Britain's second dopiest MP, David Lammy, is very upset about the government's new chicken box anti-knife crime campaign.

Mr Lammy fumed:

The Home Office is using taxpayers' money to sponsor an age-old trope... pushing the stereotype that black people love fried chicken. This ridiculous stunt is either explicitly racist or, at best, unfathomably stupid.

David Lammy MP.

Stupid, yes, because only tough policing and sentencing will reduce knife crime.

But racist?

Not really.

Young, urban black men are statistically more likely than any other group to carry knives, and their penchant for take-away fried chicken is well-known.

Not unreasonably, the government deduced from this that chicken boxes - 321,000 of them - would be good for broadcasting their anti-stabbing message.

It's an example of what American academic John K. Press calls 'culturist profiling' - profiling based on cultural, not racial attributes:

Racial profiling - targeting persons solely on the basis of their skin color - would make no sense. But, cultural diversity being both real and statistically demonstrable, culturist profiling is rational.

For example, based on statistics, we should employ culturist profiling in airport security. Young men named 'Muhammad' should receive extra scrutiny. People named 'Muhammad' are overwhelming[ly] Muslim. Young Muslim males commit the vast majority of terrorist attacks. Elderly Korean women have never committed terrorist acts; they should be passed through airport security quickly.

Culturist profiling can help keep us safe and prevent police and security services wasting precious time and resources on the wrong people.

Finally, a strange suggestion from David Lammy: