> Their direct function is not to investigate suspicious instances of walking while black.

True. Their direct function (one of) is investigating suspicious instances. Period. If the instance turns out to be just a black man walking by their business, they should say "sorry to bother you, sir" and both continue with their day.

This happened to me several times in various countries - police approached me, asked me some questions, ensured I am neither threat not in need of help and we parted ways amicably. The fact that a black person has smaller chance to such resolution than a white person who looks like me is a problem (both from moral and utilitarian standpoints), but it's not a problem of reporting, it is a problem of whoever taking decision on this resolution.

It's a simple thing - whoever is doing a wrong thing, is to blame for the wrong thing. Since when it became a problem to see things like this?

> when someone does report a person as suspicious solely on account of race

Obviously not the case in this discussion. In fact, I would submit it very rarely if ever happens "solely* on account of race. Even the most crazy, vitriolic, hateful anti-black racist does not report any random black person they meet to the police. They may hate them, they may scowl at them - but even these crazed bigots would know police will need something more. Now, there's no doubt that for many people race is a factor - sometimes a major one - but rarely it is the only one.

In the case under discussion, the person was on other's property, while not invited, behaving in unusual manner (not just passing by). Turns out the unusual manner was of innocent kind, probably complicated by mental issues, but again,

> and that leads to, say, a police shooting the person - the person that reported certainly shares part of the guilt.

Nope. Shooting an innocent person is not a reasonable response to a suspicion complaint. And blaming people for unreasonable and unlawful behavior of others is not right. If reasonable person can and should predict this behavior - i.e. if the police in this place is publicly known to be racist and trigger-happy - then the reporter may have some share of the guilt, but then again the first question that needs to be asked is how come everybody knows the police here is racist and trigger happy and it's still not fixed?

> And doubly so if, due to race-only description, police end up targeting the wrong person.

That did not happen in the case we are discussing - while we assume the person was treated as a threat even if he wasn't, there's no doubt and controversy that it was about the same person and there was no mistaken identity.

While race is not a good qualifier alone (too broad, of course), I don't see how removing it would reduce the chance of the police targeting the wrong person. After all, if the person of concern is of certain race, by pointing out the race you reduce the set of potential mistargeting victims to persons belonging to that race, and if you do not mention it at all, the potential set is all people - which is surely a larger set and thus possibility of mistargeting is larger. You can not reduce the probability of mistargeting by making your targeting selectivity worse.

Of course, you can claim race is not enough for identification - and that's certainly true. The police should be trained to solicit more details.