"maybe they would tackle the dysfunctional inner city environment"
[Sarcasm]It's that easy? Maybe the thought hasn't occurred to them yet.[/Sarcasm]
That's great that OK legislature is instituting reforms.

We clearly have several differences in worldview. We share some congruent beliefs in the efficacy of a free market as the result of personal responsibility for one's own life. And it is kind of funny that you think that I see things only in black-and-white, as my Objectivist comrades accuse me of being a situationist for citing articles from Mother Jones. But am an Objectivist. And I perceive you as a conservative. So, at some level, we are going to continue talking past each other. Your opinions on crime are informed by your experience. I have to accept that, even as I come to different conclusions for other reasons.

"that is just another kind of sociological excuse"

And that's why this issue is so one-sided for you. You see it in black and white - all or nothing. Profiling is based on trends not absolutes. I completely agree with you that it does not excuse one from using their brain when dealing with other people, but the trends are hard evidence we use to fill in gaps in information in the attempt to mitigate risk. If there were a way when we met people we could instantly know their entire background, their motives, etc., we could always make informed decisions when dealing with other people. But for good reason, we can not.

I would also note that one's sociological situation doesn't excuse one from making poor decisions. It just points us to larger social issues which if we chose to embrace different social policies could be dramatically affected. People make bad decisions and sometimes the consequences affect other people - especially family. It's one of the reasons why so many social policies we have adopted are fundamentally flawed - no decision affects purely one's self.

I get so caught up in the big ideas that I forget to keep it personal. I grew up without a father.

Your assumptions seem nice: family values, traditional values, nuclear family. But if you stop and think about it, that is just another kind of sociological excuse for crime: the poor boy couldn't help it because he grew up without a father.

If you are profiling against someone because of their race that is morally wrong and allowable under liberty. I would not support a business if it isolated or refused customers based on their race or ideology however if they profiled against bullies and thieves (which would mean most of congress would not be allowed in) I would prefer that business and use it.

I am a professional writer. I do this for an hour every morning on one or another "Objectivish" discussion boards. For me, it is like when a concert violinist takes a guitar and a bottle of wine down to the corner to jam.

Yes, thank you. When writing the above, I forgot about any feasible exceptions and my favorite Monty Python movie scene~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgj3n...
Here is another favorite scene with a rabbit--it's a Trojan Bunny!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGXx5...

Monty Python fans know there are exceptions:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-geo-image...

Yeah, the dinosaur age only lasted about 179 million years and it took the incoming velocity of a 6-mile-wide asteroid to end it.
According to a book I read during the late 70s and other things I've read since, dinosaurs were of a separate genus from reptiles and some scientists say birds are dinosaur survivors.
Evidently, science came up with the warm-blooded theory even before they theorized theropods like T-Rex and allosaur walked like teeter-totters as evidenced by the illustration on that paperback I bought~
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15...
That's not how theropods even stand in the Jurassic Park movies.

I totally agree with this. It is not black and white. It is far more.
How many people, women or men, would be afraid of a ride on an empty bus at midnight with an attractive, well dressed thirty-something black woman. Compare this to riding the same bus with a 240 lb, 6'4" twenty-something, scruffy, tattooed white man.

This profiling nonsense has gone too far. We are trying to weed out survival traits in favor of political correctness, and if fully implemented, just about everyone would suffer.

The best path forward is to eliminate the boundaries by data. Gandhi and Mandela showed a means to address this, without asserting that behaving as a hoodlum and demanding one's status was the new cultural norm. How about behaving like the people that succeed, and setting a cultural norm around success?

Yes, but in the day RLM must've been something! Reptile Lives Matter!

Well put.

Hello, MM,
My impression is that you have a lot of free time.
I think that your writing, in this instance, contains logical errors, too numerous to call out all. I will just choose one: your number three above. You state it as if it were a self-evident truth. I think that it is not, and I think that, as it stands, is plain wrong. This is not to say that there is no racial prejudice in the justice system. But, it is only one factor, among many, contributing to the observed truth. Certainly not THE CAUSE, as you pretend.

"It is easily shown that profiling often slides into prejudice so one should be careful to make sure the profile is valid."

Precisely. It is not that we are encouraging prejudice. We are acknowledging risk factors. What we should not do (as you point out) is equate a risk factor with an absolute risk.

Dr. Williams is,as usual, right on the money.Most people in positions of responsibility might well profile people several times a day - mentally. Most people do it without thinking about it and that's where the trouble starts. It is easily shown that profiling often slides into prejudice so one should be careful to make sure the profile is valid.

Aren't all efforts to correct racial, cultural, or gender bias a form of profiling? White males are automatically considered "privileged" in educational and government circles. When a minority gets special treatment regarding college admission or job consideration, isn't that a form of profiling that automatically tags them as inherently inferior?

Any time we set different standards for males and females, we're profiling. The stupidest difference I saw during the Carter era, when the Army was ordered to reduce the distance a woman had to throw a grenade from 15 yards to 10 yards. After a general pointed out that the lethal range of grenade shrapnel was just under 15 yards, the order was quickly withdrawn.

If BLM wanted to be "useful" maybe they would tackle the dysfunctional inner city environment where 95% of murders of blacks are by other blacks, not police. They're more of a distraction and eye candy for the paparazzi than productive.

Agree the justice system needs a tuneup. The Oklahoma legislature is acting to do just that, after the voters told them we wanted changes. Drug users who aren't dealers will go to rehab instead of jail; non-violent misdemeanors will be dealt with by judges with lots of latitude and alternatives to jail time; non-violent felons will get more attention from an administrative board with respect to parole; non-violent offenders will have increased opportunity to have criminal records expunged; more focus on victim restitution than punishment overall. We'll be seeing if it works.

Everyone profiles all the time. The only time anyone complains about it is when it bothers someone on the Left.

You will never hear anyone on the Left complaining about the way that they profile gun owners or anyone else on the Right.

BLM would picket my Jurassic World paddock.

Re: “Williams' article just excuses all of the old prejudices.” No it doesn’t. Nowhere in the article does Williams advocate or excuse judging a person’s character based on his or her race or gender. And you left out the next paragraph of Williams' article, which puts the statement of his that you quoted in context:

“The bottom line is that people differ significantly by race and sex. Just knowing the race or sex of an individual may on occasion allow us to guess about something not readily observed.”

You do realize that you are a racist by observing reality. The Black deserved that promotion because of racism. Competence does not matter in leftist lala land.

Speaking of race, I've seen the Alabama DOC profile with reverse discrimination.
Two corrections officers I had known for 18 years competed to make sergeant.
The white guy was no nonsense by the book and he knew "the book" inside and out.
The black guy was all and all goof ball and I can think of a number of other black officers who would be good sergeants if they wanted the grief;
Let's just say the white guy didn't make sergeant.

Profiling is how El Al Israel Airlines have not had even an attempted skyjacking since the Dawson's Field Incident. And even then, the captain, realizing he had a nefarious passenger on board, threw his plane into a steep dive to throw the intruders off balance. One of them broke his silly neck; a passenger cracked a bottle of liquor over the other one's head.

Since then, El Al always provide their own security for passenger screening. Nattily dressed, scrupulously polite security officers, all of them IDF veterans, grill every passenger to find out how they got to the airport, where they will go when they get there, etc., etc. I know: I flew El Al to Israel five years ago, as a tourist. I never felt safer in the air.

That certain medical conditions affect some of certain racial backgrounds far more than they affect others is fact. Does it mean that those proclivities should be relied on to the exclusion of everything else? No. That's where you are taking things to the absurd. Profiling for medical problems is one tool of many.

3. No, actually, it is the result of fatherlessness, and this has been proven. Blacks are far less likely to have a father in the home than whites and you can blame much of the welfare state for this phenomenon. Prior to the 1960's, black marital rates were on par with white marital rates and so were crimanal prosecution rates. Since then, black marital rates have plummeted and black criminal prosecution rates have soared. (http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and...)

4. See #3. The real problem again is fatherlessness. The areas where crime is the worst are also the areas where teenage pregnancy (and fatherlessness) is rampant. Without positive male role models, teenagers act like those they hang out with.

5. I can run away from an old lady a lot easier than I can run away from a young guy - regardless of the skin color of either. It's a hypothetical that's interesting to pontificate about, but the simpler answer is not to go walking at night in shady areas of town. (BTW, I've seen the shows too and they always paint the good guy as being able to take out a half dozen opponents. It's simply garbage. Two, maybe, but more than that and you get overwhelmed by sheer force even without weapons.)

I'd love to have the training that the Israelis give to their screeners and I'd love to see it replace the body scanners at the TSA. They'd do a better job and not violate rights and waste billions of dollars.

Just on the matter of size, I have worked as a mover: I am 5-8 and 140. I have worked with guys smaller than I am. When we moved our own home one time, I emptied a 4-story house, sofas, beds, desks, chairs, tables, bookcases, 100 cases of books, all of it by myself. into three trailers. It took a few days. Like martial arts - judo especially - physics wins.

I had already long since worked on loading docks when I was inspired by Michigan engineer Wally Wallington:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsoYk...
Once I saw this, I knew that I could move anything. Case in point - just one - after the big home, we had a back yard with a big picnic table. Following Wallington, to mow the lawn, I up-ended the table and walked it across the yard on its pivot points.