If I have to think about it this hard, it probably is racist

I have finally come to a conclusion that I have failed to reach since an issue became apparent with argument between me and my entire Government & Politics class (the teacher included) in 2007. It has bothered me on-and-off over the past 5 years and I've blushingly avoided (or confusedly stumbled through) any discussion about it. I have been left wondering if I was being racist or if society was being over-sensitive.
My problem was the inability to separate (or the inability to even think of separating) the effectiveness of a particular method with the ethics of using that method. This may seem stupid, but I make the rather lame excuse that no-one ever bothered to pointed out this distinction to me either. 


The subject of the debate? Racial profiling. More specifically, the stop and search powers used by the police in London in order to try and reduce knife crime. The issue is that these powers are used disproportionately on young black men (henceforth YBM) which is troubling to dissenters (and my entire class, my teacher and most people I've known) in several ways:

• It's racist. It's hard to argue with this except to claim, as I did, that it's not racist but instead the result of statistics and resource management.
• It is thought to foster feeling of resentment towards the police (and perhaps authority figures in general) with the possible effect of driving more YBM into crime. This seems like a pretty logical thought however I think I was unwilling to acknowledge it at the time (I can't claim to remember all the points made and my views on them clearly).
• It may lead to acceptance of other racist policies. I don't think I accept this, it seems like a slippery slope logical fallacy provided the case for racial profiling is empirically justified.
• It may lead to people accepting the following view, "I can't hire him, he's young and black. Everyone knows YBM are criminals, the government say so". Again, hard to argue with a quite possibly true.

The justification given by supporters (and me in 2007) is that this method works. It's that simple, whilst I haven't seen strong evidence which does not suffer from bias, the reasoning seemed to stand alone - if more YBM commit knife crime then targeting YBM will give higher success rates and therefore make a bigger difference. This is reasonable if the italicised premise is correct, and not itself subject to a sampling bias (police target more YBM therefore it appears as though more YBM commit knife crime). I want to make it very clear that I was very insistent on this premise needing to be correct for the policy to be acceptable, I knew that without it the policy was unequivocally racist and unjustified.


I don't know whether I could have been convinced at the time by someone saying to me, Separate the efficacious from the ethical, you must. However my embarrassment at holding this view (yes, I have been very embarrassed to hold a view dissenting from my liberal friends, I'm human) makes me think I could have been convinced by someone earlier than 2012.
It was probably a mixture of discussion and consideration of torture which put me in a mindset very willing to accept the idea that whether it works or not, it infringes on individuals rights and is therefore unnacceptable. Or as put by Massimo in an article which helped me to reach that long awaited conclusion:


"[...] in an open society, profiling of any sort – no matter how effective – is a breach of the fundamental principle that all our citizens have the same rights and ought to be treated equally by the law."


It's been a long time, but that's one less thing that will keep me up at night... or at least it would be, except now I have the new worry that the police actually do this and now it's definitely wrong.