[belorn]

> This means that we can be zoom in better on the issues that lead to such crimes being committed

The problem of stereotyping is that people take a complex problem and attempts to reduce it by measuring people based on one or a few bits of information.

Crime is a bit like rain. The more one attempt to zoom closer to the atom the less we understand it and the poorer the prediction becomes. It get even worse when attempting to zoom in order to understand rare events.

If we look at the specific crime of rape in Sweden we see that P(person is Muslim | person is a rapist) > P(Person is a Christian | person is a rapist), by around 300%. The political reaction to people noticing the data is a bit volatile to say the least.

It is possible to still use the data, but its best to zoom out rather than in. A common one for crime is the acknowledgement that high risk groups tend share a trait of low social economic status. Thus a popular general prediction method is to measure social economic status when determining risk. What we then get is a more general P(person is socially isolated AND low income AND low education | person commit a crime) that we can compare to other prediction models. People then take each of those classifications and zooms out even further by addressing them independently and outside of crime prevention as improving them has value in itself.

[beatgammit]

And since there isn't a ton of data here, it's quite likely that some of the factors are heavily skewed by outliers.

For example, skin color may not be the determining factor in college violence, but social ostracism, so it would only become relevant in specific cases where that caused social tension. The larger problem, however, may be completely unrelated to skin color if most colleges don't have a problem with ostracising people with a particular skin color.

So yes, I completely agree that we need to take a step back and look at multiple explanations for the evidence we have and see if they explain future events.