent.

One person calls about a person loitering where it makes absolutely zero sense to loiter.
One person calls about an unusual amount of traffic.
One person calls about an intense odor of cat urine.
Boom. There's your meth lab.

you can google neighbor tip leads to meth lab bust if you'd like to see examples such as,

Volusia County deputy sheriffs shut down a mobile meth lab and seized drugs and counterfeit cash after a neighbor called to report three suspicious people hanging around outside a vacant house near South Daytona.​

I totally get that you do not understand how different neighborhoods work and what is "unusual" in places outside yours. I get that, and nothing anyone can say can clue you in to the absolute fact that is is not some bigoted profiling, it's an ACTIVITY that is suspicious, not a PERSON. I've lived in cities, I've lived in countryside. Different things are risky or unusual in each place. What is normal or justifiable behavior in one place is not necessarily so in another.

That's okay. I don't actually need to convince you.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

That's okay. I don't actually need to convince you.

Well, that's good.

 

[dystopian]

I get that, and nothing anyone can say can clue you in to the absolute fact that is is not some bigoted profiling, it's an ACTIVITY that is suspicious, not a PERSON.

Nothing, it seems, will clue you in to the fact everything you've described does in fact suggest it is problematic profiling you're engaged in. There really isn't that much difference between saying: "That person is black, he must be a criminal" (which you haven't done); and saying "That person isn't doing anything ''purposeful'', which is odd around these parts and must therefore mean he's a criminal" (which you *have* done). Both are bigoted forms of profiling, you just have an easier time justifying the latter to yourself.

 

[Deepak]

I get that, and nothing anyone can say can clue you in to the absolute fact that is is not some bigoted profiling, it's an ACTIVITY that is suspicious, not a PERSON.

Nothing, it seems, will clue you in to the fact everything you've described does in fact suggest it is problematic profiling you're engaged in. There really isn't that much difference between saying: "That person is black, he must be a criminal" (which you haven't done); and saying "That person isn't doing anything ''purposeful'', which is odd around these parts and must therefore mean he's a criminal" (which you *have* done). Both are bigoted forms of profiling, you just have an easier time justifying the latter to yourself.

Nonsense - being black isn't an activity and a person has no control over whether they're black.

The one suspicious person call I made to the police was to report two guys in dark clothes wearing balaclavas walking around on a side-street. Now surely walking on a summer night, ambulating through a side-street, and wearing balaclavas (I do this a lot when clearing snow) are not themselves criminal activities or suspicious behavior. Clearly then I'm a bigot who would feel at home in a KKK rally.

 

[Unbeatable]

I get that, and nothing anyone can say can clue you in to the absolute fact that is is not some bigoted profiling, it's an ACTIVITY that is suspicious, not a PERSON.

Nothing, it seems, will clue you in to the fact everything you've described does in fact suggest it is problematic profiling you're engaged in.

It's obviously profiling, but profiling is problematic merely in practice, because so many instances of it turn out to return a percentage of false positives which somebody has deemed unacceptably high. It's not clear to me that we can even evaluate Rhea's ratio of false positives to true positives, and it's not clear to me what would constitute unacceptable. I mean, I think most could agree that Rhea's heuristic for predicting criminal activity would be a failure if it worked no better than chance, but I imagine you want to set the bar significantly higher than that, given your example of what you think would constitute crime prevention. How many false positives would you allow for, I wonder, to find a crime prediction heuristic acceptable for use? Maybe what it comes down to is a difference between the two of you with regards to risk tolerance. You can argue until the sun burns out about how much risk is in fact present.

There really isn't that much difference between saying: "That person is black, he must be a criminal" (which you haven't done); and saying "That person isn't doing anything ''purposeful'', which is odd around these parts and must therefore mean he's a criminal" (which you *have* done). Both are bigoted forms of profiling, you just have an easier time justifying the latter to yourself.

"that much difference"-- What's that much? It's subjective. It's no surprise you two can't convince each other. You're speaking a language of estimates and value judgments. Too much uncertainty, too little concrete fact. If reconciliation were to occur here, it would be purely coincidental.