Can a thing exist if we cannot define it or measure it?

Hmm. From Measuring racial profiling: Why it’s hard to tell where police are treating minorities unfairly by Liberty Vittert and Colby Dolly.

The American Civil Liberties Union defines racial profiling as “the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.” This includes police using race to determine which drivers to stop for routine traffic violations or which pedestrians to search for illegal contraband.

The inevitable question is what percent of minorities the police should stop, statistically. But the default methods for deciding who is guilty of racial profiling are not statistically sound. We are working with the Bureau of Research and Analysis at the St. Louis County Police Department to create a stronger metric.

They go on to discuss the two principle ways of identifying racial profiling, benchmarking and hit rate, and identify the reasons why those are not adequate measures.

They outline a new method, intrapopulation comparison. I think the new measure is as bad as the old are.

The irony is that we have been talking about racial profiling for decades with no real progress in adequately measuring it. And if we cannot measure it, we cannot improve.

Why we have no objective or empirical measure of racial profiling could be an extended essay. But the reality is that we do not yet have an agreed definition of racial profiling much less a means to measure it and measure policies to reduce it.

Absent a definition and objective measurement, we have devolved into crude correlation which we know from long experience is a non sequitur in terms of proving anything.

Without a definition or means of measurement, it should be removed from political discourse. It currently serves not much more than as an ad hominem attack, representing an incapacity to make the argument rather than a proof of a real problem.