It’s not that it’s arbitrary, although it is. It’s more an admission that we could do far more, but choose not to spend the resources necessary, or the political capital to tackle the police and community culture (both interact to produce this situation even when the cops have the power).
He probably chose it for motivational reasons. It’s a nice round number and it sells well in print or on TV, and you can shorthand it easily for stakeholders who will largely be either hostile to the basic idea or suspicious of your motives.
He’s a politician, he chose it for political reasons.
When the police chase targets, numbers get fudged. KPIs, crime statistics, performance targets, stakeholder demands, call it what you want, they will aim for that number regardless of the consequences. It’s bad governance and results in things breaking.
The more any quantitive social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt social processes it is intended to monitor.
It’s not that it’s arbitrary, although it is. It’s more an admission that we could do far more, but choose not to spend the resources necessary, or the political capital to tackle the police and community culture (both interact to produce this situation even when the cops have the power).
He probably chose it for motivational reasons. It’s a nice round number and it sells well in print or on TV, and you can shorthand it easily for stakeholders who will largely be either hostile to the basic idea or suspicious of your motives.
He’s a politician, he chose it for political reasons.
When the police chase targets, numbers get fudged. KPIs, crime statistics, performance targets, stakeholder demands, call it what you want, they will aim for that number regardless of the consequences. It’s bad governance and results in things breaking.
https://youtu.be/xH_6_8NOfwI
Well, ok, what works better than targets? Gotta measure how you’re going somehow.
Edit: btw, all those factors I mentioned are indeed political reasons.
Determining what your goal is in terms of outcome, not numbers or percentages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell’s_law
These things have been known about in sociology and political science for quite some time.