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Comment by knallfrosch | Hacker News Reader

> which groups are more likely to be flagged. Did I miss the part where they checked whether the risk assessment was correct?

I see a lof of studies like this: »'Male drivers aged 18-25 leaving clubs at night' are a group that is overrepresented in police DUI (Driving Under the Influence of alcohol) checks.«

Stopping there is okay if you want to claim that any such targeting is wrongful. But the more useful information would be whether these groups are justly targeted.

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This is a significant omission from the article.

The other part is how do you really measure efficacy of these systems? Unless you did some secret shopping, which in this case would be paying people to defraud public services occasionally, how would you really know how effective these systems were at reducing fraud costs to public services?

You also do random audits, to check that the targeting follows the actual risk.

no - add race, spoken language, education, social status, income, politics.. those indicators are always present, and are controversial today as differentiation for street law enforcement

French republic and many other European nations dont collect on race. And "racial thinking in Europe" does not fit very well into American thinking.

Where are you from?

> French republic and many other European nations dont collect on race.

Which is a convenient way for them not to track patterns of racial discrimination in their social systems.

why should the government empowers pseudo biological bullshit? For me it is very weird to write human race into driver licence, census or university application.

Because perceived race is a big factor in how most people treat strangers, so having that information would likely be useful in identifying unfair bias in enforcement.

Also first sentences is wrong. Human societies had lots of categories than just race.

Racism doesn't start with race. You can trace racist behaviour way before people invented "humen races".

Racism definitely is based on race, hence the name. Maybe you're referring to some other kind of out-group bias based on tribal or familial status?

Why should government investigate whether their employees practice pseudo-biological bullshit?

As someone else said, it makes it so much easier to ignore when it's used to go after people:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/19/french-high-court-recogn....

I don't see how state collected races are helping to these situations.

Also racism is very well convoluted in Europe. American race hierarchies don't help.

> Also racism is very well convoluted in Europe. American race hierarchies don't help.

Then use European race dynamics. Or even better, use local national race dynamics. But you can't do that if you don't collect data or make any effort to understand national race dynamics.

It absolutely does not follow that "Because American race dynamics =/= European race dynamics", therefore "there's no point in considering race dynamics in police action."

Worst case scenario, you spend tax money proving that people don't practice racism in France. That'd be a hell of a discussion point.

There's more racism in France than in the US in my experience. The difference is as you said that France would rather ignore racism or point at the US than care about it. So your comment is quite ironic.

California here, born American

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