[taneq]

So maybe, rather than sticking our collective head in the sand and saying "no, it's impossible that black people are more likely to break bail or reoffend", we say "holy crap that's obviously caused by something" and try to address the root cause?

You cannot fix a problem by pretending it doesn't exist.

[rebuilder]

There's a difference between saying a disproportionately large number of recidivists are black and saying black people are more likely to reoffend. The latter frames the issue in terms of "what black people are like", and worse, gives the impression any given black person is more of a criminal than any given white person.

I'm not usually such a stickler for language, but in this instance it does seem to me that this kind of profiling serves to perpetuate that narrative of criminality being a feature of a group of people, and doesn't help to get at the causes.