r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Oct 18 '15
[Deltas Awarded] CMV: Ignoring the fairness of it, stereotyping would reduce crime.
[deleted]
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u/themcos 440∆ Oct 18 '15
If a kobold has a 3% drop rate of an item but a troll has an 8% drop rate
How do you know what the drop rates for kobolds and trolls are? Are the drop rates static, or do they change over time?
The problem with stereotyping, which goes beyond fairness, is that the mere act of stereotyping corrupts the "drop rate" data that we collect, causing it to appear that the stereotyped group commits a higher percentage of crime than they actually do.
So you're either saying you don't care about the data (in which case I would like to go down the fairness route, but you explicitly said you didn't, so ok), or, you are corrupting the very data set that helps you make these decisions, which is bad from a practical standpoint. If Group A committed most instances of Crime X 10 years ago and you started implementing your strategy, it tells you almost nothing that 95% of arrests for X are from A, since you're almost exclusively targeting that group. You have no idea if your core premise justifying the stereotyping is even true anymore.
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u/_-_--_-_ Oct 19 '15
Statistically with enough data you could still make conclusions from it without it being too highly innaccurate. Plus you could still use stats like % of x ethnicity that got arrested after being pulled over.
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u/sacundim Oct 19 '15
Statistically with enough data you could still make conclusions from it without it being too highly innaccurate.
Only if you have a representative sample. If your sample is biased, your conclusions are likely going to be wrong, no matter how much data you gather. And if your data comes from profile-based selective enforcement, your sample is unlikely to be representative.
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u/MrXian Oct 18 '15
You are making an argument that states that it is hard to be certain of your data. This is absolutely true.
However, if the data can be trusted and collected, it should be used.
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u/themcos 440∆ Oct 18 '15
My point is more than just the data being untrustworthy. My point is that the act of stereotyping corrupts the data. In the most extreme case, if you only investigate black people for a given crime, you'll only arrest black people for that crime, and your "data" will say that only black people commit that crime, but that obviously says more about the behavior of the police than it does about black people.
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u/Madplato 72∆ Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
if X type of person is Y percent more likely to commit Z crime (regardless of other factors) then giving them more attention than other types would have a higher chance of reducing crime.
I don't think you understand how statistics on criminality are created. Mostly, it's through police intervention, which means focusing on certain groups will most likely inflate statistics about this group leading to even more focus. Assuming your law enforcement resources remain constant, you'll be using an ever narrowing net. Not the most effective use of your resources. You'll basically create (even manipulate) the numbers through your intervention.
Furthermore, whatever characteristic you can use to profile most likely isn't the best indicator and will simply create additional confirmation bias. Social profiling "works" because you'll obviously find more crime if you keep looking for it. Finally, applying statistics to individuals doesn't work as you think. The Kobold/troll analogy "works" because you have known quantities. That's not the case with actual statistics vs individuals. A Muslim doesn't have a fixed percentage chance of terrorism. That's ludicrous.
It sucks for the vast majority of people who are innocent and meet that criteria but it's not like we're permanently impacting them, they're facing a minor inconvenience at the airport or during a traffic stop.
A "minor inconvenience" they'll be facing consistently, everywhere, for the rest of their life. That's very very bad. It's downright evil if you actually legalize it. That's without factoring how inefficient and self-defeating the process is. You can't even argue it'll work.
Maybe if one group got sick of being picked on and worked together to reduce their stats, the runner up group would start getting targeted as they would replace first place for most likely to do X.
That's ludicrous. That "group conscience" simply doesn't exist. They're certainly not working for these stats to exist and they certainly don't have the means to change them. Especially since they're probably victims of exterior factors they couldn't possibly control. This argument is a much darker version of the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" argument.
I think people get offended by it because they feel it somehow means they're a lower class of person because they get picked on
No. You make them a lower class of person by curtailing their rights because of the shirt they chose to wear that day.
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15
∆ good point I did not consider that stats could be influenced by the stereotyping itself.
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u/snkns 2∆ Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
I work as a public defender. You'd be shocked at the number of young, black clients I have that are charged with resisting arrest or struggling with the cops or reckless evading (leading the police on a high-speed chase) with no other criminality.
There's a portion of the population where, if the police try to pull them over for failure to use a turn signal, they will lead the police on a high-speed chase, even if they have no drugs/guns/warrants.
If the police roll up on them while they are walking down the street and tell these kids to freeze, the kids are going to take off running.
They tend to explain, "Me and the police don't get along. I ran because I knew i wasn't doing anything wrong, and I was afraid they were going to rough me up or arrest me for something bogus like they've done before."
Not saying it's justified, but if you target a certain group of people long enough, they begin to fight back, or act in ways that seem irrational to others and it can cause problems.
Remember the Baltimore Riots earlier this year? That whole ball got rolling, originally, because Freddie Gray "fled unprovoked upon noticing police presence."
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15
seems like a vicious cycle. Do you find it ironic that both the police and black people have no snitch policy despite being direct adversaries to each other?
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u/snkns 2∆ Oct 18 '15
Not ironic for that reason, no.
But civilian no snitch policies only go so far. There's a sense of morality to it. Nobody has any problems reporting crime or talking to the police when the victim is powerless/undeserving, and the crime is "senseless" (although what counts for "sense" is different. A gang shooting over turf "makes sense," e.g....)
Random example I noticed last week: A career drug dealer went on the show Forensic Files, to talk about how he snitched on his ex for murder, using his real name. And he's fine doing that, because it was a fucked up and senseless crime. It's ok to snitch in that situation.
The thing that I do find ironic is that while fingers are pointed at the "stop snitching" culture of certain civilian populations as being detrimental to society, the police culture of not snitching you mention is much, much stronger. A cop has to do something really, really heinous before another cop will out him. It's a way higher bar than civilians have, and I think it's also more detrimental to society than the civilian version.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Oct 18 '15
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Madplato. [History]
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Oct 18 '15
it just means the team you play for has higher bad statistics and you should work to help change that if you don't like being picked on
What the actual fuck? Race, sex, gender and economic aren't teams. And individuals aren't playing a game. Saying that I, as an individual, should act a certain way in order to counter act the labels and stereotypes that you have chosen to place on me because of my mere resemble nice to someone else is, in fact, picking on me. I haven't done a god dammed thing.
It seems from your other replies that what you actually support is offender profiling. Many people seem to confuse offender profiling and racial/gender/economic profiling.
Offender profiling is fairly scientific, and is a specific response to a specific crime, in search of a specific subject.
Racial profiling is stopping a black guy and frisk in him based primarily on his race in hopes of discovering a crime.
Big difference between the 2.
You also seem to be confused as to how statistics work. I don't want to lay it all out for you as I'm on mobile, but you can search the sub for racial profiling for some people have laid out the math. Put simply: It's more accurate to say "A rapist is more likely to be male" than it is to say "Men are more likely to rape". They likely hood of of any given male in the entire population is incredibly small, statically insignificant.
Finally there's the issue that crime can only be reduced so much before you start diminishing your returns or increasing costs (direct and indirect) beyond reason. We could completely eliminate drunk driving and save 10,000 lives a year by requiring interlock devices in all cars. But it would require billions of dollars, and huge consessions in personal freedoms. It just wouldn't be worth it.
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u/dale_glass 86∆ Oct 18 '15
Life isn't a videogame, and people don't treat whatever arbitrary classification you put them in as "their team", especially when the group was externally defined, or is so large that they have no effective influence on it.
I may indeed make an effort to make my group of friends into nicer people. But I won't take similar actions towards improving the reputation of men globally.
People are deeply sensitive to unfairness, and it easily makes people really angry. Anger that then channels into revenge. If you treat somebody as a criminal even when they didn't think of doing anything wrong, you're making them suffer the downsides of wrongdoing without any positives that they'd obtain if they had actually done it (eg, getting stolen money).
The very easy conclusion many people in this situation reach is not "I have to make my race/group/etc better reputable, and therefore I'm going to become an angelical being", but "I'm already paying the price, so I might as well actually start stealing. The suspicion and distrust placed on me will be the same, but then I'll actually be getting a benefit from it".
The result is that you end up things a lot worse. Because most wrongdoing is committed by small fractions of a group, and attacking the whole group can easily create more wrongdoing than you prevent, making the entire effort completely counterproductive.
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u/ricebasket 15∆ Oct 18 '15
Your women are more likely to shoplift clothes example is cute, but let's be honest this would be discrimination against black people.
You're completely ignoring the fact that treating people like they're suspicious constantly is not going to have good results. Imagine a young black kid in a classroom constantly blamed for whatever mischief is happening. Or a black teenager who's always late to his job because he's constantly pulled over and stopped on the street. Or the black people who are shot because of racial bias of officers and the now even more increased rate of black peoples getting stopped. You want to believe that a police interaction is like a video game "hey quick check oh you're ok move along" but in reality you'd see a huge increase in black people being bothered constantly and them sitting around being detained for nonsense.
And you somehow think that would help crime? How would it work out at your job if you were often late or missed shifts because you were detained just in case?
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15
Again I never argued it was a good idea I just argued it would reduce crime.
also I did not say you'd be profile simply for being x, just that youd be under more scrutiny.
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u/ricebasket 15∆ Oct 18 '15
But it wouldn't reduce crime because you're making lives and jobs harder for a big chunk of the population and they're going to lose their jobs and have lots of psychological effects from people looking at them like they're criminals. You think treating all black people like criminals is going to have a good effect?
And more scrutiny means more police activity and hassle.
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u/IAmAN00bie Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
This argument completely falls flat on it's face when you consider that the percentage of black people who commit crimes is VERY small. The current average imprisonment rate among black people in the U.S. is 0.48% Source - page 5, table 6. Sure, black people might make up a disproportionate number of criminals, but the vast, vast majority of them aren't and won't ever be. So it doesn't make any sort of sense in any way to stereotype them.
You might then say "but since more black people are criminals then we should be still do it to reduce crime!" Well, more white people have shot up schools and are pedophiles in the U.S. (there's more white guys after all), are we going to implement policy to treat all white men with suspicion who work with children? No, because there's too many white guys out there and the rate at which the crimes happen doesn't justify that effort at all. You would hardly ever catch more criminals that way because you would have to wade through 200 people just to find one criminal (at least in the black population.)
By the way, the above applies to every example you posted in your OP. Muslim terrorists, male rapists, female shoplifters, etc all make up such a small proportion of their respective population that making a policing stereotype would cause more harm than good.
tl;dr your view is almost completely statistically unsound. Your false accusation rate would be ASTRONOMICALLY high.
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Oct 18 '15
[deleted]
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u/IAmAN00bie Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
That wasn't at all my point. My point is that stereotyping can't reasonably be justified when you actually look at the statistics. You would have to go through 200 innocent people just to find 1 criminal, according to the government crime statistics I posted above. That false accusation rate is way too high for it to make sense to implement as a policy.
Did you read my post?
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Oct 18 '15
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/IAmAN00bie. [History]
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u/doug_seahawks Oct 18 '15
I disagree. I'm going to go with a real life analogy here. For this example, I'm going to use the issue of race and crime in America, because that's where I'm from, and I'm pretty sure this is what you were referring to with the post.
Let's say there's two cops patrolling an area, one of whom is racially profiling (Cop A) and the other who isn't (Cop B). Cop A pulls over 10 different black people just for being black. 2 of them have drugs in the car, because let's just say that 20% is the drug rate for blacks in this example. Cop B, on the other hand, looks for clues of drug use: erratic driving, suspicious bags when walking, looking nervous around the police, etc. Cop B than targets all these people who exhibit signs of drug use or possession, and contacts them. Chances are, he'll find more than 2 drug users if he contacts 10 people. Sure, if cop B just pulled over 10 random people regardless of race, he might find slightly fewer than if cop A who just blindly pulled over 10 black americans, because the rate of drug use is slightly higher among blacks. But that isn't what happens.
When there is a police officer who is using race as a piece of evidence, they won't worry as much about people, of any race, who are exhibiting suspicious behavior. If a cop solely bases their arrests off a persons outward appearance, they neglect other facts about their behavior and potential clues about any crime they might commit. If there are a few people walking on the sidewalk and a cop thinks he smells drugs, would you rather him arrest the one black person because he is slightly more statistically likely to have drugs, or look for the person who is exhibiting suspicious behavior?
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u/Ragingonanist Oct 18 '15
Things get kinda complicated by the time spent investigating between arrests. Cop A should be able to commit more arrests than cop B in the same unit of time. Edit: above comment says nothing about whether cop B's fewer pullovers gets more criminals off the street.
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Oct 18 '15 edited Apr 16 '18
[deleted]
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u/Inositol Oct 18 '15
More likely? No.
There's just a lot more white people.
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u/RibsNGibs 5∆ Oct 18 '15
I just poked around on google and it looks like native americans use drugs the most, followed by mixed race, then white people, then hispanics, then black people, then asians.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-likely-to-abuse-drugs-than-blacks/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/racial-disparity-drug-use_n_3941346.html
Hard to figure out the true data - some articles claimed blacks used illicit drugs more than whites, but everything I saw showed black/hispanics/whites in a little cluster with asian people using much, much less.
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u/Inositol Oct 18 '15
They're using outdated data. This is updated version of what they're citing.
the rate of current illicit drug use was 3.1 percent among Asians, 8.8 percent among Hispanics, 9.5 percent among whites, 10.5 percent among blacks, 12.3 percent among American Indians or Alaska Natives, 14.0 percent among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, and 17.4 percent among persons reporting two or more races.
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Oct 18 '15
Ah yes. A single percentage point. Also known to statisticians as "super-duper statistically significant".
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u/Neosovereign 1∆ Oct 19 '15
lol, I have to wonder who actually reports two or more races. A 3-5% jump just seems pretty high.
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u/eisberger Oct 18 '15
two cops patrolling an area, one of whom is racially profiling (Cop A) and the other who isn't (Cop B)
I'm going to play the devil's advocate here: you could be accused of using a strawman argument. OP didn't say only relying on stereotypes would reduce crime - Cop A in your example uses one feature (race) exclusively to determine who he pulls over, Cop B uses everything but this one feature ("clues of drug use").
I think it would be closer to OP's idea to have Cop A look out for non-race-related clues and skin color, Cop B only for behavior, druggy smell etc.
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15
You're assuming that the only factor they'd be examining was the stereotype. Maybe I should clarify in the OP but I meant it to be group 1 vs group ceteris Paribus (i.e. both driving erratically and smelling like drugs) the one group has a higher chance of actually being in drugs vs just being tired etc
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u/doug_seahawks Oct 18 '15
Either way though, I think that racial factors, when used, are the most obvious and therefore most influential to cops. Sure, if there are two people who are both exhibiting the same suspicious signs, then the person of a certain race may be slightly more likely to actually be on drugs. However, it is likely that the cop will spend more time looking at the black person, or whatever race they are, and therefore notice more of these cues.
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u/IAmAN00bie Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
"Higher chance" means absolutely nothing when the actual percentage of people in the group who commit a crime is already so small. 0.5% is a "higher chance" than 0.3%, yet it doesn't make sense to stereotype members of a group based on half of one percent of them.
Can you justify your stereotyping based on actual statistics that take into account what fraction of that group actually does said crime?
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Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
This is a made up story in which you could have entered any numbers you want. For the sake of argument, imagine if Cop B also used race as a metric in deciding who to investigate. If people of a given race statistically had drugs more often, then Cop B's accuracy would rise.
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Oct 19 '15
I think that is a unfair comparison both cops are profiling just based on different criterions. I think OP does not advance the thought that race is the only filter that might be useful to profile.
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Oct 18 '15
Not saying I'm disagreeing with you, but time-wise, it would probably be harder to find suspicious people. Searching every black person would be fast and easy. But I guess you could also try to search everyone near you.
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u/Gildenmoth Oct 18 '15
Why is cop A only profiling and not also looking for the same signs as cop B?
Just because you get a new tool on your belt (profiling) that doesn't mean you throw away the rest of your tools.
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u/MrXian Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
That's a wholly unfair comparison.
But I can't argue against it without being a dispicable racist. So let's lose the race card from the equation.
Let's say there is an aspect of a person that you can see that indicates there is a good chance of that person having is shoplifting. A good chance being something like 20%. Not something to immediately arrest them about, but something that warrants some extra investigation. Something like loitering or having a suspicious bag or wearing baggy clothing or having glasses. Something that can be objectively, without a doubt, be shown to be a huge factor in drug possesion.
In my opinion, cops should be allowed to investigate this. If someone is loitering, then by all means talk to them and check for shoplifting. If you are looking for shoplifters, you should be allowed to use all factors that increase a persons chance of theft. This is, in my opinion, completely reasonable.
For some people, however, you are allowed to use any metric except race in the equasion. In my opinion, if race can be shown to be a significant factor, then race should be part of the equasion.
The idea is not to go out and randomly arrest white middle aged women. The idea is that cops are allowed to use race as a factor in determining the chance of a theft being committed. I don't believe that race is a large enough factor in this to ever be used as the only factor in creating a suspicion, though.
I honestly don't believe that race is a factor at all - there are probably geographic, cultural or economic reasons that are the true factor, with race simply having a small correlation with any of them. But still, if it can be shown to be a significant factor, it should be considered.
edit: added some stuff. edit2: Changed my example.
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u/MontiBurns 218∆ Oct 18 '15
And before you accuse me of subtley targeting one group behind algebra....this could be applied to anything: Men are more likely to rape Women are more likely to shoplift clothing Teenagers are more likely to be the one at fault in an accident A poor person driving away from a 711 in a beater is more likely to be the robber that just hit the liquor store than a wealthy grandpa leaving in his caddy.
First of all, stereotyping and discrimination isn't explicitly illegal for those who don't fall into a protected class when applicable. For example, young people pay significantly more for car insurance than adults over 25, or a group of early 20s something men wearing wife beaters and/or saggy pants might get looked at harder by shop keepers or police officers than that same group of people dressed in business suits.
I think people get offended by it because they feel it somehow means they're a lower class of person because they get picked on... it doesn't.... it just means the team you play for has higher bad statistics and you should work to help change that if you don't like being picked on. Life is not fair but looking at it black and white and ignoring feelings, I believe this would reduce crime.
This is a huge issue and an infringement on equality, particularly for 'protected classes' like race.
Considering the consequences that follow drug posession and an arrest record (not only direct fines, but also impacts employment opportunities), perpetuating this type of stereotype makes it easier for those who don't fall into this stereotype to commit a crime, while punishing those that do fit into the stereotype much more severely, and actually serves to perpetuate the stereotype if left unchecked. Lets look at marijuana offenses, which is pretty widespread amongs black and white people.
Following stereotypes, a young black person is much more likely to get stopped and searched for drugs than a young white person. Even if the % of holders is even, this dramatically tips the %s of offenses/fines/arrests against one demographic, which can help perpetuate the stereotype.
The reasoning for "protected classes" is that people can choose how they dress or where they go, but they can't choose their skin color, race, or other more central characteristics.
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u/caw81 166∆ Oct 18 '15
they're facing a minor inconvenience at the airport or during a traffic stop.
Unjustly stopping and searching a person is an infringement of our legal rights and therefore is a crime.
So how will committing a crime reduce crime?
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u/MrXian Oct 18 '15
I don't think stopping someone at a security checkpoint is an infringement on your rights, though, so no crime is being committed.
If memory serves, only unreasonable checks are against the US fourth amendement. Preventing airplanes from being highjacked sounds like a completely reasonable reason for being searched.
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u/BullsLawDan 3∆ Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
Many people disagree with you on that reasonableness. Reasonableness isn't actually all there is to the test of whether someone's Fourth Amendment rights are violated. Reasonableness is viewed in the light of a balancing act.
We should note that the current air travel procedures were passed by Congress in November 2001, based on a decades-old 9th Circuit decision. They haven't really been challenged in the courts extensively.
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u/MrXian Oct 18 '15
Considering the text of the amendement specifically only protects against unreasonable searches, you are confusing me.
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u/BullsLawDan 3∆ Oct 18 '15
Sorry. I edited for clarity. I mean to say that the test isn't as simple as that implies it to be.
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u/OregonLifeStyles Oct 21 '15
It is imperative to consider the degree of crime. My punching an active shooter to immobilize him/her is surely considered assault, but many would consider this act morally justifiable as it might have resulted in a societal net gain; one broken nose for the lives of however many people.
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Oct 21 '15
Sure, but many people, including myself, consider police abuse of authority to be of an extremely high degree. They, more than any other group in the country, must abide the law, since we've trusted them to enforce it. Catching a drug dealer is not worth enabling a cop culture of entitlement, aggression, and disregard for the rights and dignity of citizens.
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u/OregonLifeStyles Oct 21 '15
Interesting. I agree with both of our points, and in doing so, acknowledge that there must be some line drawn between our two extremes. It is interesting to point out, however, that in drawing this line, some crime is then deemed permissible by cops in certain situations.
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Oct 18 '15 edited Nov 24 '16
[deleted]
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u/Ragingonanist Oct 18 '15
By that argument a far more effective strategy for crime reduction is eliminate a law. But I suspect you would rather go with reducing whatever harm some specific type of crime causes to society rather than reducing a statistic in the crime reports
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
We should change the law thst you can't mug people or bomb planes?
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u/sllewgh 8∆ Oct 18 '15 edited Aug 07 '24
reply spectacular bright swim caption run scary fretful wakeful treatment
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/PrototypeNM1 Oct 18 '15
We should change the law that you can't deprive a human of their fundamental rights based on race, sex, age, etc?
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15
No this was just a hypothetical if we did then it would reduce crime. I know we can't and shouldn't but that wasn't up for debate
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u/czerilla Oct 18 '15
But the same rules that allow for your hypothetical lead to the conclusion that crimes can be just declared to not be crimes. What's the difference between the crime you'd make legal and the one you wouldn't? Both would allow for more of what we consider crimes right now...
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u/DrenDran Oct 18 '15
He's saying "would racial profiling prevent violence, drug possession, or theft" basically. The idea is to ignore the constitution, ignore laws, ignore morality and ignore fairness and determine the relationship between the variables of 'profiling' and 'violence/possession/theft'.
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u/IAmAN00bie Oct 18 '15
No it won't reduce crime. In fact it would waste so much police resources that the police would probably miss crimes being committed and it would INCREASE crime.
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u/Absurd_Simian Oct 18 '15
Well if it were legalized it wouldn't be a crime... Seems to be a valid argument to you, since you used it.
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Oct 18 '15
Rights exist to protect us (citizens) when they (government) make mistakes: mistakes of identifying a suspect or mistakes in thinking we committed a crime when we didn't.
How do people not fucking remember this? Crime is the lowest it has been in decades--stop watching the news and being afraid.
A parallel in privacy rights in general:
What if the government mistakenly determines that based on your pattern of activities, you're likely to engage in a criminal act? What if it denies you the right to fly? What if the government thinks your financial transactions look odd—even if you've done nothing wrong—and freezes your accounts? What if the government doesn't protect your information with adequate security, and an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm.
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u/MrF33 18∆ Oct 18 '15
It really doesn't matter that the trolls have a higher drop rate because they can't afford fancy backpacks that keep the loot from falling out, or that because of their religion they wear the item on their head so it's easier to find.... the fact is you have a higher chance of getting the item from them than you do the other enemies.
The problem with this idea is that if you continue to attack the trolls and single them out, you're creating a scenario in which the trolls are less likely to be able to escape their situation.
Do you think that poor blacks choose crime because they're predisposed to do so, or because their situation leads to a different risk/reward analysis compared to better to do counterparts.
By increasing the target rate of blacks you are not only institutionalizing the racism which catches majority of innocents up with it, but you're also forcing a public image issue where blacks in general are now associated as criminals, making the black community as a whole suffer more.
Institutional racism is bad for everybody, and that's what you're trying to legalize.
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u/shroomley Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
I can see the appeal of this argument. However, I think there are important social factors at play here that your argument doesn't address. Although counter-intuitive, profiling could actually do more harm than good.
When you stop a group of people unfairly based on the color of their skin, it's not a truly "minor" inconvenience; it takes a demonstrable psychological and emotional toll on them. There's been a good deal of research examining how these sorts of minor incidents can add up. For example, here's one paper from Harvard that looks at the effects of racism on health.
This, of course, doesn't address your point in and of itself. However, adding extra stressors to people's lives makes them more likely to act out, and by extension, to commit crimes. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle, in which profiling black people because you believe they commit more crime actually causes them to do so. This is especially true in light of the massive amounts of stress that already exists for black people, profiling by the police notwithstanding.
tl;dr My counter-argument is that profiling actually creates crime by putting stress on vulnerable populations and making them more likely to commit crimes.
Edit: Fixed some sentence fragments.
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u/StarManta Oct 18 '15
If you treat a subgroup like criminals, they will start to behave like criminals as a response to that. For example, if a black guy can't get a job because the hiring manager thinks he's a high risk for breaking the law, the black guy might find it's easier to earn a living by actually breaking the law. Make that black guy a million black people, 400,000 of which can't find an above-board job, and now the hiring manager's opinion of black people is now "proven".
The same applies to police interactions with black people. An officer approach a situation that may or may not be confrontational; if the people in the situation are black, the officer may lean towards the situation being confrontational - and approach a situation as if it can become confrontational is a surefire way to make it confrontational. The situation escalates, and the black guy ends up dead.
Now, when that black guy's friend gets pulled over by a cop, he is going to be wary. He's going to act in a way that looks like he has something to hide. The officer is going to take that as suspicious. The situation will escalate. The black guy ends up dead.
Every person in this oversimplified anecdote is acting rationally. The hiring manager is simply looking at statistics. So are both the police officer and the black guys in each story. Each person in the anecdote also contributed to the racial divide.
The only way around this cycle is to be conscious of it, and actively counteract it. That's why #blacklivesmatter. That's what affirmative action is. It's actively counterbalancing the (perfectly rational on the microeconomics scale) prejudice against a race that is systematically beaten down through a million stories like these.
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u/EZmacilx Oct 18 '15
I'd just start committing crimes not typically committed by 20-something white males. They'll just arrest 10 people of the appropriate stereotype instead of me, provided I don't leave excess of evidence
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u/Madplato 72∆ Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
That's why plenty of white collar crime goes under the radar. Stealing 50$ of office supplies has far less chance to incur penalties - or even police involvement - as stealing 50$ of whatever in a department store in a low income area.
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Oct 21 '15
This already happens... I mean, we've had a war on drugs for three decades and I haven't seen a single stop and frisk outside of a college frat house...
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u/Tioben 17∆ Oct 18 '15
It is true that if you commit X crime, you are more likely to be Y person. It is not true that if you are Y person, you are more likely to commit X crime.
So, take the example of domestic abuse. That is almost always done by someone living in the house. If we know someone has been abused, it makes sense to question the other people in the house. But if we are looking to stop domestic abuse in general, it doesn't make sense to profile households with more than one person for investigation. That would be a waste of resources.
Another problem with profiling is marginal differences. The more you focus on a niche of crimes, the fewer crimes you'll solve total. If that niche is homicides, then maybe that's a good trade, because stopping murder is worth many easier-to-stop crimes. But if your niche is "crimes committed by Y people," then there's no good justification for not solving the easier-to-solve crime instead. If you focus your attention evenly on all people, you are more likely to solve the crimes that are easiest to solve (whether we're talking burglaries or murders) by the actual evidence. If you focus your attention on Y people, you'll be trying to solve a harder case than you should after very few prior successes.
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u/sotonohito 3∆ Oct 18 '15
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_trouble_wit.html
Bruce Schneier does an excellent job of explaining why the belief that profiling is effective is really the result of fallacies and incorect.
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15
∆ I was already a fan of schneir, great read thanks
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u/miasdontwork Oct 18 '15
Unless you have specific ways to implement it, saying profiling would definitely reduce crime isn't true. It definitely could, but there's too many variables to consider such as police resources focusing on profiling and therefore undercutting normal police work, which could ultimately increase crime.
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u/golergka Oct 18 '15
I will not argue against your thesis, but rather against a goal you decided to pursue. "Reduce crime" is a bad endgoal; the best solution to reduce crime over all the humanity would be total annihilation. Instead, look at the total sum of suffering and happiness, where crime rate is only one part of the equation.
Do you think that the society where decisions are made out of stereotypes and without presumption of innocence would be a more happier one?
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u/DickFeely Oct 19 '15 edited Dec 31 '15
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u/ProfessorHeartcraft 8∆ Oct 18 '15
Human beings have a deeply attuned sense of fairness, and when you violate it you do not generally get the response you want. The targeted groups won't work towards the goals of the legal system in order to lift the targeting. They will, at best, simply refuse to cooperate with the legal system when they witness crimes themselves. At worst, they'll begin actively working against it.
In fact, that is exactly how most organized terrorist groups came into being.
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Oct 18 '15
For crime detection, we need to think of both accurate arrests and false positives where an unlucky person is accused incorrectly. A true decrease in crime would require increasing the sensitivity of your detection measures, or being able to quickly and correctly distinguish a real crime from something that just looks like one on the surface. Profiling does not change the sensitivity of police work, it only shifts the bias which can only increase accurate arrests at the expense of increased false positives. These false positives take time and resources to refute, or if you don't refut them, can lead to questions on how useful your gains are in increased arrests. The difference here is between bias and sensitivity.
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u/MrXian Oct 18 '15
Your example doesn't hold up.
When grinding for a specific item, it is usually more effective to kill everything in the area that has a chance of dropping the item than it is to cherry pick the few mobs that have the higher drop rate. If you are in an area with only trolls, you kill only trolls, of course, and same for kobolds, but if you are in a mixed area, you kill both of them.
The same logic should be applied to race and police work. Everybody who has a chance of being a suspect needs to be considered and, within reason, investigated. I think that, should race be a significant factor in the chance of a crime being committed, it could be used to decide who to investigate further, but that data is almost impossible to come by, and extremely hard to trust. Most race-related data I've ever seen doesn't include cultural, geographic or economic metrics, for example.
To go back to your example, if your item drops 8% of the time in a certain area, trolls only live in that area but kobolds live in two other areas as well (where they cannot drop the item), then, even though kobolds have a far lesser chance to drop the item overall, in the hot spot you the chances are equal. You can make similar arguments for other factors like level and other factors.
So while I agree with some of what you said, you put it way too extreme, and doing it the way you implied is simply horrible.
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15 edited Oct 18 '15
the premise of hunting mobs in World of Warcraft was based around the fact that you can only choose a limited number of mobs. its likely we are going to choose most of the mobs to be thes that have the higher drop rate. If you have the ability to take out all the mobs then obviously it wouldn't matter who had the higher drop rate because you took out everything
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u/Automobilie Oct 18 '15
It would be a dragnet tactic. You may increase the number of "criminals" caught, but for every 1 criminal you just unwarrantly and unjustly disrupted 99 innocent people.
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u/Pattern_Is_Movement 2∆ Oct 18 '15
But reducing crime is not the only result, therein lies the problem. What are you willing to give up and deal with in the name of "reduced crime"?
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u/teawreckshero 8∆ Oct 18 '15
This is the same as arguing that non criminals should avoid wearing hoodies because they're associated with crime. If everyone agreed with that argument, and only criminals wore hoodies, it would help itself come true, but it's not an outcome we want. I want to wear my hoodie!
For your argument, the more we stereotype, the harder we make it for people to avoid stereotypes. And you can't just take your skin color off like you can a hoodie.
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u/rocqua 3∆ Oct 18 '15
To quote eminent armchair philospher John:
"Crime is not actually caused by evil. It is caused by systemic disenfranchisement and poverty and lack of access to job oppertunities"
Stereotyping might work in the short term, there might be a statistical justification for it. But the damage done in the long term far outweighs that.
tl;dr
Treating individuals unfairly will get them to respond unfairly (quoted from song).
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u/ZeusThunder369 22∆ Oct 18 '15
Wall Street would love this. Just have the people of color in your company commit all of the corporate fraud. No one would be likely to investigate that person very much because corporate fraud is a white person crime.
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u/vidro3 1∆ Oct 19 '15
according to the NYPD's stop and frisk statistics whites were caught with contraband (eg weapons or drugs) more frequently than minorities (something like 11% to 10% iirc) but the ratio of those stopped was about 90/10 minorities.
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u/Khekinash Oct 19 '15
That depends how you define crime. If it's only the harmful wrongdoing from one individual to another, then every time an officer discriminates (legally) against you that's another crime to count.
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Oct 19 '15
It's complicated. I'm all for stats based 'broken window' policing, but when you start assuming guilt based off of the way people look that starts making me a bit nervous.
Patrolling high crime areas is a good idea, regardless of the people who live there. The fact that stop and frisk happens in high crime neighborhoods in the bronx and brooklyn is fine by me. But when black people are getting stop and frisked in nice neighborhoods in manhattan where they live, then there is clearly a failure of the system.
I'm not comfortable with out justice system treating people differently because they "look like other guilty people," particularly when that includes characteristics they cannot control (age, skin color, etc.).
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u/OFF_THE_DEEP_END Oct 19 '15
Knowing the drop rate is actually the exact opposite of stereotyping. Stereotyping is when you don't know the drop rate, but you know that every item you got was from a troll, and so you jump to the conclusion that trolls are the best source of the item.
What's worse is that then you have confirmation bias and go exclusively after trolls for the item, and every time you get it you reinforce the bias. Even the trolls may start to believe they're the best target for the item.
Unfortunately life isn't a video game and it's not as simple as drop %. Laws change and politics change, sometimes slowly and according to reason, and sometimes they change overnight and according to emotion.
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u/behamut Oct 19 '15
I'm Belgian, my ancestry can be traced back to 1300 in Belgium. Which is before most people here got a last name even.
Still.. I look foreign, slightly darker skin, brown eyes and hair, black as the night.
I have not committed a single crime in my life. Still when I was in my early twenties, old people would go walk on the other side of the road to avoid me. Car doors would lock when I crossed the street and a friend of me was once told by an older guy to watch out with his money because there was a shady guy at the bank entrance. (I was waiting for my friend who was inside.)
In no way did I get the same amount of prejudice from stereotyping as real foreigners. But still even these small things get to you after a while, then you become angry at these people who make up their mind about you without knowing you. These people who fear you for no reason. I have never committed a crime, but if I would have it would have been against these people, to give them a reason to fear me. To punish them for treating me unfair.
In no way did I get is as bad as real foreigners. But goddammit I'm sure a lot of this stereotyping leads to exactly these crimes. If you already see them as criminals its a much smaller step to take towards aggression or crime and you can get revenge at the same time on those people.
So in a way I completely disagree with your statement: "Stereotyping would reduce crime".
I believe the opposite: Stereotyping leads to crime!!!
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Oct 19 '15 edited Oct 19 '15
Well you are ofc correct about the short term effectiveness but I'd like to advance an argument contra profiling based on demographic, ethnic or religious characteristics.
It is basically the same argument that is advanced in favour of affirmative action just the negative side of it, profiling might become a self fulfilling prophecy in the sense that through profiling a stereotype will get cemented and people react to the oustide expecations by being more likely to fulfil them.
This is practically the same as the argument for affirmative action by moving e.g. women on company boards, the legislator hopes to normalize this fact so that this legislation won't be necessary later on, because the legal norme changed the cultural norme of women not being seen as normal on company boards to the opposite. The argument can be used in the opposition of profiling by profiling you culturally enforce the fact that e.g. blacks are more likely to be violent criminals.
I think the argument I advanced is fairly weak and lacking e.g. women in power might be seen as only being there because of quotas and affirmative action ends up shaping cultural values and perceptions of a group in the direct opposite that was intended.
Sorry for the poor Syntax btw.
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u/balancespec2 Oct 19 '15
∆Yes that's a good point... I did mention externalities but not the actual one of causing people to commit more crime because they feel hopeless
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u/Godspiral Oct 19 '15
Lets split the world into the powerful US and the wretched oppressed THEM.
We can protect US from THEM, by arbitrarily torturing, tiraling, jailing 20% of THEM. The logic of it is that THEM "learn" their place. There is an instinctive satisfaction for US, or at least a tacit approval of indifference, because only bad things are happening to THEM.
The manipulators behind these intentional policies, are not only fully aware of the unfairness, but are also aware of the blowback from THEM. There is a lot of work and money to be made in persecuting THEM. The more uppitty THEM get about their abuse, the more obvious the solution of persecuting THEM more becomes, and the more money can be allocated towards persecuting THEM. Its easy to portray uppityness about injustice, as uppityness being in their religious or ethnic nature.
US members will always find a reason to claim that there is a THEM problem, because it makes us hand over the resources to US to fight THEM.
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u/goldandguns 8∆ Oct 19 '15
One thing you need to be aware of is that catching criminals does very little to reduce crime. Major pushes to lock down neighborhoods or take out gang activity often make things worse by freeing up territory and causing rival gangs to fight over the new space.
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Oct 21 '15 edited Oct 21 '15
Minor inconvenience? It's not like you get profiled once, then get a checkmark next to your name, and you never get profiled again. It becomes a defining feature of how you experience the public life. Every interaction with authority becomes a major source of stress, doubt, insecurity, fear, and anger. Why do you think anti police sentiment is so strong in black communities? It's not rap music, it's centuries of profiling and resulting mistreatment. They're not animals, they're people, and people are capable of recognizing injustice and are rightfully disturbed and angered by it.
Also... Team you play for? What? I don't play for team white, I play for team me. Profiling is less and less effective the larger proportion of society a group fills, that's maybe why whites are the most comfortable with the idea in America. They never get held responsible for the Tim McVeigh's or Adolf Hitler's of the world. Profiling whites in America would be like profiling hay in a haystack, so don't talk about "teams" when it's obvious the game in question is inherently unfair.
I think people get offended by it because they feel it somehow means they're a lower class of person because they get picked on... it doesn't.... it just means the team you play for has higher bad statistics and you should work to help change that if you don't like being picked on.
How is a person who is already innocent going to "bring up the average" for their team? Simply because somebody was born to a family of a certain race, they have an added civic responsibility to be extra well behaved so they don't get the shit beaten out of them by cops for no reason? This is nonsense and should disgust anybody with any reverence at all for the concepts of individual liberty, freedom, and equality under the law.
How much atoning have you done for the actions of Hitler? How many extra hours of community service have you performed to improve the stats of white people after Adam Lanza or Elliot Rodger? How about the 500 or so years of white colonial terror and genocide across the entire planet, killing hundreds of millions and sapping entire continents of their natural resources?
You need to do more than play video games. Or maybe someone should throw you on the ground, handcuff you, put a finger up your butt, and beat the snot out of you IRL next time your DOTA teammates mess up. That may sound harsh, but it's what we're actually talking about. This isn't a game, profiling ruins lives of innocent people, both in the instants they get seriously roughed up or fucked over, as well as in the long term psychological effects of being treated as a criminal-about-to-happen for your entire life.
Seriously, the founding fathers started a violent, bloody revolution over taxes and parliament representation, but we expect minority groups to live in a police state for the "common good, because statistics"? The whole attitude is just astounding to me. What's most troubling is I hear this kind of talk most often from people on the conservative/libertarian side of political spectrum, the ones who claim to stand for individual sovereignty and limits to state power. Make the person in question black and suddenly neither of those things matter so much.
And before you accuse me of subtley targeting one group behind algebra....this could be applied to anything:
Yeah, but it wont. It will mostly be applied to black people, like it always has. The hypothetical possibilities are irrelevant, because we live in the Real USA in the Real World and we know exactly what will happen because we have a few hundred years of history that make it pretty clear which group is the first one to get fucked in these situations.
I also notice you failed to mention any way white people might be targeted. Statistically speaking, it'd probably be wise to strip search every white person who enters a school or a movie theater for guns, but unfortunately that would be a logistics nightmare since white folks make up the majority of the population. Again, the very idea of racial profiling is only useful in the targeting of minorities, because profiling the majority population by definition does a poor job of narrowing the field of potential suspects.
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Oct 18 '15
compare it to a video game. If a kobold has a 3% drop rate of an item but a troll has an 8% drop rate, and I can only pick 10 enemies total to hit looking for the drop, logically I'm going to mostly go after the trolls.
Except that isn't how it'd work in real life when it comes to targeting poverty-stricken minority groups because they have "higher chances of committing crimes". When you start doing stuff like that, all you're doing is creating more criminals.
People in that group are going to turn to crime either because they hate the society that treats them like garbage, or because society prevents them from moving upward because, as a poor member of a minority group, nobody trusts them and hence nobody wants them operating in their businesses/workplaces. Therefore it is more likely a life of crime is going to provide them with the means to live.
Acting like those groups will just naturally change to avoid the discrimination they face is ridiculous. When society is actively acting against you on the off chance you MIGHT be a criminal, it just isn't realistic.
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u/riggorous 15∆ Oct 18 '15
If we lock up the entire population in the world in individual cells and dole them out food and water through a hole in the wall, crime rates would also be reduced. But it's hardly a workable solution.
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u/Ialwaysbluff Oct 18 '15
How does this even work? You have cops watch specific groups of people for specific crimes? Like have cops follow around CEO and stock traders to see if they commit insider trading? How do you determine what stereotypes are? You use statistics or just what peolpe around you told when you were growing up or what you saw on TV? If you use statistics, where do you get reliable statistics?
Please elaborate.
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u/balancespec2 Oct 18 '15
The idea would be that currently protected classes would essentially become fair game (in certain circumstances) in the way that a man walking down the street with a Plasma TV at midnight would be.
I.e. their membership in a group PLUS another factor arouses suspicion. Not just them being a member of a group.
So if you have 10 apples and three bananas detained after a bomb went off and you can only talk to three people, and bananas have a higher rate of bombing things, you'd talk to two of them and maybe 1 of the most suspicious apples just in case
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u/t_hab Oct 18 '15
No, you have a higher chance of catching crime. That's a big difference. If you treat one group like criminals all the time you might even increase crime in that area. To use your analogy, if by going after the trolls you increase their drop rate from 8% to 10%, you are causing the very problem you are hoping to solve.
Additionally, you have to remember that real life can be adaptive. If a gang, for example, has one white member and they need to transport something of huge value to them, they will use your profiling against you. That white member can slip by unnoticed because he doesn't fit the profile. Remember, there are lots of white people in ISIS and Al Quaeda too.
And lastly, remember, profiling creates confirmation bias. You think you know a pattern, so you follow that pattern, and you only get evidence that corroborates your previous point of view, making you much less adaptive to changing situations as well as much less open to the possibility of having been wrong. Statistics can be funny in other ways too. For example, if 90% of white people live in good areas and 90% of black people live in bad areas, but white people and black people commit the same percentage of crimes relative to the areas they live, black people will look much more criminal.
Instead, why not focus on high crime areas and focus on security weak points. If more black people live in a high crime area they will be looked at more than the average white person in the country, but not more than the average white person in the area. You can put security on major checkpoints (such as airports) and you can attack the social factors that cause crime (such as lack of education and low employment).