I think socioeconomic status is a better predictor of criminality than race. With that said, if I'm walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, race is one of the few variables I have to work with. Unfortunately, in America, race is a moderately effective indicator of socioeconomic status, so I would use it as one factor in judging my safety. Even then, I usually use clothes and appearance rather than race to judge one's propensity for crime.
This is actually a more interesting problem in terms of what to tell children than racial differences in intelligence. I think by the time they're old enough to be somewhere without adult supervision, they are able to determine what looks like a poor area or poor person and act accordingly. I can see the logic that would lead someone to tell their kids to use race as such a proxy instead, but the consequences of doing so make it not worth the negligible increase in safety in my opinion.
I think it's a red herring to ask why we're collecting the data in order to decide whether or not the data are accurate.
I don't care why we're collecting the data, and I was assuming the data was accurate. I'm just saying that as far as genetic differences are a factor in the data, there's nothing we can do about it or with it, so it's useless.
You would really be indifferent between finding yourself in Boro Park or Bedford-Stuyvessant? I understand the rent is very cheap in the latter (I lived there a while). Bed-Stuy doesn't have sub-Saharan Africans (or if it does, they're very smart immigrants who are likely to move to a better neighborhood in a few years), but the people there are from roughly that group, plus some admixture.