etienneleclerc Posted September 8, 2016 Posted September 8, 2016 A recent audit of the Baltimore Police Department (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3009376/BPD-Findings-Report-FINAL.pdf) concluded "intentional discrimination" by the police. This has been a big point of anger for the Black Lives Matter movement and social justice warriors of all kinds, groups which generally clash with libertarians, especially the more conservative. Should police keep to ideals and not stray to pragmatism in the name of order? If a group of people is committing disproportionate amounts of crime, is it legitimate to target that group disproportionally? Is this a sign of things getting worse or better?
deadflagblues Posted September 8, 2016 Posted September 8, 2016 If a group of people is committing disproportionate amounts of crime, is it legitimate to target that group disproportionally? Let's grant the assumptions that investigating people who have not committed a crime will not increase their propensity to commit crime, and that capturing someone who is breaking the law will lower the crime rate in the long run. If it's not legitimate to disproportionately target groups that commit a disproportionate amount of crime (or, as I would say, to target people proportionately to their propensity to commit crime as a group), then we should target every demographic equally, regardless of whether or not it's even possible that they can commit a crime. That is, we should target rocks as often as we target people who we (somehow) know for a certain fact will commit a crime in an hour (provided that this is not a crime itself). Obviously, more factors should be taken into account than just race, and I think it would improve the entire situation to put more research into finding a wider variety of crime-prone groups.
shirgall Posted September 8, 2016 Posted September 8, 2016 A recent audit of the Baltimore Police Department (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3009376/BPD-Findings-Report-FINAL.pdf) concluded "intentional discrimination" by the police. This has been a big point of anger for the Black Lives Matter movement and social justice warriors of all kinds, groups which generally clash with libertarians, especially the more conservative. Should police keep to ideals and not stray to pragmatism in the name of order? If a group of people is committing disproportionate amounts of crime, is it legitimate to target that group disproportionally? Is this a sign of things getting worse or better? The point of racism audits is to put the local police departments under the direction of the DOJ via consent decree. There have been threads on this subject before. Here's a small taste: https://www.justice.gov/crt/consent-decree-monitor-reports
Recommended Posts