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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine how they become this way. With most offenders being from minority groups it's hard to keep an open mind if you're having to chase after them every day. Even though these problems are societal, not really caused by the minorities themselves but rather lack of opportunities etc

But if you're on the business end of society's failures on a daily basis I can imagine how this changes one's opinion.

I've worked as a technical support agent and I really started to be afraid of our company's products, being confronted with the worst that could happen to them every day. The knowledge that the calls I was getting were only about 0.1% of products in the field was easy to forget.

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Let's not ignore the fact that minorities neighborhoods have historically faced higher levels of scrutiny from police.

It's not just that offenders are from minority groups... Consider that police are going out into minority groups looking for offenders.

I saw a stat a while back that showed that any higher levels of policing of minority communities was directly attributable to higher levels of disturbance reports from within the communities themselves.

So police aren’t just looking for offenders in minority communities. They’re going where the communities are asking them to be.

This article explains the situation better: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/09...

There's also evidence to show that all else held equal, police respond with more force when dealing with minorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_....

Do you have a source for the stat that you mentioned.

Most policing is in minority neighborhoods, but not necessarily most crime.

For example, white drivers carrying drugs is higher, but Black folks are more likely to get stopped and searched for drugs.

So it's not that Black folks commit more of these crimes, they are just monitored more closely than their white counterparts regardless of outcome or reality. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...

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