Quality | 2010.03.11
Police racism report – there is a silver lining | Michael White
Comparative performance that can be measured – and good practice copied – is a valuable response to those who want to merge things to make them \'more efficient\'
If the levels of police stop and search activities against black and south Asian Britons are as disproportionate as Vikram Dodd\'s report suggests in today\'s Guardian much hard work remains to be done. But there\'s a silver lining all the same.
Today\'s alarm is sounded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is threatening to denounce as "racist" those police forces that persist in excessive stop and search against ethnic minority citizens. Its report is due out next month.
The EHRC\'s research suggests that the Metropolitan police is still the prime offender despite robust efforts in recent years to recruit ethnic minority officers. It\'s an important ingredient in improving the performance of any large institution that should reflect the community it serves.
The Met was deemed to be responsible for 120,000 "excessive" stops, a power used up to five times as often as in comparable urban police forces. The Met carries out 71 stops per 1,000 people, whereas the West Midlands force covering multi-ethnic Birmingham carries out just 13.
If you break down the Met figures by race, 195 Afro-Caribbean Londoners are stopped per 1,000, compared with 78 Asian Brits and only 49 white Londoners. The stats relate only to "reasonable suspicion" stops – not public order or terrorism-related stops where (researchers claim) the figures may be worse.
The stereotypical response would be to say: "Well, young black kids are stopped more because experience probably suggests they are more likely to mug Granny. If you are looking for bank fraud you look for white blokes, usually in offices."
It\'s crude, but whether or not there\'s a point there , stops aren\'t supposed to be based on generalisations like race or appearance.
The price paid for doing so is that a lot of respectable people get pointlessly stopped and get hacked off with the law. That\'s bad. In a non-racial context you could say the same of young people, especially those with long hair. Do they still get stopped on suspicion of possession? They certainly did.
Yes, but here\'s where the silver lining comes in. Britain has 58 separate police forces if you count the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (750 officers), the MoD police and other small entities. The Met has 31,000 officers. They all do things differently.
And the EHRC research confirms that those differences show. Brum does better than the Met. Cleveland, presumably with a more homogenous ethnic base, has cut its stop and search to one fifth while also cutting crime.
The hard-pressed Stoke division of Staffordshire police – an area with high unemployment and a BNP presence – has done something similar. In mostly-white Dorset and Hampshire they stop 10 times the number of black people, always assuming they can find them in the villages.
Comparative performance that can be measured – and good practice copied – is a valuable response to those who always want to merge things to make them bigger and "more efficient". You see the impulse in private sector mergers that end in expensive tears and in the likes of Charles Clarke who, when home secretary, wanted to bundle up small police forces.
We know that small forces can screw up major investigations (think Soham, when Humberside failed to keep a proper record of Ian Huntley\'s past form in child molestation), but so can large ones. But the larger the institution, the larger the gaffe. There are also obviously political dangers in a national police force in the wrong hands.
The EHRC has had teething problems – too large and unwieldy to handle diverse forms of discrimination, say critics – and a lot of people are still gunning for its high-profile chief, ex-TV reporter and Labour politician Trevor Phillips.
But the Met also has its problems, highlighted not least by last month\'s conviction of Ali Dizaei, the former Met commander now serving four years for perverting the course of justice. According to Hugh Muir\'s verdict here , Dizaei was a bad guy with a lawyer\'s skills who still ran rings round the colleagues. They blamed "political correctness" for the problem. But as Hugh says: "They always do."
I think we\'re making progress all the same, albeit not as fast as we should have done in the Met, though I see more black faces in uniform these days. Dubbing errant forces "racist"? It\'s so sweeping and tars everyone in the force that I recoil from it.
I did when the Macpherson report created the label "institutional racism" for the Met after the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Having read the report myself I thought I saw incompetence and a spot of corruption in the initial investigation as more relevant to the failure. I still do.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2010/mar/11/police-stop-and-search-racism
