[markhnthoraway]

It depends how you read that sentence.

Race doesn't matter if "low-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents" is simply stating that all low income neighborhoods have higher proportions of Black and Latino residents. Although it's kind of relevant if all downstream bias in arrests etc, say, goes away when you control for income.

But I read it as "of all low income neighborhoods, ones with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents had more police vehicle images". In which case, the question is:

Why would similar-income neighborhoods (which you theorize should have similar crime levels regardless of race) be policed differently based on the race of the population?

[verteu]

You were misled. From the paper: "we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates."

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3593013.3594020

[aiisjustanif]

Let’s also quote why

“We report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates. First, if New York City residents of different races face different levels of police deployments, that disparate impact is itself important; it can also bias algorithms trained on downstream policing data irrespective of the true causal mechanism. Second, controlling for other factors in policing data can be difficult to interpret, introducing concerns about omitted variable bias and model misspecification which make it difficult to identify which factor is truly the “cause” of higher police deployments. For the sake of transparency and simplicity, therefore, we report results by stratifying each variable separately, noting that these disparities are themselves important but that multiple causal mechanisms may underlie them.”

[policepost]

Misled implies a degree of intent, the wording is ambiguous but I don't assume ill intent by the author, especially when they later spend a paragraph explaining why they did not slice by covariates.