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I disagree. 24/7 totalitarian surveillance of all citizens at all times would also "work", far better than racial profiling. I am absolutely confident that it would drastically reduce the murder rate. But we still shouldn't do it. It'd be a bad thing in itself, an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on hundreds of millions of people 24/7 - in the same way that perpetually being looked on as possible criminals/rapists/illegal immigrants every day of their lives is an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on the tens of millions of non-white American citizens. (Similarly, parents should not be monitoring their children every second of their life beyond their toddler years, even if that does result in slightly more children who get run over crossing the street.)
In other words:
I think that the cost of normalizing racial profiling would in fact amount to more bad things than its implementation would prevent. Above I spoke of the distributed psychological harm done to all POCs from having to live in a society where it is normalized, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The horrors of slavery, segregation and lynchings are not so far behind us that we should laugh off the chance that reintroducing racial stereotypes into the Overton Window would allow for their return in force. Not in five years, but in fifty? A hundred? Slippery slopes exist. Give the ape brain's anti-outgroup bias an inch and it will take a mile, far in excess of what can be rationally justified.
Fair enough. This is more of a costs-benefit argument. Your initial argument was it’s wrong because it’s wrong. I pointed out that big racial differences in crime are “true” and you can get big efficiency gains by utilizing that data.
El Salvador seems overall happier they did profiling and just locked all the people with gang tattoos up.
Would you agree now if you can save X amount of lives or reduce Y amount of bad things that profiling is a proper tactic? It’s not just wrong because it’s wrong?
Ah, right. I think we were talking at slight cross purposes. When I said "because it's wrong", I meant that I wanted to designate "openly racially profiling minorities" as in itself "a bad thing", harm done to minorities as a class, as per the framework I outlined in my latest reply where living in a society that racially profiles imposes a significant psychological cost on any person who might be targeted by it, whether or not they actually are. (In contrast to how you seemed to consider the first-order effects of racial profiling itself to be neutral or negligible, and only look at outcomes, ie how many guilty vs innocent men get detained, how unpleasant it is to be briefly detained if innocent, etc.)
I did not mean "it's wrong because it's wrong" as some sort of completely abstract "if someone racially-profiles in the middle of a forest and no one hears it, Baby Jesus still cries" position, though I suppose I can see how you got that impression.
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