[mtts]

What’s the situation with Nordic police and minorities? Because in the not really Nordic but reasonably civilized Netherlands the supposedly well educated police force is also a known hotbed of racism. Members of the police force in The Hague refer to themselves as “exterminators of Moroccan vermin”. Ethnic profiling is rampant and on at least one occasion a man of color was held down by a group of cops until he died as well.

At least part of the problem is cops themselves.

[tokai]

Police in Denmark are bullies too. Breaking basic rights, assaulting citizens, covering for each other, lobbying against body cams and visible identifiers on cops like numbers, etc. Profiling is legal and used extensively.

[ficklepickle]

Until we realize that tribalism is human nature, it won't change.

Racism is universal amongst humans. We are tribal primates, after all. We need to admit the biases exist and address them head-on.

It stands to reason that having a bias against out groups once increased an individuals chance of survival. Now it is actively harming society. If we can't rise above our primitive impulses, we are doomed.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's important to understand that the actual politics of reform pose a serious obstacle to admitting biases exist. If a police department produced a document saying "10% of our officers are moderately to severely racist, we're aiming to get that below 3%", they'd be eviscerated.

[bsanr2]

Bigotry is universal amongst humans. Racism is a systematic application of that bigotry such that it can operate on an "undesirable" population with or without the consent of the people supporting and maintaining that system. Racism is not a natural sociological phenomenon; it is a deliberate effort to twist the nature of human behavior and cognition towards cruel, cynical, violent, and destructive ends.

We need to stop telling ourselves these lies about who we are and what we're capable of.

[collyw]

Profiling is seen as bad, but I honestly don't think many grandmas will be the ones committing violent crime (or females in general). If you have some statistics to prove otherwise please show me them.

[mtts]

Someone once explained it to me like this:

Let's say 1% of the population commits crimes.

Let's also, for the sake of argument, say all crimes are committed by black people.

Of the general population, 10% is black.

If you profile all black people, you will indeed profile the 1% of the population that commits crimes, but you will also profile 9% of the population that does not commit crimes.

And before you say "not the entirety of the 10% black population is profiled": maybe ask some black people about this. It's not 100% of the black population that gets profiled but certainly a very significant percentage.

And even if it's just half or even a quarter of the black population that you're profiling, you're still profiling a lot of innocent people.

This is the reason why profiling is bad.

(and note that in reality the figures are even worse).

[roenxi]

The conclusion doesn't really follow from the premise. If all crime were committed by one racial group it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures.

If there are credible reports of a white man committing murders it doesn't make any sense to waste resources listing mainly female Asian suspects, for example. There are also other similar issues. For example, if a crime happens on my street I expect to be treated as more of a suspect based only on my proximity.

The issue of racism is (and needs to be) grounded in things other than rational resource allocation.

[bsanr2]

The majority of crime in America is committed by white people, in terms of absolute numbers of arrests, value of stolen goods and funds, etc. By your logic, it would be most effective to target white people. This is without even taking into account that white suspects tend to avoid arrest, prosecution, conviction, and long jail sentences at higher rates than other racial groups (that is to say, when brought to a particular level of the justice system, they are less likely than others to proceed further).

However, it's clear that the vast majority of resources are devoted to black areas and poor areas, and to responding to directly "violent" crime. A mugging is more sensational than white collar crime, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint, I'm not sure it's rational to devote more resources to catching the mugger when, for example, there is widespread wage theft depressing incomes in the mugger's city. Which causes more damage in the long run?

[bsanr2]

A dead reply to this post expressed incredulity at the disparate treatment of Bernie Madoff and countless black convicts when comparing the scale of the damage they respectively caused. They illustrated this with the erroneous "factoid" that Madoff stole more than the value of all robberies and burglaries by black people in the country's history. This is probably untrue, due in no small part to the nature of his scheme. That said, the trillions in value lost during the Great Recession, which was the result of completely unpunished malfeasance by executives and regulators across the financial industry, and which stripped black families of roughly half their wealth, almost surely eclipses whatever figure one could come up with for the proposed above. I agree with the spirit of his comment.

[mtts]

Yes it does, because this is about profiling.

If all crime is committed by South Asian women, you're right that it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures such as, for example, only looking for suspects that are female and have a South Asian suspects.

Profiling, however, where you preventively search if not outright harass people, is something entirely different: if one in ten South Asian women engage in crime, every time you preventively search and harass one of them, you have a ninety percent chance of searching and harassing someone who is innocent.

[collyw]

So it better to target 99% of the population that don't commit crimes rather that 9%? You haven't convinced me. Interesting that you chose black people for your example, its almost like you are profiling them.

[leetcrew]

it's better not to target any fraction of the population until you have some reason to suspect that an individual has committed a crime.

[fsloth]

I don't know about minorities but the level of unprofessionalism obvious in the most egregious cases of police violence would feel improbable to me in countries like Sweden ,Finland or Norway. Yeah, they are tiny countries so the sample size is really small. But the police culture is different. Guns are not used, and if they are, their use is strictly monitored.

For example, Finland has a large number of firearms, but police don't come to a crime scene guns ablaze unless they have a very good reason to think there is a need to use them.