If advertiser’s notice, or know through research, that the majority of sci-fi TV programmes are watched by white males between the age of 15 and 45, and they target the ads on that channel toward that demographic…. Then how is it any different when the police target the specific groups of persons who, through research, have been shown frequently to have committed crimes of a certain nature?
You cannot have it both ways.
In a socially deprived area where there is a clearly identifiable demographic bias, certain suppositions about those persons present may not be unreasonable, that seems a fair thing to contend. Say if we were to look at a part of a large city that had a populous who were employed in low paying jobs and lived in social housing that was previously council built. If we spot an anomaly, for instance a single house with gold leafed lions on plinths at the edge of a gravel driveway, upon which sits the very latest high-end offering from Mercedes or BMW, and emerging from this urban palace is a person festooned in the finest modern threads, and we were to also know that none of the residents of this particular domicile was gainfully employed in any legal sense so as to be able to accumulate the opulence we can clearly see, we might start to think that there was something illegal afoot.
Yes it is true that there are people who come from nothing to become something, and yes they may then show that in their purchases, but those persons are sportsmen and entertainers. There is a reason that we can attribute to their presence in these places, so we would override the first assumptions we could make about them. How then is profiling the thing that is happening? We are led by our awareness and our experience to make reasoned judgements, we have no other criteria to base them on. So how do we determine without the judgement we almost always use.
Judgement that could be rightly named profiling? But how can we prove that where is intention to be prejudice, intention to use another metric if we have an abundance of materials that allow for a reasoned explanation for our conclusions? I know that some people wish to say that these prejudices exist, especially when they are the representative of persons falsely accused, but isn’t it always going to be the case that there are both mistakes made without intention, and prejudices that turn out to correlate with potentially correct assumptions in an accidental way (i.e. the things you may assume because of your prejudices happen to be correct, but not because of them)?
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