[king_jester]

You must be living under a rock to not have read one of the bazillion of stories about policing and racism that have come up since last fall, but for a great overview of the subject I highly recommend The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [1]

[1] www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/

[briandear]

We're talking about SWAT team raids. I am interested if the rate of raids is higher for a specific race compared to other types of arrests.

Also to be intellectually honest in the subject, one can't use media coverage as a proxy for actual data. Lots of anecdotes doesn't necessarily provide evidence. There are thousands of arrests daily. I haven't seen thousands of news stories -- generally only when there was an angle that would elicit ratings. A white man getting shot by the cops doesn't generally make national headlines just like the over 2000 shootings of (mostly) black victims in Chicago barely warrants mention.

My point isn't to argue if cops are racist. My point is that knee-jerk claims of racism ought to be quantifiable.

[happyscrappy]

Police need to try harder to ignore the statistics of who commits crime. Just because one group is statistically committing more crime that should not affect their dealing with an individual who is innocent until proven guilty.

[zo1]

It's only a problem if unreasonable, excessive and unwarranted violence is used by the law enforcers. They should use every available indicator of crime in order to focus on problem areas. The alternative means that we're willingly sacrificing safety, peace and security in order to not offend, and that I find absolutely distasteful and negligent.

Of course, 100% innocent until proven guilty; I'm not saying we should convict/target people without merit based purely off of race/age/obesity/hair color.

[rmxt]

No, there are problems with racial profiling long before things devolve to "unreasonable, excessive and unwarranted violence." What defines a "problem area" as you put it? What is an "indicator"? Am I incorrectly reading between the lines here to say that you believe that it is perfectly acceptable to police black neighborhoods at a higher rate merely because they are black neighborhoods? That is, your "indicator" is, to put it bluntly, blackness.

EDIT: Like any mutual fund manager will tell you, "past performance is not a guarantee of future results." Police policy is barking up the wrong tree if they think that blackness/race are the variables to watch, much like anyone would be amiss if they solely looked at TTM rate of return for an investment option, and that is to say nothing of the positive feedback loop that racial profiling creates. Poverty, education levels, and the availability of social mobility are the variables that should be watched to create sane public policy in the USA.

[zo1]

Yes, I absolutely think the police should not discriminate against crime-heavy neighborhoods by policing them less than they deserve/need. To police them less is the discriminatory thing to do, as they need it more than safer neighborhoods.

Of course, the entire discussion we're having is invalid if we work with the premise that more policing = more convictions, by virtue of the crime being everywhere (across boundaries in whatever criteria you wish, e.g. race) regardless, and convictions being a simple byproduct of policing and not of said underlying factor like race, obesity, education, socioeconomic status, or hair-color.

[rmxt]

My point of contention isn't whether or not we should police high crime neighborhoods more or less, it's whether we should condone the (less-common) explicit or (more-common) implicit police policy of using race as a proxy for the other variables that I mentioned previously. You've danced around my question: is race a valid "indicator" of "problem areas" in your model?

[zo1]

If the statistics agree with it, then yes, of course race can be used as an indicator of problem areas. But as I said in my second paragraph, there are certain things that invalidate that completely.