One needs to look at who the police are choosing to interact with to understand the denominator properly. The numbers seem to show that they are biased towards interacting with black people.
I get it and I have no disagreement with qualifying the numbers. It's a very complicated issue, but, if it is in fact true, when controlled for all other factors, if a particularity defined demographic group engages in disproportionate amount of criminal activity (less or more), then wouldn't you expect that that would filter down to the individual interactions?
If an individual police officer is choosing who to frisk (or interact with), and the only things they have to go on are visible superficial characteristics (i.e. age, gender, ethnicity, clothing, etc.), and the global fact that those characteristics are statically correlated with more or less crime, that would be impossible for an individual to control their biases.
We know this is a painful exercise, because people are not just those superficial characteristics, and it's unfair for an individual to be singled out for those characteristics - but that's the ONLY information available to the officer.
The officer cannot control their bias, because if they try, they will either over or under compensate and because they are human. It's why we have double-blind trials and the scientific method - we know even well-meaning humans cannot control their biases. And this isn't an example of racism, because it could clothing or gender that trigger the frisk (I guarantee you that men are stopped more than women - WHY?!?!?), but aspect of human cognition. The only way to control for that is by introducing a non-biased random decision maker. For example, in airport security, there will be a device that will randomly flag passengers for extra screening. Perhaps something like that should be the case in these 'stop-and-frisk' policies? But even that has limited value. If a particular neighborhood with issues of crime, is dominated by an ethnic group, even random sample will involve disproportionate 'harassment'.
A while back Sam Harris had a debate with an airport security expert on profiling in airport security[1]. Sam Harris advocated for profiling and security expert was not. Sam Harris was 100% wrong and didn't admit it. The security expert talked about how proper airport security should work (and the problems with profiling and how to control for that). That debate has analogues to this conversation, because police should adopt some of those strategies because profiling is socially painful and breeds resentment and has limited success ... and individuals will not make the right decision in context.
I could have been a bit more clear in my summary. The article cites statistics that claim a higher rate of police stops of Black and Hispanic people are unfounded than those of white people. If true, this is evidence of police targeting practices that are disproportionate with actual underlying criminal activity rates.
Taking a step back to look at the historical context... The brutal wake of slavery and ingrained systemic racism are primary contributors to heightened criminal activity we see in some predominantly black neighborhoods. Black people didn’t collectively choose to live in worse conditions with high crime rates... After unlocking their literal chains, a savagely racist society pushed them in that direction.
If society were savagely racist why are asians not pushed in that direction?
But lets say this is true: it still means the whole police thing is a symptom, and not the cause. So the big question (and elephant in the room) is, what can be done.
> if a particularity defined demographic group engages in disproportionate amount of criminal activity (less or more), then wouldn't you expect that that would filter down to the individual interactions?
What you're asking is "is it legitimate to discriminate against individuals because of the demographic group to which they belong".
I realize that it's not obvious that that's the question you're asking. But when reframed in that way, my answer is obviously no. You should engage with an individual if you have evidence of a crime or suspicious activity. Existing while black is neither.
> Sam Harris advocated for profiling and security expert was not.
I don't think "profiling" by itself quite captures what Harris was arguing for. He was arguing for profiling based on a characteristic--being a Muslim--that can't be directly observed. This was a key point of Schneier's rebuttal. So Harris's version of profiling isn't workable even if we admit that the characteristic in question does increase the probability of the person causing harm.
The profiling done by police does not have the same problem, because the characteristics involved are visible. However, visible characteristics are not limited to the ones you note: they also include behavior. So your statement that visible characteristics like age, gender, ethnicity are the ONLY ones available to the officer is not correct. The officer also sees what the people are doing and whether it looks suspicious, the people's body language, and so on. It is not unfair to single out people for their behavior.
It demonstrated in a very straightforward way how the given statistic can result from very different underlying realities, and then provided evidence of the less obvious possibility. The fact that police stops of black people are less likely to find contraband than those of white people seems rather significant.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-cap...
One needs to look at who the police are choosing to interact with to understand the denominator properly. The numbers seem to show that they are biased towards interacting with black people.