Just in case anyone’s wondering why I’m continuing to contribute to this thread, it’s not in the hope of enlightening BS. it’s because some contributors seem genuinely interested in understanding why statistics (whether related to crime, welfare, employemnt, health, etc) cannot be interpreted in an intuitive way.
We still live - today - with the incredible misuse which was made of HIV/AIDS statistics in the 1980’s. Gay men still suffer extensive discrimination based on nothing more than the perception that they are more likely to contract and spread HIV.
Statistical clusters can be found in every field of endeavour. And they are. Analyse the attributes of the 200 top CEOs in the US and you will find that there are things which seem to correlate strongly with success.
Profiling can be a positive thing - it’s used in medicine all the time. A positive pap smear by no means indicates that you will go on to develop cervical cancer, but it does mean that you have a higher chance of ultimately doing so. There are reasons why prostate tests and mammograms are recommended for certain age groups, and in these cases “casting a wide net” has a positive benefit with very limited potential for those being “profiled” to be impacted upon in a way which is - on balance - negative.
Many of the same people who are happy with the concept of using statistics to demonstrate that minorities are more prone to particpation in crime, dependence on welfare, etc would be horrified to see DNA profiling introduced once we have totally mapped the human genome; much of their unhappiness would centre on the possibility of them being discriminated against as a result of such profiling (some corporations already use psychological profiling when employing people). Most of us can see that while DNA profiling could bring some people major benefits, if applied to the population as a whole it would lead to massive discrimination (Gattaca, anyone?).
The incarceration rate statistics are important because they tell us that the law enforcement and justice systems do not work in an equal manner for all people.
Other correlates are important because they tell us what attributes are likely to be shared by criminals in general and criminals of specific types.
It may be, ironically, that blacks are committing every bit as much white colour crime as whites but are not being caught for it because of the stereotype which holds blacks to be lazy and uneducated (there’s considerable evidence that the presumption that certain crimes are “male” crimes directly affects the manner in which they are investigated and almost certainly allows many females committing those same crimes to remain undetected).