Then in that case, I suppose it all depends on who is doing the justification. Nearly every police shooting in America is "justified" — be it by a police review board, a prosecutor, a grand jury, or a trial jury.

I agree, and unfortunately I don't have a good idea about how to audit the entire justice system. My gut says it's unlikely that an entire diverse industry is prejudiced against one particular racial group, and that thousands of laypeople are in on it. Hopefully we can get better data if it doesn't already exist.

>My gut says it's unlikely that an entire diverse industry is prejudiced against one particular racial group, and that thousands of laypeople are in on it.

Is that a general statement? Because the 20th century would like a word.

If we really managed to eliminate institutional racism in the justice system, we should probably try and work out the date that occurred, and make it a national holiday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism

You think it unlikely that there is a systemic bias? Bearing in mind that systemic bias isn't usually the result of an overt plan or even hidden conspiracy but instead the simple average of the bias of all the parts of the system.

Something like that. I guess I don't think bias is as responsible or pervasive as we're lead to believe. Frequently when we look at a disparity, I find myself thinking "Why didn't they check if X, Y, or Z were responsible instead of bias?". One example is the gender wage gap; we now know that women make less than men because they elect into different careers, because they have different priorities. Different groups have different distributions of any given behavior, and not all behaviors have the same outcome. This is all just a hunch, so I won't defend it too much; it just seems more plausible to me than the current "everyone is subconsciously biased against one racial group" theory.

I sort of see what you're getting at, but considering there's been a clear systemic bias against women and black people in our very recent past, and considering that it took a lot of effort (even a civil war, sort of, in the case of black people) to reduce these biases, I find it entirely reasonable to assume that they're still there, to a degree, and that we'll have to expend quite a bit of effort to reduce them further.

Those were conscious biases though. Most people in our society try very hard to avoid even unconscious bias, often by being consciously biased against minority groups (this might range from small acts of kindness toward a minority group to nonprofits that serve minority groups to corporate inclusivity policies to government programs and affirmative action policies). Given all that, I have a hard time believing bias plays a large role in explaining disparities.