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Comment by paulannesley | Hacker News Reader

Uh… what?

Maybe you accidentally hit reply before elaborating on “racial stereotypes exist for a reason”.

Understand that stereotypes may persist because they have a root in culture. E.g. imagine some subculture in a city gets in trouble routinely. To a law officer, soon everybody that looks like that seems likely to be an offender. After a while it becomes ingrained - a feud if you will - between law enforcement and the folks getting profiled.

Why does it persist? Because culture == behavior. Because profiling works, for better or for worse.

Looking through some of the data shows that blacks are overrepresented in crime[1] compared to their proportion of the population[2].

What would be the right thing to do? I think that everyone should be treated equally and all have the same rights as anyone else. Given the data I sympathize with a police force that resorts to profiling. There are likely larger social issues at play here, we are seeing symptoms of other problems.

[1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan...

[2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36000.html

Are they over-represented in crime when considering their class as well?

That's a great next question, unfortunately I don't have the data at hand to give you a good answer. I casually looked for some of this (read: spent a few minutes) and anything I could put together would be an amalgamation of several different sources of information and I'd likely make incorrect inferences from it.

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