Should the government give high-risk offenders gaming systems to reduce crime?

Regular readers will recall that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick responded to the school shooting in Santa Fe by suggesting that Texas eliminate subsidies aimed at luring video game companies to the state. Grits responded by disputing the purported link between video-game violence and violent crime.

The more I think about it, though, I wonder if video games might be part of a solution to violent crime?

Here's an outside-the-box (but not the Xbox) suggestion for reducing crime that's cheaper than incarceration and gives authorities a better tool to help offenders comply with probation: Give young people at high risk of committing serious crimes gaming systems as part of probation terms and make taking them away a punishment for violating conditions.

Several different strands of thought led me to this idea, which I've not seen proposed elsewhere.

In recent years, we've seen pilot programs where law enforcement identified the people at the highest risk of committing violent crime and simply paid them not to. And it seems to work! Some of the methods for identifying the most high-risk folk can be pretty sophisticated.

At the same time, we've seen studies showing that youth playing violent video games (or really, any video games) tend to commit less crime because of the voluntary incapacitation effect: The kid playing Grand Theft Auto for hours doesn't have time to be out stealing my car.

(On Twitter, John Pfaff recently pointed to a paper showing a similar voluntary incapacitation effect related to violent movies.)

My personal belief is that the rise of video games and online entertainment caused a much greater proportion of the crime decline witnessed in the past quarter century than most observers have considered.

Young males through about their mid-to-late twenties are the highest risk population group for committing crime. This is also the group with whom video games are most popular.

So what if we combined these observations to create a correctional strategy? What if high-risk young male offenders on probation were given a PlayStation or Xbox and a few popular games when they went on supervision, and allowed to keep the equipment if they successfully completed their probation term?

I see several benefits:

1) The incapacitation effect: The more time these youth spend playing video games, the less likelihood they'll get into trouble.

2) Incentive for good behavior: Just like payment is a positive incentive not to commit crime in the pilot programs described above, access to a video game station is a significant incentive not break the law or violate probation rules, as well as to complete probation.

3) Tool to address rules violations: Similarly, taking access to the video game system away is a significant additional negative incentive, a tool that could be used to punish technical non-compliance (half of all revocations to prison from probation in Texas are for technical violations).

4) Economics: Gaming systems are cheaper than paying a monthly stipend, as in the above-cited examples, and the project could be scaled up more easily.

The complaint would come from people who say, "My kids don't have a Playstation, why should the government buy one for criminals?" But since the answer is so firmly rooted in public-safety goals - particularly if the tactic were reserved for the most serious, high-risk probationers - IMO it could be justified. We spend a lot of money already on these high-risk populations.

The same parental controls that keep young kids from accessing inappropriate stuff could be used to limit improper use of the system (contacting victims, etc.), and of course improper use could be punished by taking it away.

IMO this could reduce crime among the population eligible for the program and make it easier to get people to comply with their probation terms. The cost of each system is significant (~$300 + games), but a lot less than incarceration, and I bet under such circumstances the state could get a bulk-purchase discount.

This is a brainstorming post, not a fully formed policy suggestion. But as cost-effective public safety solutions go, this idea seems to check a lot of the boxes.

'Body Camera Obscura': Videos of police violence and matters of perspective

Image from fatal police shooting in Palestine, TX, 2015.

Those thinking through the implications of police body-camera policies and procedures may find useful this academic article I read over the weekend from Georgia State law prof Caren Myers Morrison, titled "Body Camera Obscura: The Semiotics of Police Video." Her analysis takes a step back from legalistic controversies to think more deeply about how meaning is derived from video images of police violence, particularly in courtroom settings. "Using insights from semiotics, film criticism, cultural theory, and cognitive psychology, [the article attempts] to sketch out a more nuanced way of approaching video evidence in the context of these cases. The aim of this article is primarily descriptive and diagnostic: we are in danger of misunderstanding a new source of evidence in these hotly contested cases, and making an already permissive standard even more lax." As things stand, she wrote, "Courts seem remarkably unsophisticated and credulous when dealing with video evidence."

"A bit of a touchy-feely approach for my tastes," Grits thought upon seeing the title and abstract, but Morrison has produced a thoughtful and useful piece that systematically runs through various strains of bias which can infect those interpreting video and result in different types of errors. "Because video evidence is so emotionally compelling," she wrote, "it makes factfinders vulnerable to a host of biases, including naïve realism, or the belief that what one sees is the uncontroverted truth, the inability to recognize the role of subjectivity, the fragmentation of perspective, and identification bias." The article then discusses each of those in turn in the specific context of police body cameras - a valuable contribution.

One critique I don't agree with: The author writes that the "unquestionable usefulness of video recordings comes with a dark side; cases without video now tend to be devalued and overlooked by the public." Of course, that's true, but it's not necessarily problematic.

Grits' own criminal-justice reform work began in response to a string of bad police shootings and misconduct in Austin in the mid-1990s. In 1997 I launched a now-defunct site called the Austin Police Department Hall of Shame, which documented sustained misconduct and questionable use-of-force incidents by Austin police officers, expanding the work statewide in 2000 into a site called the Texas Police Reform Center. (That site shut down when Grits for Breakfast launched in 2004.)

So, having spent years trying to convince the public to care about police misconduct in the pre-cell phone era (I was director of the Police Accountability Project at ACLU of Texas for seven years, 2000-2006), Grits can say with confidence that, before cell-phone and dash cam video, those cases were devalued and overlooked anyway, going back many generations. Without video, even convincing people there was a problem was a difficult slog. It wasn't real to the white public until they could see it with their own eyes. And a glimpse of the truth is better than no access to it at all. With video, the public ignores cases without video; without video, they ignore these issues entirely.

Regardless, lots of other interesting stuff here. This discussion of the implications of Morrison's humanities-based approach gives a flavor:

Police video is video recorded by the police in the course of their official duties, either via dashboard-mounted cameras (“dash cams”) or body-worn cameras (“body cams”). Eyewitness video, often recorded on a cellphone, is taken by bystander-witnesses or victims, either spontaneously or as part of a Copwatching program. These two types of videos offer contrasting narratives. Police video tends to recirculate dominant narratives of violence and masculinity as heroic ideals that coexist easily with the legal standard of the reasonable officer. In contrast, the perspective in eyewitness videos typically challenges those narratives and offers the counter-narrative of an abusive state.

The malleability of video in the context of police use-of-force cases has been apparent since a primarily white state jury found four white Los Angeles police officers not guilty of unlawfully assaulting black motorist Rodney King in 1991, despite a video capturing the beating. Arguably, this was because video recordings don’t actually show the “truth” of any interaction— they are inherently indeterminate. Video will reflect a different reality depending not only on who is watching, but also on who is recording. Therefore, in the context of police violence cases, legal actors need to view images with greater skepticism, and be aware of the competing narratives they offer.

While images have evidentiary value, they also have cultural currency. There is a tension between the use of video as “both evidence and a call to action,” on the one hand, and as entertainment, recycling a historical spectacle of black victimhood, on the other.  Because the paradigmatic video is that of a black man shot by the police, these images reflect back to us our feelings about violence, race, masculinity, and the law, and how we believe they should interact.  But the salience of the videos that make news headlines tends to focus attention on the worst kinds of police violence, and their shock value may distract us from thinking more deeply about systemic questions that go beyond individual encounters.

Not sure I completely agree that bodycam footage always portrays officers as a hero, but it's inarguable that they only show one perspective, and not always a determinative one. I also agree that focusing on the most extreme cases discourages deeper systemic thinking, in much the same way that myopic focus on death-penalty cases overlooks problems in the far-more-vast non-capital parts of the system.

"Video evidence is at its most powerful and least ambiguous when it can contradict a false account given by the police," she noted - an effect entirely obviated by policies that allow officers to see the footage and other evidence against them before answering questions from police investigators. But in more ambiguous, workaday cases, "video evidence needs interpretation just as much, if not more than any other type of evidence."

The SCOTUS standard applied in police use of force cases "does not take into account the police officer’s actions in precipitating the confrontation," the author observed, leading to allegations that the standard "condones unnecessary violence" by ignoring the officer's role in getting to that point. The standard focuses only on the split second in which the officer makes the decision to fire, not "what went before."

For all of its benefits, video evidence encourages this atomization of facts, literally focusing the factfinder on the narrowest of moments in the encounter. When examining police video, particularly body cam video, the legal standard melds with the perspective of video, reducing a confrontation informed by many factors to a simple matter of whether the officer might plausibly have been in fear for his life at that one moment. This is where the “deceptive intensity” of video evidence can be problematic. If police video can heighten the sense of danger to the officer, it may place a thumb on the scale in favor of the officer in the eyes of many viewers.

The meat of the article examines case studies exemplifying various types of biases and showing how subjective interpretation colors every image, whether it's police, prosecutors, courts or the public doing the interpreting. Police body cams are new, but theoretical work regarding how people interpret moving images extends back a century. Grits learned a few things seeing the latter applied to the former.

Bigger safety threat: Guns or violent video games?

A recent opinion poll (pdf) of Republican primary voters posed the question, "What do you think is a bigger safety threat in America: guns or violent video games?" Among respondents, an amazing 67% said video games, 14% said guns, 19% said not sure. The sample size was rather small (just over 500), but still, that's an enormous difference.

My personal belief is that, in fact, the opposite is true: IMO video games likely reduce crime because of the incapacitation effect of young males spending large amounts of time playing them. As a 2011 study on the subject put it, "Even if a gamer is predisposed to being more aggressive due to gaming, he can express this aggression only over a shorter time non-gaming period." Or in layman's terms, the kid who spends hours perfecting his skills at Grand Theft Auto has less time to spend stealing my car.

At the macro-level, too, the threat from violent video games falls flat. Max Fisher at The Washington Post reported in December that, "the United States has the highest firearm murder rate in the developed world. But other countries where video games are popular have much lower firearm-related murder rates."

Are Playstation, X-Box, reducing crime?

Via Sentencing Law & Policy, two Texas researchers from Baylor and UT-Arlington teamed up with another from the Centre for European Economic Research to perform a detailed time-series study of the relationship between violent video games and violent crime. Said the report, "Our results provide some support for the psychological finding that, absent incapacitation, violent video games lead to more violent crimes. However, our results also indicate this is dominated by an incapacitation effect leading to a net reduction in violent crimes."

In other words, while violent computer games may contribute to increased aggressiveness in laboratory settings, those findings fail to take into account the main effect on crime from video games: Kids who would otherwise be out getting into trouble are spending their time playing them instead of committing street crimes. "Even if a gamer is predisposed to being more aggressive due to gaming, he can express this aggression only over a shorter time non-gaming period." This incapacitation effect "swamp[s] the marginal increase in aggression in the person." Of course, as pointed out in the abstract, this "voluntary incapacitation effect" means that "playing either violent or non-violent games decrease crimes." But one imagines that those with violent tendencies may be more drawn to violent games; the folks who would otherwise engage in street crime likely would prefer Grand Theft Auto to Super Mario, etc..