Honest question: does race predict legal recourse when decoupled from socioeconomic status, or is this an assumption?
I think the issue is that regardless of the answer, it isn't decoupled in real world scenarios.
I think the solution isn't dependent upon race either. It is to ensure everyone have access to legal recourse regardless of socioeconomic status. This would have the side effect of benefiting races correlated with lower socioeconomic status more.
Presumably the coupling of the variables is not binary (dependent or independent) but variable (degrees of coupling). Presumably these variables were more tightly coupled in the past than in the present. Presumably it's useful to understand precisely how coupled these variables are today because it would drive our approach to addressing these disparities. E.g., if the variables are loosely coupled then bias-reducing programs would have a marginal impact on the disparities and the better investment would be social welfare programs (and the inverse is true if the variables are tightly coupled).
Did you think I was asking about non-real-world scenarios? And how do we know that it's coupled (or rather, the degree to which it's coupled) in real world scenarios?
> I think the solution isn't dependent upon race either. It is to ensure everyone have access to legal recourse regardless of socioeconomic status. This would have the side effect of benefiting races correlated with lower socioeconomic status more.
This makes sense to me, although I don't know what this looks like in practice.
So unequal treatment based on race has quite literally been a feature of the US justice system, independent of socioeconomic status.
If you survive violence at the hands of law enforcement and are not convicted of a crime, or if you don't and your family wants to hold law enforcement accountable, then the first option is to ask the local public prosecutor to pursue criminal charges against your attackers.
Depending on where you live could be a challenge, given the amount of institutional racial bias in the justice system, and how closely prosecutors tend to work with police departments. After all, if prosecutors were going after police brutality cases aggressively, there likely wouldn't be as much of a problem as there is.
If that's fruitless, you would need to seek the help of a civil rights attorney to push your case in the the legal system and/or the media. This is where a lot of higher profile cases like this end up - and often only because they were recorded on video.