You jumped immediately to an assumption of higher crime in the neighborhood, while the article pointed out the existence of white-collar crime in other neighbor

You jumped immediately to an assumption of higher crime in the neighborhood, while the article pointed out the existence of white-collar crime in other neighborhoods. An interesting similar practical application was differential sentencing for drug dealing outside versus drug dealing inside. White and black Americans use illegal drugs at essentially the same rate, with white Americans pulling ahead in several categories historically. Suburban Americans more often deal drugs inside houses, while urban Americans are more likely to deal drugs outside than suburban Americans. Due in part to redlining practices, black people are more likely to live in urban areas and white people in suburban areas. So just send a bunch of cops to urban neighborhoods and you'll catch plenty of drug dealers and give them higher sentences, while letting all the white drug dealers go and giving them lower sentences if their behavior is egregious enough that you've got to arrest them. This example doesn't even get into differential treatment for white-collar crime (scamming your investors) vs stealing meat from a grocery store. All those articles we saw on HN about scamming your employees and investors? MotionLoft, 1for.one? Those folks are "just doing business" and most commenters seemed to implicitly condone the scamming behavior -- sure it's unfortunate that it happens but you know business -- while no one here would condone stealing meat from a grocery store, and the meat-lifter would be more likely to get caught since there are cops at the doors of those grocery stores. Do we need cops in the startup scene if scams are happening, though? The bad thing is not targeting "needs," as above, it's targeting perceived needs or exploiting differences in a way that contributes to injustice. I can see how you might not care about targeted advertising that allows you to ignore the lives of the poor -- that's fairly normal and in the US we really rely on it for political stability -- but ads that only show high-cost high-interest low-placement educational options for poor people push out ads from your local community college, targeted ads contribute to the political polarization we're seeing, targeted ads show higher-paying jobs to men than women regardless of qualifications. There is information asymmetry in a lot of these situations and in several ways: if the poor person trying to look up education doesn't already know about the low-cost legit CC and the information is buried after a page of for-profit ads, they may not understand all their options, and just as bad, we who earn a bit more may not know that's happening, because when we look up education to see if our teen could take multivariable calc nearby, we will get the CC right at the top of the page and the for-profit schools, not targeting us, won't show up! And then we can grumble with a clean conscience that poor people are so dumb they can't even look at the first search result...