How do we distinguish systemic racism from legitimate profiling?
I mean if I'm called out to fix an IT issue I don't start with the assumption that it's a server side issue, I start with the user's laptop and 99% of the time that's where the issue is occurring. Likewise if you're a cop and you're dealing with people who are breaking the law, and more often than not those people are black, as a simple matter of efficiency you're going to pay more attention to black people.
Consider, though, you don't want bias and prejudice affecting things negatively.
Imagine if Aussie tourists got a reputation of being trouble-makers on holiday. Now, every time you leave the country, and someone in your hotel loses something, the police always come to your room, and search it from tip to toe, which takes 4 hours. Every time you plan to go on an excursion, you have to cancel and lose your deposit, because your room keeps being searched. Every time there's a murder, you stay 3 days in a cell.
Even if it's more likely to be an Aussie, do you really think that it's fair that you keep being hassled that much by the police, when you've never done anything like that, just because you're also of the same nationality as them?
Besides, if the police start profiling the Aussie tourists, then the British tourists will probably think that they won't get blamed for causing trouble, and will probably cause mayhem.
There are certain types of truths that are reasonable to associate and use.
But there are certain types of truths that, even if they are true, you don't want to rely on them, because it sends the wrong message to people, and then they get the wrong idea, and then that misperception causes far more problems than the extra hassle you would have not relying on that truth.
Put another way, I know that certain types of people are the people who cause 90% of the BS that IT people have to deal with. But you can't blame them, because it will just make them upset and make things even worse.
So sometimes, you have to ignore that sort of profiling, because the costs outweigh the benefits.
Is that unfair? No more unfair then men crossing the street rather than walk behind a woman because we don't want to make her uncomfortable, I'm not a rapist and statistically the average man isn't likely to be a rapist, but it's a cross we all have to bear.
I understand that many women are afraid of men.
I understand that men can sympathise with their fears and want to protect them from feeling afraid.
However, the brutal truth is that
most women want relationships with men. Women like the company of men.
If you're not around them, then they'll likely still end up being around other men, if only because they either are seeking a relationship and so spend time in areas with lots of single men, or because they are in a relationship and live in an area with lots of other families and thus lots of men.
So by you avoiding them, they just end up being followed by another man who isn't you, and is thus more likely to be a rapist, just from simple averages.
Given how common rapes are reported, there's a lot of men who would take advantage of those women. So if you avoid them, you can increase their chances of being raped quite a lot.
In hindsight, I can see it with dating. The guys who didn't want to take advantage of women, didn't really date them.
But the girls still wanted a boyfriend, though, and so ended up dating the guys who weren't as bothered about hurting women. A lot of them got into situations where they felt they were almost raped, and had to escape the guys they were with. Many of them got raped. Many of them got into relationships with guys who used to hit them a lot.
You'd think this would make women back off from relationships. But it turned out that many/most women would rather have a relationship with an abusive man, than have no relationship with a man at all.
So by backing off, you're not saving them from danger. You're giving the dangerous men room to take advantage of women.
So if it sucks to be black because you get more police attention, insofar as the police aren't taking it further then that, then they're just doing their job and the inconvenience isn't their fault, it's the fault of the criminals who created the stigma.
1) It is the fault of the criminals. But you're being punished just because some of the people in your ethnicity turned to crime.
2) If you have some power to influence the collective of your ethnicity, and you didn't do that, then that gives you incentive to use your power to make the other members of your ethnicity behave.
But if you don't have that kind of influence to affect these criminals to give up their lives of crime, then you're being punished for something, when the punishment won't change anything about you for the better.
3) Rather, it will probably convince you that being a good person gets you punished anyway, and so you might as well do the crime, as you're paying for it anyway. I've met a lot of people in poor, crime-ridden areas, who told me they ended up feeling that way, and acting that way.
4) So it doesn't help. It also increases white crime, because the white criminals think that they'll be more likely to get away with it, and probably will.
Police don't have infinite resources and infinite time. Each case can only afford so much funding and so much time. So if they check the BIPOC suspects first, before they get to the white suspects, they'll run out of funding and time, and have to move on to another case.
5) You're better off sticking to some rules that make sense. Something like checking all rooms in the vicinity, whether they are occupied by BIPOC or white people, by men or women.
If you visibly act to make it clear that there's no favouritism, then the BIPOC feel like they're not being treated worse than anyone else, and still feel they have an incentive to not do crimes, and the white criminals see that they're not going to get away with crimes and so lose their incentive to be more criminal than normally.
That being said police who do shit like planting evidence should be punished HARSHLY because not only are they breaking the law, and of all people they ought to know better, they're also eroding everyone's trust in the rule of law and that absolutely positively cannot be allowed to happen.
I would support the death penalty for officers caught willfully falsifying evidence, that's possibly too harsh for the crime itself but given the impact upon society as a whole it is important that anyone caught doing this is used to set an example.
If you're going to give a huge incentive to NOT plant evidence, then you need the police force's laws and policy to be such that they don't feel pressured in any way to plant evidence.
Everything has to be done by the book. No cutting corners. No short-changing the evidence.
The real problem with that, is that then when crimes are high, and the police need more manpower, they don't get it, and then they feel a sense of duty to act anyway.
So you need to encourage them to feel that what protects people the most, is knowing that they can rely on the police, because the police will never do anything unlawful to them, because they'll never do anything unlawful.
But then if the police are so cautious, how will they ever catch the bad guys?
Easy. You teach them to be like Samurai warriors. You make them train for 2 hours a day, every day, even while they are working.
