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benbristow • yesterday at 12:30 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

People on illegal escooters or illegal electric bikes are already committing crimes, there's rarely a decent reason to be wearing a balaclava in the city.

As I said, machine learning to take all these pointers into perspective.


Replies

Waterluvian • yesterday at 12:44 PM

I think what makes this resemble a moronic idea is it’s a thin veneer of an invention based on your personal stereotyped perspective.

The real challenge, if you wanted to work on the meat of the issue, is that we need to reduce crime without catching the innocent in the net, without having a chilling effect on legal behaviour and people’s rights, and without normalizing the mindset that we should just precrime people.

One of the core points of Minority Report is in the film’s title: that even if technology becomes 99.99% accurate, we are still damned by the destruction of due process and the presumption of innocence.

I think ideas like yours belong in the incinerator.

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someonebaggy • yesterday at 12:47 PM

Is arresting someone for (what fact about?) their scooter actually making society better?

Comments like these reinforce my belief that the UK is a panopticon because UK residents sincerely want one and not because the government is corrupt.

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MSFT_Edging • yesterday at 12:37 PM

In the age of everything being filmed in a panopticon, I look at the teens wearing balaclava and wonder where they bought theirs. Good on them for having a modicum of privacy.

roryirvine • yesterday at 2:20 PM

It'd be much more effective to close the gaping loopholes which allow importing, selling, and servicing unrestricted and unsafe ebikes and escooters (currently you just need to have some small print informing riders that they should be insured, licensed, and only use them on roads where mopeds are permitted - even though no-one actually does that).

Ideally, you'd go back in time and do this before the problem really took off - but failing that, you could introduce scrappage/swap schemes to incentivise taking existing bikes out of circulation.

To tighten things up further, you might think about making safety certification mandatory, and force delivery platforms to take responsibility for ensuring that their riders are using only certified bikes.

Deal with the source of the problem rather than wasting police time on chasing down every teenage cyclist or bringing back sus laws.

z3c0 • yesterday at 5:58 PM

I'd say the biggest indicator towards crime is self-absorption and lack of empathy. Apparently, HN comments are great place to devise a corpus upon.

adammarples • yesterday at 12:55 PM

Trouble is you'd be scooping up 90% of boys in a certain race, class, age bracket, because those ballys and bikes and Nike tech are effectively fashion at this point even if you're doing nothing wrong. And if that's the case you don't need AI you can just wait outside the school gates and arrest everyone.

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