Police stop and search powers under fire
Four out of ten complaints made about the police’s use of stop and search powers are lodged by members of people of Afro-Caribbean origin, a new report published today warns – despite their constituting just two per cent of the population.
Eight per cent of complaints are made by people of Asian extraction, and yet they make up only four per cent of Britons.
The study, compiled by the Police Complaints Authority, will bring back to the fore concerns about the police being “institutionally racist” – in the words of the MacPherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence.
Dr David Best, who produced the report for the PCA, explained, “Black complainants are four times more likely to make a complaint about stop and search than they are to make a complaint about another issue.
“Police recording of stop and search was of a wholly unsatisfactory standard. The police need to be far better in monitoring fairness and proportionality of stop and search.”
However, the report has received an angry response from the police themselves.
PCA chairman Sir Alastair Graham pointed out that only 11 per cent of complaints about stop and search were upheld as justified.
Nonetheless, he acknowledged, “It shows that – given the high volume of activity in stop and search powers – that not everything may be right in the use of these powers.”
Following a separate Metropolitan Police Authority study into stop and search, which considered curbing the powers, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Federation told the Daily Telegraph newspaper, “This could have a disastrous effect on the police’s ability to catch criminals on the streets. There are already fewer stops and searches than there were and, as a result, more street robbers and burglars are going free.”
