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Who cares about 'vastly more likely'? We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime. This is basic stuff, I can't believe I have to explain it.
People who care about actually stopping the thing in question. It's a huge point of data that we're supposed to ignore, what, just because it gives you warm and fuzzy anti-racist feelings and you don't care about immigration enforcement anyway?
Not the person you're replying to, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there. I care very much about the enforcement of anti-rape laws, for example, or indeed laws against cold-blooded murder; but even if some reliable statistics should show that in a Bayesian sense, the culprit is more likely to be black than white, I would still take the principled stand that the police should not be allowed to let that statistic enter into the identification of suspects.
Why not? Because it's wrong. Because it's wicked and counter to the fundamental dignity of Mankind. Because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes far out of proportion with the actual statistical fact, which if unchecked may be used to excuse vast-scale mistreatment of POCs as it was in the past. Because it is an insult to the memory of all black victims of slavery and segregation. A hundred reasons. I could talk about utilitarian concerns and the greater good, or I could talk about the moral necessity of making racist heuristics taboo for the sake of human dignity and civilization - I think these are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing from different paradigms.
At the end of the day, yes, we're "supposed to ignore" this "huge point of data" for the same kind of reason that the government isn't supposed to install telescreens in every home. Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong.
Racism works. It’s efficient.
How was it efficient for 2 decades 70 year old ladies had to take their shoes off at airports when we could have just racial profiled every Muslim male for additional screening? Then everyone could leave for the airport 30 minutes later because airport security did not exists for them. And here’s the thing about racial profiling it’s better for Muslim men too. Since they are about 1% of US airport passengers they would have a security guard screen that thoroughly for 10 minutes which still saves them 20 minutes of their day.
Suicidal empathy like you described worked as an argument 5 years ago. Today people just want a society that functions well.
Racial profiling is good because it improves net happiness in society.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
Your argument basically breaks down to just saying it’s wrong. A very typical leftist response of the variety “these are human rights so we can’t debate these things”.
Since racial profiling works and is very efficient at reducing crime or terrorism that means it’s a “true” model of the world.
I think it’s very hard to describe something as both “wrong” and “true”.
Because racial profiling “works” it also means that you are willing to allow some obvious bad things to happen if we don’t do it - more young black men killed by black men, a TSA that pats down Asian girls, more expensive ICE operations, etc. how can you describe something as wrong if it reduces bad things in the world?
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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