THROWN - SKYWARD: BLOWN IN & ON. THROUGH.AND OUT... URSELF... LI

Ota, Tokyo. March 2021. 12183

Q9 $3.00 under an hour spent from wallet flown,   forming unto itself; the sun the sky the gras the sea down it flows, and as birds flown down at dawn,   done, south we go.

Researchers from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (previously) reimplemented the algorithm Predpol predictive policing system that police departments around America have spent a fortune on in order to find out where to set their patrols, and fed it Oakland’s 2010 arrest data, then asked it to predict where the crime would be in 2011.

Predpol’s algorithm munged the arrest data, then confidently asserted that the Oakland PD should concentrate the bulk of their resources in a neighborhood that is poor and black. However, data from the census and the National Drug Use and Health Survey show that crime occurred across Oakland, meaning that if the Oakland PD had followed Predpol’s advice in 2011, they would have just gone and rounded up and jailed a bunch of black people (remember, 97% of the people indicted in the USA plead guilty, an impossibly high number that guarantees that innocent people are pleading guilty to escape the extreme sentences available to prosecutors who secure a conviction at trial).

The reason that Predpol’s model predicts that nearly all the crime would occur in a these neighborhoods is that police concentrate policing here, and you can only find crime in places where you look for it. The algorithm distills the bias in the input data. Unsurprisingly, these are neighborhoods predominantly populated by low-income people of color. Predpol and tools like it are sold as data-driven ways to overcome this kind of police bias, but really, they’re just ways of giving bias a veneer of objective responsibility.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has repeatedly sought an appropriation of $150,000 to buy Predpol for the city.

Other cities are dumping Predpol. In Burbank, where I live, the police got rid of Predpol after it lowered officer morale to the point where 75% of Burbank cops had “low or extremely low” morale.

Predpol is a classic weapon of math destruction in that it creates a model without regard to bias in data – every scientist and statistician knows that sampling bias is a deadly pitfall in any kind of statistical analysis. Then it predicts the future based on that biased data, and directs those in authority to act on those predictions in a way that is guaranteed to show the predictions to have been correct (regardless of whether they are, in fact, correct), and then it re-ingests data from the behavior dictated by the biased predictions, and suggests behavior that produces even more biased outcomes.

To top it off, a bad prediction by the algorithm causes black people to be overpoliced, white people to be underpoliced, exacerbates the problem of coerced guilty pleas, and is a pipeline that feeds into the equally racially biased automated sentencing systems that send black people to prison for longer than white people.

YOU are allowed in my Church.  You may hear sermons that tell you to deny your flesh in favor of eternal spiritual life, but that is only because we would want those good things for you.

YOUR Church bars people, keeps them out.  

Looks like the bigoted, hate filled Church is YOUR dream Church.

im actually safe in like one maybe two churches within a 50 mile radius (no i dont live in the south). if there were a church that went out of its way to make sure people like me were safe, theyd probably be living out the Gospel. and how many conservatives would defend this hypothetical church’s right to exclude a certain class of people based on sincerely held beliefs about how cis, straight people are socialized to sin.

ultimately i probably wouldnt actually make such a church as described in OP but y'alls vitriolic outrage seems terribly misplaced because cis, straight people arent the ones who are being denied access to bathrooms or appropriate housing or sufficient healthcare. moreover cis straight people enjoy a very low suicide attempt rate compared to trans people. and why is this? because cis, straight people not only run this country and the corporations that control it, but they also dominate everything about Christianity–theology, scholarship, clergy, laity, sacraments. everything. while this may be partly due to disparity in demographics, i will forever argue that the current state of the Church is not safe for LGBT Christians. and as much as y'all wanna be ~inclusive~ and spout sone Dont Ask Dont Tell bullshit, these spaces are frequently turning out to fail our communities in horrific ways.

yall have so many churches you can go to. literally so many. just pick one. having one church dedicated to ensuring a safe worship environment for LGBT Christians and LGBT seekers is not going to cause a premature Second Coming or whatever.

Countryside Cabin in Denmark via Apartment Therapy