Warp wrote:
>   Maybe if I emphasize it would help: *IF* race could be used as a trait
> to catch criminals more efficiently, *THEN* it would make sense to use it.

> The issue of "can a policeman check someone without probable cause?" was
> a completely different line of discussion which had nothing to do with
> racial profiling or anything. 

Except, as I've tried to explain, these two features are 100% intertwined 
and completely related. And we're trying to get you to understand why those 
two are intertwined and related.

> I discussed it purely on the context of "checking without probable cause"
> because that separate issue came up in a post.

Except if you have probable cause, you don't need profiling. And without 
probable cause, profiling doesn't help. So they're really quite related in 
ways that you don't seem to be understanding.

>> When you do that, you come across as having an air of superiority - not 
>> you personally, but culturally certainly - and it is interpreted as 
>> "we're better than you".
> 
>   I don't think that "I'm surprised that the police is not allowed to do
> random sobriety tests on drivers there" shows an air of superiority.

Except they *are* allowed to do random sobriety tests. The problem is that 
in the very same post, you went on to talk about doing profiling during 
"random" sobriety tests to improve the efficiency of those tests. At which 
point, it's no longer "random", but rather profiling.  You see where the 
confusion comes from?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
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On Wed, 05 May 2010 13:41:01 -0400, Jim Henderson wrote:

> See the post I just wrote with the OED definition of racial profiling.
> That's the definition I'm using.

In digging through definitions for profiling (which led me to 'offender 
profiling'), I think I see where there may be a disconnect here.

Racial profiling is what I previously defined it as (so I won't re-cite).

Offender profiling, however, is a compound usage that's common in 
Britain, defined as:

offender profiling n. orig. and chiefly Brit. a system of analysing and 
recording the probable psychological and behavioural characteristics of 
the unknown perpetrators of specific crimes so they can be matched with 
the known habits and personalities of suspects

This is something that is done in the US - the idea is basing the 
criteria for a search based on common traits of offenders.  This is not 
the same as racial profiling, because offender profiling uses the 
statistical characteristics of a known class of criminal and starts from 
the traits of those who are known to be guilty of committing a class of 
crime.  It also focuses on psychology and behaviour rather than physical 
traits.

Racial profiling starts at the other end of the spectrum - rather than 
starting with a classification of the guilty, it starts with the 
assumption that someone of a particular race must be guilty.

I can see how the two could be easy to confuse, though, especially when 
popular culture presentations of offender profiling includes sentences 
like "the suspect is probably a black male in his mid-30's [...]" which 
isn't a behavioural or phychological trait that would be used for this 
type of profiling.

Jim

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Warp wrote:
>   Just because individuals can have mixed traits doesn't make the concept
> meaningless.

It makes the concept of assigning a single race to a person (especially 
nowadays with global travel and all) mostly meaningless.

>> Why is Obama "black" but not "japanese"?  I believe even you once pointed 
>> out the absurdity there.
> 
>   I think that's more a political than a scientifical issue.

Exactly. You can't say scientifically what "race" he is, because the 
boundaries of "race" aren't scientific.

>> Kenyans are tall, but not all of them, and some British are tall too. I'm 
>> sure you know some people born where you are that have dark curly hair.
> 
>   Yet an anthropologist can easily distinguish whether a skull belongs to
> a Kenyan or a British.

No, they can't, any more than you can look at a person's race and tell 
whether they're a legal resident or an illegal immigrant.

You can tell whether they have genetics more often associated with people 
whose ancestors come from middle africa thousands of years ago, or more 
often associated with people who come from northern europe thousands of 
years ago.  But you can't say whether they're from Kenya or Britain.

And *that* is the distinction people are trying to make. Other than for 
information *about* genetics, "race" is a meaningless term. It's a statement 
about genetics, and for anything outside the field of genetics, it's 
meaningless.

You may say "Saying someone is Kenyan is a shorthand for saying they had 
ancestors thousands of years ago who lived near what is now Kenya," but by 
the time you actually *express* it that way, almost any assertion you make 
about the person's behavior or location (especially classical "racist" 
assertions) becomes obviously nonsense.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Because profiling based on race assumes guilt rather than innocence.
> 
>   Well, there's where we are using different meanings of the word
> "profiling". You are using a rather loaded meaning of the word.
> 
>> "The person is of hispanic descent, therefore they must (or even are 
>> highly likely) to be in the country illegally."
> 
>   That's not profiling. That's prejudice.

It's not possible to do profiling based on someone's appearance without 
being prejudice about it. Hence, it is both.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> So, tell me a little bit about the issues there in Finland - I don't read 
> a lot of news from Finland, so I wasn't aware there was an escalation 
> regarding immigration laws there.

  There are many people here who are looking at Sweden and its immigration
problems (which are completely real, as even the Swedish press, which
has traditionally censored every immigration-related issue in the past,
is slowly opening a bit to report problems with immigrant suburbs, such
as riots, arson, ambulances and firetrucks being thrown with stones and
bottles, and other such acts of violence performed by immigrants), as
well as Britain (a bit of googling should give good resources) and France,
and are fearing that Finland is going down the same path, and trying to
raise consciousness about this.

  At the same time the so-called "multiculturalists" are trying everything
they can to deny any such problems either existing or being significant,
as well as trying to "educate" the Finnish people that we are, allegedly,
extremely racist and that we need tons and tons of immigrants. The vast
majority of the media is on this "multiculturalists" side, sometimes even
to rather amazing extremes (such as launching systematic public loathing
campaigns against politicians who criticize the current immigration policy
trends).

  There was a big commotion some years, especially on the media, when a
politician who is quite known and very vocal about is critique of the
current immigration policies and "multiculturalism" was almost elected to
the Finnish parlament (he was just some votes short of getting there).
Afterwards he got elected to the city council of Helsinki. Since then
there has been, basically, a coordinated attack against him by the Finnish
media. He has been systematically loathed, and even criminally investigated
(this got so far as a court trial for something he wrote many years earlier).

  Of course he is not the only one, but he has apparently been selected by
the media as the main target.

  Rather than the whole thing dying down, this has only escalated in the
last few years. Even to the point where other politicians cannot keep
quiet anymore, but are more or less forced to take public stances on the
immigration issue. (This puts many of them in a difficult situation because
a significant portion of voters are leaning towards the critical side,
and the politicians don't want to alienate them.)

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                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   How many times do I have to write "but I understand why it wouldn't work
> in practice" before it sinks in?

Because I'm telling you why it wouldn't work even in theory. Even if you 
*found* that statistical correlation, the answer is still "No, it wouldn't 
work."

>   (And how many times do I have to write that it doesn't change my original
> point?)

And that's why I think you don't understand what I'm saying. It completely 
invalidates your original point, as well as all the rewordings of the 
original point you've expressed.

Because your original point is *incorrect*, and there is *no way* to make it 
correct, even by completely eliminating all prejudice and fear of racism and 
profiling from the entire population. It's not that "it wouldn't work in 
practice." It's that "the math says it wouldn't even work in theory."

>> I completely understand. And I'm telling you "the math shows that there are 
>> no contexts in which crime could be more efficiently stopped by making the 
>> distinction," in any case where you don't already know something about the 
>> specific criminal you seek.  And yet, you still haven't said you understand 
>> this. Do you?
> 
>   No.
> 
>   Firstly, I don't see how the math says that.

Look up Bayesian statistics. It's a common misunderstanding of how things work.

As I've tried to explain, it's a difference between reducing false negatives 
and reducing false positives.

http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-explanation-of-bayes-theorem/

Your "test" is the ethnicity, and your "result" is whether the person 
committed the crime. The number of people who are *not* criminals far 
outweighs the number of people who *are* criminals.

That's why I've been pounding on this. You seem to not understand "it 
mathematically cannot make a difference."

>   Secondly, it was not my point. My point *still* is "if it could make a
> difference, it would make sense to use it".

OK. I don't know what else to say besides "It's impossible for it to make a 
difference, so there's never any way in which it makes sense to use it."

>   You talk like using a profile is mutually exclusive with using other clues.

Having a profile is unnecessary if you have other clues. You match the 
person to the clues, even if that clue is a clue about the race or gender or 
age of the suspect.  That's not profiling. That's using clues to eliminate 
suspects.

>   If your clues have narrowed down the list of suspects to 100 people, 50
> males and 50 females, and your profile says that the criminal is most likely
> a male (for example, in rape cases it's pretty unlikely for the criminal to
> be female), you reduced your list from 100 to 50.

You understand that is eliminating false positives, right?  By the time 
you've already narrowed it from 300,000,000 people down to 100 people, you 
have probable cause to suspect some of those people. You're not eliminating 
the females because "in rape cases it's unlikely to be a female." You're 
eliminating the females because you have genetics spilled all over the 
victim telling you it's a male. That's no more profiling than "the rape 
happened in Boulder, so let's not suspect people who were in Beijing that day."

If the victim got raped with a broomstick, you wouldn't be eliminating the 
females, because there would be no *evidence* outside the profile that would 
allow you to eliminate them.

>   For some reason you seem to think that "using a profile" means "discard
> all other evidence and *only* use the profile" (in some past post you even
> explicitly talked about profiles *increasing* the amount of subjects, which
> at the time I didn't understand at all because it made no sense, but now I
> think you were implying "using a profile *and* discarding all other clues").

I said that using a profile based on the total number of criminals with 
attribute X can increase the number of people you look for without catching 
someone if there's an even *higher* number of people who have X that are 
*not* criminals.

If you say "We should throw away the rotten fruit. 80% of the rotten fruit 
is strawberries. Only 20% of the rotten fruit is blueberries. Hence, we 
should examine the strawberries more closely."  But if you have more than 
five times as many total strawberries as total blueberries, you'll be 
*increasing* your work by concentrating on strawberries rather than picking 
fruit at random to examine because there's a lower percentage *of 
strawberries* that are rotten.  And it has nothing to do with racism or 
prejudice.  It's just math.

I know you'll say "but what if it helps?"  I'm giving this as an example of 
how my statement could make sense, not a reason why your statement was 
incorrect.

> I don't understand where you are getting that. It's certainly not something
> I have said nor implied.

But if you already suspect someone of a crime, why do you need the profile?

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   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Having a profile is unnecessary if you have other clues.

  I am curious about one thing: Why do you seem to have such a huge aversion
against profiling? You have insisted again and again that profiling, any
kind of profiling, is useless and unnecessary to catch criminals. (Or at
least that's how I understand your posts, as you don't talk exclusively
about racial profiling, but about other types of profiling as well, such
as one based on gender.)

  This is rather odd given that criminal profiling is an important tool of
investigation especially in the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offender_profiling

  If profiling is so unnecessary, why is it used nevertheless?

  Maybe you are talking about something else than profiling?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   This is rather odd given that criminal profiling is an important tool of
> investigation especially in the US:

That's a different kind of profiling.

"Offender profiling is a behavioral and investigative tool"

It's for investigating, not arresting. It's based on behavior, not statistics.

As I said, I'm not against "profiling" someone who is driving erratically 
and then checking if they're drunk.  I'm not against "profiling" someone who 
isn't paying taxes comparable to their lifestyle and finding out if they're 
getting paid under the table because they're in the country illegally.

The profiling people object to is the profiling based on things that *don't* 
have to do with the crime under investigation, such as genetics, age, 
clothing, hair style, or car color.

Or, to sum it up again:

1) When doing offender profiling, you already know there's an offender involved.

2) The profile you develop is specific to the criminal, based on clues left 
at a crime scene.

3) When doing offender profiling, you don't use the profile as a means to 
determine who to arrest. You use it as a means to determine who to 
investigate and what further clues to look for and what kind of traps to set.

In other words, you use the profile as a means of looking for more clues, 
not as a means of identifying a person. If the profile says "He probably had 
a vehicle", you ask the parking attendant for the video tapes of the cars 
that went in and out of the crime scene. You don't stop everyone with a 
vehicle and ask them for fingerprints. When the profile says "cunning" it 
means you don't set an obvious trap and hope the criminal won't notice; it 
doesn't mean you investigate lost of smart people who were around that day. 
If the profile says "likes to kill blond teenagers", you don't send cops 
dressed like little old black ladies walking around the park at night as 
bait in a trap for him.

"Various aspects of the criminal's personality makeup are determined from 
his or her choices before, during, and after the crime."

Offender profile is "this is what we think the criminal in *this* case is 
like, because of the clues he left."  It's also used mainly when someone is 
committing *multiple* crimes in the same way.  There's 500 murders this 
year. But *these* six all had the victim tied up by their left ankle from a 
tree and had their nose mashed in with a hammer left at the site. If we 
catch someone doing that a seventh time, it's probably a good idea to ask 
him about the other six.

Racial profiling is "a majority of the people who commit crime X have trait 
Y that they can neither control nor change, but we're going to look 
disproportionately at people with trait Y, presupposing that a 
disproportionate number of them will commit crime X."

About the closest racial profiling for illegal immigration would come to 
offender profiling would be "if you catch an illegal immigrant, check out 
his family too."  Or "if you catch an illegal immigrant working illegally, 
check out his coworkers."

Does this clarify?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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You all know that this thread has a time limit. After tomorrow 
(Thursday) the election is over, I hope. <g>

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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On Wed, 05 May 2010 14:18:38 -0400, Warp wrote:

>   There are many people here who are looking at Sweden and its
>   immigration
> problems (which are completely real, as even the Swedish press, which
> has traditionally censored every immigration-related issue in the past,
> is slowly opening a bit to report problems with immigrant suburbs, such
> as riots, arson, ambulances and firetrucks being thrown with stones and
> bottles, and other such acts of violence performed by immigrants), as
> well as Britain (a bit of googling should give good resources) and
> France, and are fearing that Finland is going down the same path, and
> trying to raise consciousness about this.

Interesting; I had heard that Finland was extremely difficult to 
immigrate to, but hadn't heard about the potential for violence (I've 
heard about the BNP issues in the UK).  I hadn't heard about the problems 
in Sweeden, though.

Jim

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