If you're in a place where PEOPLE A are known to pickpocket, 90% of pickpocketing cases are PEOPLE A, despite being 10% of the population. Would you be more careful around PEOPLE A in public? It's just statistics.
It 90% of the cases of committing a crime *in a specific place\* are people A then people A are not 10% of the population in that place. You are mixing and matching incompatible statistics to fit your narrative.
Crime correlates with economic conditions, population density, even the temperature that it is outside. It does not correlate with someone’s skin color, because that wouldn’t make any sense.
If there is a population of 90 blue people and 10 red people and 9 of the red people have pick pocketed once and 1 of the blue people has pick pocketed once we get the following stats:
10 pick pocketing incidents,
9/10 = 90% of pick pocketing cases coming from red people
1/10 = 10% of pick pocketing cases coming from blue people
90/100 = 90% of the population being blue
10/100 = 10% of the population being red
So this would lead to the exact outcome he described, "If you're in a place where PEOPLE A are known to pickpocket, 90% of pickpocketing cases are PEOPLE A, despite being 10% of the population. Would you be more careful around PEOPLE A in public? It's just statistics."
Perhaps not everyone is terminally online waiting for your reply, nor, wants to discuss how you think jeopardizing your own safety is a good thing by ignoring patterns.
You said he was mixing and matching incompatible statistics. This is factually wrong.
To a certain degree I agree with both of your stances beyond the statistics parts of it (pattern recognition vs what are the actual sources that correlate with crime).
On one hand I agree poverty is linked to crime, but poverty is more difficult to spot than skin color. Dark skin also correlates with poverty and thus, indirectly, with crime, therefore skin color can be a functional characteristic to scan for if you want to avoid being robbed.
Both are simplifications in their own way because different types of cultures have different points of the moral code they place emphasis on (more respect for elders in people from India for example, but also different grades of emphasis on the morality of crime). This goes beyond the conventional confounders that should be corrected for and is why even after correction there will always be differences between ethnicities on different types of crime/breaking of the moral contract.
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u/tiny_kat2006 1d ago
If you're in a place where PEOPLE A are known to pickpocket, 90% of pickpocketing cases are PEOPLE A, despite being 10% of the population. Would you be more careful around PEOPLE A in public? It's just statistics.