I also felt the article could have tried to get to the point more directly. My initial reading of the article was that they were hand-wringing about whether th

I also felt the article could have tried to get to the point more directly. My initial reading of the article was that they were hand-wringing about whether the feature-set predicting crime could double as a feature-set for predicting race, and whether we should discount the algorithms as a result. To which my reaction was 'meh.' Just don't explicitly use race as a feature, and make sure your feature set will find suspicious people regardless of their race. Feedback loops, on the other hand, are a completely legitimate concern, and something that should be asked about and controlled for in these kinds of analyses.