[doublekill]

Sucks to be poor, but that can never be an acceptible excuse for criminal behavior (as long as you can feed yourself and your family through legal ways, shoplifting is hardly a desperate necessity for first world inhabitants, but damages from shoplifting do bankrupt hard working store owners).

If the discrimination (not racism!) causes a bias towards a certain race, neglecting other races who shoplift, and focusing on innocents, then the accuracy will suffer. These systems are not deemed problematic because they are ineffective, they are problematic, because they do a "good" job.