Also just because it's been niggling at me😅 there's a far more fundamental flaw in the other argument you mentioned.

If we imprisoned all the black people, we would cut back on crime. It's perfectly true. Of course, this would be true whichever group of people we chose. So if we continue by extending it to the form you proposed:

"We should do whatever it takes to cut back on crime, therefore we should imprison all Black people,"

This is perfectly logically consistent. But it's glaringly incomplete, because you've snuck in the imperative, "whatever it takes." I don't think this is actually the argument he's making.

Imprisoning black people only cuts back on a completely arbitrary amount of crime. It doesn't eliminate crime. It's not doing whatever it takes. To do that, at the least, you'd need to imprison everybody. And there's still be the potential for crime in the form of murder or rape. To truly do whatever it takes, you'd have to isolate everybody from everybody else forever. Of perhaps just execute everybody and be done with it.

This is the true "therefore" of the question if it were really about doing "whatever it takes." We should do whatever it takes to cut back on crime. Therefore we should imprison/execute everybody. Ah! Spoken like a true evil AI.

The racism in the argument comes from the fact that he's really saying:

We should do *something* to cut back on crime, but not whatever it takes. There are limits to how far I think we should go, even if I haven't consciously formulated them in my mind. And those are expressed by the people I don't implicate in my solution.

This is the argument he's really making. And therefore, his choice of black people as the "something", out of all the possible options, most of which don't require imprisoning anybody, reveals his true thoughts.