Peter Karwacki: A Few Good "Policemen"

2021 - 2022 Rideau Rockcliffe Stats..a little light on detail. Look over here...not over there stuff.

https://www.ottawapolice.ca/en/annual-report/resources/Crime_Stats/Ward_13-Rideau-Rockcliffe.pdf

The Club of which - We are Not Members

Society enforces its rules through force. Countries enforce theirs through armies.

We accept that bargain: a small percentage of the population gets legal authority to detain, restrain, and if necessary kill, while the rest of us navigate daily life with nothing sharper than good manners.

We don't get to escalate. They do.

Here's the part nobody likes to say out loud: there are bad actors already inside that system,

There are dangerous people who haven't been identified yet, moving through our institutions like free radicals. Some of them wear a badge.

That's not a slander against the profession, it's just math. Any group large enough, given enough unchecked power, will contain people who abuse it.

The question was never whether that's true. It's what we do about it.

What we've done about it, historically, is very little, and the structure of policing makes that almost inevitable.

Police unions exist to protect officers, which is reasonable, but it breeds a brotherhood reflex that doesn't distinguish between protecting a good cop from a bad accusation and protecting a bad one from a fair one. Add nepotism, seniority politics, and good-old-boy loyalty, and misconduct doesn't need approval to survive, it just needs tolerance.

Meanwhile the public gets none of the oversight that would let us check the work. Confidentiality and privacy protections, meant to protect victims, end up protecting the institution from its own people. It's a club. We pay its dues. We're not members.

It has ever been thus. But for the first time we have a tool that doesn't care about brotherhood or seniority: data.

This isn't theoretical. Researchers at the University of Chicago, working with the White House's Police Data Initiative, built a predictive model from over a decade of Charlotte-Mecklenburg's own records.

The strongest predictor of an officer having a problem next year turned out to be that officer's own history of problems this year, information the department already had, just never connected, because connecting it depends on a colleague flagging a colleague.

Charlotte piloted the system anyway. LA County and Knoxville built their own. Miami, Minneapolis, and New Orleans already run versions of an "early intervention system."

This isn't science fiction. It's a maturity problem, not a technology problem.

That's the opening AI widens.

An algorithm doesn't get invited to the Christmas party of the guy it's flagging, and it doesn't owe anyone a favor.

It looks at complaint histories, use-of-force reports, body-cam metadata, and lawsuit records, and turns "everybody sort of knew about that guy" into a documented, time-stamped flag that someone has to answer for.

I'm not naive about the failure mode. A system is only as honest as the data fed into it, and departments have already been caught gaming exactly this kind of oversight, softening reports, even misreporting details to make problems disappear on paper.

AI doesn't fix a culture determined to hide its own evidence. But it raises the cost of hiding it. A quiet word in a locker room leaves no record. A flagged pattern that a supervisor chose to ignore leaves a very inconvenient one, for the supervisor.

We accepted the bargain that gave police authority the rest of us don't have.

We never got the other half: real visibility into how that authority gets used. AI won't deliver bias-free policing, nothing will, because people still run it.

But it can start dragging the receipts into the light, where the rest of us, the people who aren't club members yet fund it and live under its rules, can finally read them.

Real leadership means demanding that kind of transparency even when it's uncomfortable, especially from your own people. Rideau-Rockcliffe watched someone walk away from that fight instead of having it.

This is why King's resignation is so infuriating to me. He took credit for his work on OPS yet quit when the going got tough. He had an opportunity to make changes but went to the Buffet instead.

Who even bothered to watch? This is the only debate Rogers removed from its library.

https://youtu.be/5ruPIt2fzXw?feature=shared