Subjectively Objective: Statistics as a driver of discrimination
A recent court case in the Netherlands argued that ethnicity can be a valid reason to single people out for extra inspection at the Dutch border. I brought this up with a Dutch acquaintance of mine who defended this decision by saying something like “if, statistically, people of a certain ethnicity are more likely to commit a crime, then it isn’t discrimination”. This may sound plausible at first, however, there are major issues with this stance.
In general terms, using statistics in this way simply fuels a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we believe that a certain group of people is statistically more likely to commit a crime, these people will get extra scrutiny. This extra scrutiny, in turn, leads to a higher likelihood that these people will get caught if they are committing a crime. What this also means is that other groups of people will receive less scrutiny, and, therefore, a lower chance of being caught when committing the same crime. There are many real-world examples of this exact phenomena happening, and it will help to examine a real example to highlight how this can further drive discrimination.
Looking at incarceration statistics in the US, we find that African Americans, which comprise about 13% of the US population, make up 27% of the people in state correctional facilities due to simple drug possession. Based only on this statistic, it might be inferred that black people are more likely to do drugs than white people — which comprise 73% of the total population, yet account for only 43% of people in prison for simple possession. However, research shows that black and white people use drugs at similar rates. Therefore, the real conclusion we can draw from this data is that black people are more likely to be stopped and arrested for drug-use than white people.
This leads to more black people being put in prison, further skewing the numbers against them. A vicious cycle continues to repeat — the more black people are over-represented in prison, the more likely they will be seen as criminals and stopped by police. This allows white drug-users to be less likely to be stopped and arrested, creating a false sense of drug-use rates among white and black people. Far from being objective, without being properly contextualized and interpreted, statistics can embody and further strengthen institutionalized and societal discrimination.
