this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
67 points (86.0% liked)
Technology
58133 readers
4730 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They feel like there is less crime, because they have bought into security theater.
* sees robot. looks around. *
Average idiot: Huh. No crime in sight. Guess it's working.
Ironically security theater can have a a placebo effect on crime rates as well. It turns out that the likelihood that someone commits a crime is strongly correlated to the chance they believe they will get caught, not the actual chance of getting caught. That’s why fake security cameras are so effective.
Hate to say it (re: security theater), but I think that is correct. I've read articles stating a drop in crime in places where they just have a cardboard cutout of police officers in the window.
It could also just have been a hot August, leading people to feel lethargic and steal less than they did earlier in the year? (How reliable do we think this data actually is btw?)
It make sense, when you make a decision you make it based on the data you have not the truth. So security theaters are effective as long as people who are thinking about commiting a crime think it is working. And they care about getting caught.
Like the ADT signs people get off of Craigslist.
NRA stickers are probably way more effective.
Bro this is an advert paid by the robot vendor... hence why we are going based on "feelz"
People still act like a fake news article is good faith behavior when it is just low quality engagement slop to drive somebody's sales lol
Report to mods? That would work, until the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that... Damn fake news is gonna get us all killed (literally, as in climate change), but at least then after everyone dies perhaps we'll learn something from the ordeal. Wait... I might have detected a small problem with this plan (to do nothing at all, and just let it happen).
Realistically, with the robot having been around now almost six months, I'm more willing to consider that the locals have noticed a difference in their experience going shopping. That's more than enough time to notice the kind of changes the locals appear to have experienced since they stopped relying on the police.
I'm pretty sure that simply putting a picture of eyes in the scene reduces theft. People are emotional creatures , and if they feel like they're being watched by someone who doesn't approve of stealing, they're more likely to refrain.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
Yeah, if you believe the center owner the robot was apparently purchased because of unreliable security staff that were also providing eyes on the scene.
Are you suggesting that the same amount of crime is happening but they're deciding not to report it because there's a robot there? That's the measure they're touting, the reduction in crime reports.