Profiling based off of high per capita incidence of violent crime (gender, race and religion)

[Velocity]

In another thread, ZPG Zealot argued that, owing to the state of society with regards to crimes against women, men should be assumed to be potential rapists and sexual predators until proven otherwise. Which I felt raises another tangent:

In society, women are often told to regard men as potential threats, to take precautions against men, to not be alone with men, etc. And the reason for this, of course, is that the vast majority of violent crimes in society are committed by men, not women, and a great deal of those crimes are committed *against *women.

Yet this “We should profile Category X of people, because Category X of people commits a higher per capita rate of violent crime than other categories” standard is considered inappropriate when applied on the basis of race or religion. Suppose that someone were to say, *“You need to be careful around Hispanic people, and take precautions around them. Every Hispanic person needs to be considered a potential criminal threat until proven otherwise.” *Such a statement would be instantly decried.

When the topic arises of Arab and/or Muslim passengers being profiled at airports, this profiling is frequently considered racist or Islamophobic, even though all of the hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks were Arabs, the shoe-bomber attacker on the American Airlines flight had undergone Islamic radicalization, etc.

Now, the statistical difference is that there are only two genders, male and female, and men commit a vastly higher rate of violent crime, proportionally, than women. The difference between crime by race or religion is probably a smaller margin. But is this really just a case of proportion or per capita statistics? Suppose that Arabs were hijacking airliners very, very frequently. At what point would it be acceptable to profile Arab passengers on the basis of race? How high does crime have to rise, among Category X of people, for it to be acceptable to profile Category X?

For clarification, I am not arguing that we should profile on the basis of race or religion in addition to gender. I am saying that there should not be profiling of any of those categories - gender, religion, or race. This is an anti-profiling thread, not a pro-profiling thread.

[marshmallow]

Do you make any distinctions between profiling by government, private entities, or the individual?

@Velocity

I am saying that there should not be profiling of any of those categories - gender, religion, or race. This is an anti-profiling thread, not a pro-profiling thread.

Do you think a woman planning her route and schedule around her fears of men or being careful around strange men but not strange women is sexist? If yes, is this simply a literal definition (discrimination), or do you assign negative moral judgment to her actions? Is she being irrational?

[LSLGuy]

The problem with this whole line of thought is widespread ignorance of Bayesian probabilities.

This is too deep and rigorous an intro to the idea, but it’s a start: Bayes' theorem - Wikipedia

The probability that any particular person is a bad actor is the probability of bad actors in general times the probability that this person is part of the known group.

e.g. If 1 in 1,000 men is a raper-of-women and 100% of rapers-of-women are men, the odds that any given woman should be scared of any given man are not 100%, but 0.1% The amount she should be scared of another woman is zero percent. So for this fact pattern the sound choice is 0% scared for other women and 0.1% scared for other men. Not 0% and 100%.

Folks forget (or never knew) these basic facts. They don’t know how to validly reason about statistical risks.

To the degree we permit public policy to be driven by irrational bunk mislabeled as “rational thinking”, we’re no better than the folks in Salem who believed dunking tortures correctly identified witches.

IOW … 100% of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi. That same day another 31 million Saudis did not hijack any airliners. 19/31,000,000 is a very small number. Even if we filter the Saudi population to just young and male we’re looking at 19/10,000,000.

That’s called looking for a needle in a haystack. Trying to argue that we ought to treat all 10 million young male Saudis as high threats is logical garbage. But it does sell well to emotional non-rational people.

[Hector_St_Clare]

@LSLGuy

That same day another 31 million Saudis did not hijack any airliners. 19/31,000,000 is a very small number. Even if we filter the Saudi population to just young and male we’re looking at 19/10,000,000.

That’s called looking for a needle in a haystack. Trying to argue that we ought to treat all 10 million young male Saudis as high threats is logical garbage.

The denominator there should be young male Saudi nationals in the United States who happen to be traveling on airplanes.

It’s still going to be a small number, but it will be significantly bigger than you suggest.

And your remarks, while well taken, don’t really get to the heart of the issue. It’s true that terrorism is a very rare crime, but we could look at crimes that are more common (rape, murder, child abuse, etc.). Is it legitimate to profile people as potential rapists or potential murderers based on sex, ethnicity, religion, etc.?

My answer would be ‘no’ in all the cases, but I think some people would say 'yes based on sex, no based on ethnicity."

[LSLGuy]

I suspect many leftists would say “yes based on sex, no based on ethnicity.” Many rightists would say “yes based on ethnicity, no based on sex.” Being down on men *qua *men is still socially acceptable in some leftist circles.
Like you, IMO it would not be appropriate ever. Because:

1. Even for relatively common crimes the percentage of people who are non-criminals is very large. like 99+%. Especially when you go back to my comment that number of crimes and number of criminals are different numbers. e.g. in the poor part of town there are two kinds of scruffy looking guys. The kind who commit a burglary every single day and the kind who commit a burglary never. The latter are still the vast majority. Profiling them all as being burglars because there are lots of break-ins in the neighborhood means that the vast, vast majority of the time you’re coming to a wrong conclusion.

2. Our justice system is based on the premise that society commits a much more serious error when it convicts an innocent person than when it fails to convict a guilty person. Common rhetoric from calmer eras ran like “Better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man.” That was talking about conviction, which is a different step in the process from prosecute, arrest, stop-and-frisk, investigate, hassle, profile, or merely eye suspiciously. But in each case every time we do that to an innocent person we take a bite out of our limited social capital and a bite out of our limited justice system budget. On a hunch based on pure BS.
   Both the above factors are multiplicative. *If *1% of scruffy dudes are burglars and the rest are ill-educated but honest laborers, *and *it’s better to let 100 go free than screw up once, the odds are 10,000:1 against profiling being the smart decision.

Doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason 10,000 times so you can do the right thing for the wrong reason once seems to me to be a profoundly ignorant and criminally negligent way to run a supposedly modern and at least semi-enlightened society.

[marshmallow]

@LSLGuy

Many rightists would say “yes based on ethnicity, no based on sex.”

I’m not so sure. From what I’ve seen of super right wing sites they tend to focus most of their fear and hate on minority men, not women. Or take the immigration crisis. You’ll see a lot of discussion on whether the immigrants are women and children or military aged males. If they accept immigrants at all they’ll have a preference for the first, not so much the second. They’re not so worried about Syrian women raping or committing terrorist attacks.

[drachillix]

@LSLGuy

1. Even for relatively common crimes the percentage of people who are non-criminals is very large. like 99+%. Especially when you go back to my comment that number of crimes and number of criminals are different numbers. e.g. in the poor part of town there are two kinds of scruffy looking guys. The kind who commit a burglary every single day and the kind who commit a burglary never. The latter are still the vast majority. Profiling them all as being burglars because there are lots of break-ins in the neighborhood means that the vast, vast majority of the time you’re coming to a wrong conclusion.

2. Our justice system is based on the premise that society commits a much more serious error when it convicts an innocent person than when it fails to convict a guilty person. Common rhetoric from calmer eras ran like “Better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man.” That was talking about conviction, which is a different step in the process from prosecute, arrest, stop-and-frisk, investigate, hassle, profile, or merely eye suspiciously. But in each case every time we do that to an innocent person we take a bite out of our limited social capital and a bite out of our limited justice system budget. On a hunch based on pure BS.

So where is it reasonable to cross the line into a stereotype becoming rule of thumb.

is 1000 problematic people in 750,000 people a problem?

[tomndebb]

@Velocity

In another thread, ZPG Zealot argued that, owing to the state of society with regards to crimes against women, men should be assumed to be potential rapists and sexual predators until proven otherwise. Which I felt raises another tangent:

In society, women are often told to regard men as potential threats, to take precautions against men, to not be alone with men, etc. And the reason for this, of course, is that the vast majority of violent crimes in society are committed by men, not women, and a great deal of those crimes are committed *against *women.

Yet this “We should profile Category X of people, because Category X of people commits a higher per capita rate of violent crime than other categories” standard is considered inappropriate when applied on the basis of race or religion. Suppose that someone were to say, *“You need to be careful around Hispanic people, and take precautions around them. Every Hispanic person needs to be considered a potential criminal threat until proven otherwise.” *Such a statement would be instantly decried.

Starting from a silly premise from a tiny number of persons and extrapolating a thesis to apply to the majority of people does not provide a very substantive argument.

Your argument is only “valid” in the context of discussions with the tiny number of people who subscribe to the position you ascribed to ZPGZealot. Very very people in the world actually hold that all men should be treated as potential rapists and that number is even smaller on the SDMB. That effectively, means that your premise is a straw man argument.
We (the SDMB at large) have no need to defend the onerous business of racial, ethnic, religious, economic, or appearance profiling because we are not otherwise engaged in defending some tiny, extremist view of a different form of profiling.

[LSLGuy]

@marshmallow

I’m not so sure. From what I’ve seen of super right wing sites they tend to focus most of their fear and hate on minority men, not women. Or take the immigration crisis. You’ll see a lot of discussion on whether the immigrants are women and children or military aged males. If they accept immigrants at all they’ll have a preference for the first, not so much the second. They’re not so worried about Syrian women raping or committing terrorist attacks.

It seems we agree although it appears I didn’t say my point as clearly as I might have. I was trying to keep parallel with Hector_St_Clare’s formulation and that tied my hands a bit. Sorry to be unclear.

I said rightists would be happy to profile against people on the basis of race. I also said generic rightists are *not *happy with people saying things like “men and their aggressive criminal ways are a societal problem. We need to reign in men.”

I agree with you that as between a 25 yo Syrian woman and a 25 yo Syrian man the typical rightist would prefer the former over the latter as immigrants. But “neither” would be his/her by far preferable option.

The point about generic leftists is that they would be (relatively) happy to agree with sentiments like “men and their aggressive criminal ways are a societal problem. We need to reign in men.”

[Velocity]

@LSLGuy

I suspect many leftists would say “yes based on sex, no based on ethnicity.” Many rightists would say “yes based on ethnicity, no based on sex.” Being down on men *qua *men is still socially acceptable in some leftist circles.

That may be true - although, most of the people arguing against the transgender bathroom law were playing up the “male predators in women’s restrooms” argument - and were conservatives.

[doreen]

Depends on what’s being done with the “profiling”. There is a huge difference between a woman who isn’t willing to go to a secluded place with a man she doesn’t know well, and government agents searching every person waiting to board a plane who appears to be Arab/Muslim while letting others walk on to the plane with no search.Or searching every person who appears to be Arab/Muslim while only searching the others if their behavior is somehow suspicious.

[octopus]

Using judgement to avoid sketchy people or sketchy as an individual helps keep one alive. Even if that judgement is “unfair.”

With regards to the state, with finite resources is it really problematic to focus the expenditure of those resources in the areas with the highest concentrations of crime? If a cop looked me over a bit more than let’s say a small woman should I be offended? No. From my understanding males are more likely to commit violent crimes and I’d be a bigger threat. Should my feelings be hurt if a woman avoided me in a dark alley? No.

[Kimstu]

There are two important issues here:

1. What is the actual prevalence of offenders in the given population?

2. What rights are being infringed or curtailed by such profiling in the interests of security?
   For issue (1), it appears that the incidence of committing sexual assault among men in general is quite a bit higher—as in, orders of magnitude higher—than for any of the other crimes/terrorist acts in the populations we’re discussing:

Using the FBI’s definition of rape, the researchers found a higher proportion of men — 10.8 percent of the total sample, nearly twice as high as the Lisak/Miller study — who would be considered rapists. […]

As alarming as the Lisak research might seem, it offered a relatively simple solution: Isolate the handful of young men who were committing the vast majority of campus rapes, and expel them or turn them over to law enforcement. Swartout’s findings offer fewer easy answers. Instead, they point to a more complicated reality, where more men are committing rape and their behavior is harder to predict.

Emphasis added. If there was similar evidence indicating that over one in ten or even one in twenty Muslim-Americans was involved in terrorism, you can bet your boots that most of the people who now oppose ethnic profiling in security screenings would take a very different view of it.

But of course, that incidence is more like one in tens or hundreds of thousands at the most, not anywhere near one in ten. Which is what makes ethnic profiling pretty much useless as an anti-terrorism security measure.

For issue (2), as doreen pointed out, it’s a blatantly false equivalence to present women being cautious around men in social circumstances as analogous to security agents ethnically profiling people.

If a woman you’re trying to pick up in a bar won’t smile at you or talk to you because she’s concerned you might be a rapist, your rights are not being infringed in any way. If a Muslim-American is being ethnically profiled for security reasons, on the other hand, that at the very least puts significant burdens on their freedom of travel, not to mention the risks of being put on a watchlist or otherwise flagged as a potentially untrustworthy person.

Now, when it comes to men’s exercise of their actual rights, I definitely agree they should not be subjected to restrictive gender profiling. No fair, e.g., excluding men from elevators or subway cars or medical consultations or anywhere else that they might happen to be alone with a woman who might fear for her safety. And of course, nobody here except ZPG Zealot, whose views on the subject are very extreme, is in favor of any such thing.
To sum up: Women “gender-profiling” men for safety reasons in the social behavior of their private personal lives, on the grounds that the prevalence of sexual assaulters among men is alarmingly high, is not unfair to men. However, “gender-profiling” men so as to impede their expected freedoms and actions as co-workers, passengers, parents, customers, etc., would be unfair to men and should not be practiced.

A fortiori, ethnically profiling certain populations for security reasons so as to impede their freedoms and actions, on the grounds that the prevalence of terrorists or other criminals among them is slightly elevated compared to the general population but still fucking tiny, is extremely unfair to those populations and should not be practiced.

[Velocity]

@doreen

Depends on what’s being done with the “profiling”. There is a huge difference between a woman who isn’t willing to go to a secluded place with a man she doesn’t know well, and government agents searching every person waiting to board a plane who appears to be Arab/Muslim while letting others walk on to the plane with no search.Or searching every person who appears to be Arab/Muslim while only searching the others if their behavior is somehow suspicious.

@marshmallow

Do you make any distinctions between profiling by government, private entities, or the individual?

I mean mainly individual behavior and inner thoughts, although other aspects of profiling can be discussed as well.

President Obama once commented about how, as a black man, he used to encounter women clutching their purses tightly and holding their breath nervously when with him on an elevator, about how people would lock their car doors when he approached, etc. He was praised for these comments, and rightfully so - black men are often perceived as threats.

But I wonder if, the word “black” was omitted and someone simply commented about how women take precautions around men and lock car doors when men approach and act uneasy and nervous around men, that such remarks would be rebutted with, “Yes, women *do *face a threat from men and just doing what they have to do.”

I am a minority man living in a very liberal city, and I find the inconsistent logic jarring. It’s like society is saying that it’s wrong to consider me a potential threat because of my race, but it’s OK to consider me a potential threat because of my gender.

[Velocity]

@Kimstu

If a woman you’re trying to pick up in a bar won’t smile at you or talk to you because she’s concerned you might be a rapist, your rights are not being infringed in any way.

Yes, but again, when Obama used to encounter women clutching their purses tightly and holding their breath nervously when alone with him on an elevator, or people would lock their car doors when he approached, Obama’s rights were not being infringed in any way - but was it not racist and offensive to him? I dislike the term “micro-aggression,” but what could that possibly be called, other than a micro-aggression?

[Velocity]

I realize that I’ve unintentionally sidetracked my own thread by including public/governmental profiling in the OP when I really want this discussion to be about private individuals and their inner mental profiling. Hopefully it’s not too late to steer the thread down that direction.

[octopus]

@Velocity

Yes, but again, when Obama used to encounter women clutching their purses tightly and holding their breath nervously when alone with him on an elevator, or people would lock their car doors when he approached, Obama’s rights were not being infringed in any way - but was it not racist and offensive to him?

How is it racist or offensive?

As I wrote a few posts up, I wouldn’t be surprised or offended or thought a woman was racist if they avoided me at night. And who cares if I’m offended? Men can do a lot of damage quick to a woman. Why should a woman be a potential victim in order to spare a man’s feelings?

And what does racism have to do with this if certain groups are considered higher risk? Would you walk through a Muslim ghetto in parts of Europe in drag to prove a point?

[AK84]

There is a big difference between understanding why someone acts some way and being upset by it.

I can intellectually understand why a women might be afraid or at least wary of me as an unknown male. I do not have to like being thought of as a potential violent criminal.

ETA: Ghetto in drag? Yeah, very very mature.

[Hector_St_Clare]

@LSLGuy

I suspect many leftists would say “yes based on sex, no based on ethnicity.” Many rightists would say “yes based on ethnicity, no based on sex.” Being down on men *qua *men is still socially acceptable in some leftist circles.
Like you, IMO it would not be appropriate ever. Because:

1. Even for relatively common crimes the percentage of people who are non-criminals is very large. like 99+%. Especially when you go back to my comment that number of crimes and number of criminals are different numbers. e.g. in the poor part of town there are two kinds of scruffy looking guys. The kind who commit a burglary every single day and the kind who commit a burglary never. The latter are still the vast majority. Profiling them all as being burglars because there are lots of break-ins in the neighborhood means that the vast, vast majority of the time you’re coming to a wrong conclusion.

2. Our justice system is based on the premise that society commits a much more serious error when it convicts an innocent person than when it fails to convict a guilty person. Common rhetoric from calmer eras ran like “Better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man.” That was talking about conviction, which is a different step in the process from prosecute, arrest, stop-and-frisk, investigate, hassle, profile, or merely eye suspiciously. But in each case every time we do that to an innocent person we take a bite out of our limited social capital and a bite out of our limited justice system budget. On a hunch based on pure BS.
   Both the above factors are multiplicative. *If *1% of scruffy dudes are burglars and the rest are ill-educated but honest laborers, *and *it’s better to let 100 go free than screw up once, the odds are 10,000:1 against profiling being the smart decision.

Doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason 10,000 times so you can do the right thing for the wrong reason once seems to me to be a profoundly ignorant and criminally negligent way to run a supposedly modern and at least semi-enlightened society.

Actually, I’m going to have to qualify my ‘ethnic and gender profiling are both bad’ remark, since the whole topic of Muslim immigration, etc., has been brought up. I thought we were more referring to things like, e.g. cops paying special attention to interrogating Black men, Muslim travelers and so forth. I think in these cases profiling is bad because it’s applied to specific individuals: in any individual case, there’s plenty of other information you might get about an individual to help you decide whether they’re a security risk or not. I don’t think arguments in favour of profiling (either gender based or based on religion, ethnicity, etc.) are invalid when it comes to more broad social judgments about what kind of society we want to live in, since in that case you’re by definition making a judgment about groups of people in the aggregate, and not about individuals.

So I’ll have to amend my statement above: I oppose gender and racial profiling in some cases, and support both of them in others.

[puddleglum]

@Hector_St_Clare

The denominator there should be young male Saudi nationals in the United States who happen to be traveling on airplanes.

It’s still going to be a small number, but it will be significantly bigger than you suggest.

And your remarks, while well taken, don’t really get to the heart of the issue. It’s true that terrorism is a very rare crime, but we could look at crimes that are more common (rape, murder, child abuse, etc.). Is it legitimate to profile people as potential rapists or potential murderers based on sex, ethnicity, religion, etc.?

My answer would be ‘no’ in all the cases, but I think some people would say 'yes based on sex, no based on ethnicity."

To profile solely on ethnicity or religion makes no sense but to have a profile that includes ethnicity or religion can makes sense. For example, a profile that is young, male, Arab, Muslim, flying on a one way ticket, from a certain airport, and paying in cash, is a more useful profile than one that excludes the Arab and Muslim portions. This does not mean that a profile that only includes Arab and Muslim would be useful. The more conditions the better the profile, and the better the profile the more protected we are.