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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

If it’s not falsely identifying people I don’t see a problem at all. If it’s identifying criminals every criminal should be caught

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If you start with hypothetical demographic groups A and B that are for all intents and purposes exactly identical, but you implement a system such that if A commits a crime they have a 10% chance of being caught and if B commits a crime they have a 50% chance of being caught, you will achieve the following:

1. More short-term crime prevention than a system catching 10% of A's crimes and 10% of B's crimes (good!)

2. Enforce a societal belief that A is intrinsically better than B (bad!)

3. Disproportionately burden children, families, and communities in B than A, causing them to indeed perform worse in everything than those in A (bad!)

4. As a result of 2 & 3 it is not a stretch to say simply causing B to do more actual crime (potentially negating point 1 entirely)

If you believe that crime enforcement is not for the sake of vengeance but instead something done to improve the well-being, safety, and happiness of citizens, you may see that inequality=bad just as crime=bad. How to best solve this trolley problem is complicated but it's important that people are aware that it is complicated before firing off an answer.

Most crime is intra-racial. Group A will do better over time, with fewer people becoming victims of crime, if it is subject to better policing, because more of the malevolent actors within it will be incarcerated or deterred from engaging in (mostly intra-racial) predatory behavior.

That is only part of the equation. You may be removing more malevolent actors in the immediate short term, but depending on how that policing is done, you might also be creating more malevolent actors too. Overpolicing a group can create distrust between the community and the police. Once you feel the system does not care about you or treats you unfairly, there is little reason for why you should care about it. And if P(Caught|Group X) != P(Caught), the system is treating you unfairly.

I would argue we as society don't want crime to stop simply for the sake of crime stopping (or for prison labor), but ultimately because we want to feel happy and safe from harm and unjust treatment. The systems we design need to factor in the humanness of the police and their communities and make sure they are not set up in a way that loses sight of that bigger picture.

If there was a cop that only every arrested black people and always let off any white person, would you agree that there is a problem with that cop?

Selective enforcement has been used historically to persecute certain minorities and that's not acceptable in a functioning society.

it is FALSELY unidentifying people, which makes the harware, software, sales, implimentation of the whole system a criminal enterprise, which it is. Kudos to the police for rejecting this racist biggoted unjust criminal software implimentation.

See, what you've said is precisely "structural bias against a minority", or "systemic injustice". Then again, the elites are, technically, also a minority as well, and we all know how well letting their crimes slide works out for the rest of the society.

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