That is pretty bad. He was dressed in a suit, smart, coming from work clearly unlikely to be the drug dealer they were after.

Firstly, no one gets afforded protection from being profiled.. that is the very purpose of profiling.

I got stopped at Stoke on Trent train station on valentines day and asked similar questions. The reason given was very similar, I told them where I had come from and provided a ticket as evidence. They thanked me for my time and, concluding I was not the person they were after went off to eat oatcakes or whatever the police in Stoke do. 

Was it inconvenient, yes. Was I targeted, yes. Did I use it as an opportunity to get some free publicity... perhaps I should have. 

His complaint seems to be about his own feelings rather than anything the police did wrong. Cops looking for a young black man speak to a young black man. Is this an outrage?

“A man who was clearly black, and that's not really what we expect in Lewes was stopped at the station and asked to provide an account of why he was there with his actual skin on," said the spokesman. "Officer enquiries involved asking the man a number of questions and checking the details he provided on the Police National Computer. Once these checks were complete and officers were satisfied it was possible to have two black men in the same postcode, he continued with his journey." 

I wonder in what way he matched the description of the person of interest? Wearing a suit? Looking lost? Or something else?

Its a difficult one. If the police were expecting a black man with short hair and a beard to be delivering drugs, this guy fits the description doesn't he? 

If the police never stopped anyone in a suit, all drug dealers would wear suits all the time.

So, just in case I'm missing something here, his complaint is that he has been stopped and questioned by the police on a single occasion?

And that he thinks that wasn't acceptable because he was wearing a suit? Or because he was black?

This is the problem with importing American narratives about policing and racial discrimination into the UK without doing any critical thinking about whether they have any relevance here. There's a whole section of society which has been primed to believe that they're a victimised underclass and who then imagine that any interaction they have with the police is a symptom of 'structural oppression' that pervades society at large and represents some form of sinister 'profiling'.

Which leads to bizarre scenarios like this one, in which a successful young man with a professional occupation, who should view a single interaction with a police officer as a fairly mundane event, comes away from it saying strange, borderline hysterical, things like it made him feel "humiliated...vulnerable and targeted". And then has that hyperbolic reaction taken seriously in the press.

It's just a weird mindset, there's no justification for it in the UK when you look at the statistics (and yes, I know the usual red-herring stats about stop and search events in Inner-London). And yet a whole generation of young men has been taught to live in fear of being some kind of George Floyd figure.

"If the police never stopped anyone in a suit, all drug dealers would wear suits all the time."

Yes, but that way we'd never have to hear narcissistic young men and women of colour, with careers that pay more than three police officer jobs put together, having attacks of the vapours in the press over the fact that a police officer - probably working class - dared to look them in the eye and speak to them without first being invited to do so.

So it's a net plus really.

not sure they police went so far as to say how he matched the description.  Fair chance it was just "there's drugs coming in - check anyone who's black or looks a bit shifty".  Seems like County Lines need to recruit some mumsy WI types in nautical motif blazers.

I got pulled over by the cops while jogging in a tracksuit.  They pulled me over from behind and then realised quickly I wasn't who they were looking for as I was about 20 years older than their suspect and had a beard. It wasn't their fault. I was dressed in similar clothes to their suspect and running. These things happen. 

Also drug dealers wear suits. The same way people on push bikes with fake Deliveroo and Just Eat boxes are riding about selling drugs. Criminals adapt.

"The same way people on push bikes with fake Deliveroo and Just Eat boxes are riding about selling drugs. Criminals adapt."

Stop profiling and discriminating against a vulnerable group of people primarily composed of migrants and people of colour!

Why are you such a fascist and where is your compassion?!

Next up, let's have an inquest into how the wicked Police are allowing so many young black men to die in incidents of knife-violence. What can we possibly do to put a stop to the root causes this scandal?

I'll bet it's all because of evil white people being racist.

This brave man was wearing a suit. 

How dare the police question a stunning and brave person in a suit.

The police are institutionally not stunning an brave of they don't realise that criminals never wear suits or try and disguise their activity.

We need more DEI money to fix this and a general immunity from suspicion for all suits.

Matching the description? How? Specifically?

@10.31 clearly still buying their drugs off kids on mopeds doing drop offs. Get with the times, grandad.

Why was it an issue that the police stopped and asked this trainee questions? Is this bloke honestly suggesting that police should never stop anyone so long as he/she is in a suit and does a professional job? Drug dealers could be in suits too? This incident is anything but racial profiling. The police officers in question have provided a logical explanation and were merely doing their job. Case closed and no one should overthink this.

How long would it take for the police to ask his name and Google him.

Less than a minute, for our highly trained Police force? Two minutes at the most. It does not take long. 

I've been stopped and searched for similar reasons. The demeanour of the Police was what was so disappointing.

They were clearly enjoying it. For some, not all, they enjoy a feeling of superiority.

You only need look at the stats to see which group is being targeted. 

It's like The Telegraph comments section on here.

Chaps, bros, white Middle Class foppish brethren - the reason you cannot make Partner is not because of DEI. Don't get so upset by it.

The reason you cannot make Partner is because the same chaps to which you correlate so closely to don't want to give you a slice of that expensive Home Counties pie.

Poor you. Strap on the removable chin, put on your best red Cordings, and go and sit at home in Peckham, sorry, "Near Dulwich" and blame DEI for ruining everything.

Here we go, another people trying to cry racism at the police doing their job… will he looking to file a lawsuit for his hurt feelings?

If I were I'm not sure I'd be filled with confidence if the lawyer meant to represent me and supervise in the face of police questioning couldn't handle this interaction without feeling the way he supposedly did.

Still, he's a trainee and early in his career - I hope things improve for him with experience.

I - a man of colour - have also been stopped several times by the police.  On every occasion when I have protested they tell me that someone looking like me committed an offence earlier that day.

How many times has that happened to you?

Pure coincidence, I suppose, that so many black people (almost every one I know) tell the same story and so many white people have never experienced it.

I suppose it makes sense given there are so many more blacks that whites.

Oh....  Hang on a sec....

"The demeanour of the Police was what was so disappointing.

They were clearly enjoying it. For some, not all, they enjoy a feeling of superiority."

You think they're bad for it.

Just wait until you meet a barrister...

"Matching the description? How? Specifically?"

Young black male not from the local area? 

Dare to imagine that he might be a similar height and/or build to the suspect.

How much more do you need exactly?

Or are you one of these oddballs who thinks that Stop and Question needs to have a 100% conviction rate in order to be evidence of anything other than a police state?

"I suppose it makes sense given there are so many more blacks that whites."

You think you're being really clever with this, but has it occurred to you that in the UK there actually are more blacks than whites who, out of any randomly selected group of 1000, are criminal offenders an/or prison inmates?

And that the place where that ratio of total population to total number of criminal offenders is starkest is in Central London; where both violent and drug related crime is an almost exclusively black phenomena.

So, given that there are a very small number of black people in the UK, but that black communities generate a comparatively large number of criminal offenders, is it really that unusual for the police to have had a report of a black offender on a particular day? And is it really so statistically unlikely for law abiding black people to be stopped as a result? Especially when those people are in Central London.

It's not your fault. But it's a statistical fact in the UK that, if you are of black heritage, there literally are more criminal offenders who look a bit like you than there are criminal offenders who look like any randomly selected white person.

Don't blame the police for that. Identify the cultural factors that lead to disproportionate numbers of young black men choosing crime as their career path.

"On every occasion when I have protested they tell me that someone looking like me committed an offence earlier that day"

Also, just to try and understand how you think policing works, do you imagine that the police tend to go around stopping people and questioning them on days where there hasn't been an offence committed?

Like, do you think they just pull people aside for conversation? Or on the off-chance that the person will say "Thank goodness officer, I was just about to go rob a bank but you've put me right off the idea. God bless 'yer".

Of course they only stop you on days when they're investigating a crime.

What else would be the point of doing it?

Lewes is the last place in Great Britain where Bonfire Night celebrations involve burning the Pope* in effigy and waving around banners screaming 'NO POPERY!'

I suppose we should be pleasantly surprised that their approach policing has at least reached the 1950s. 

*Technically Pope Paul V, allegedly. 

I don't think that we, as white people, can argue whether or not this man was racially profiled or targeted. We do not get to decide what is racist and what is not - we do not know oppression in this way and likely never will. If he feels profiled, he was profiled. End of discussion. 

Today I shall write a lengthy LinkedIn post on this topic. Will I do any work today in order to justify the enormous money I get paid without generating any business or doing any work? NO! Will I investigate why all my associates are quitting? NO! Will I clumsily wedge into my LinkedIn post a reference to me having gone to Oxbridge and that I am a champion of [being awful to] women? YES!

The statistics for stop and search are pretty clear and damning. 

The numbers have changed over time, but consistently for many years a non-white person is significantly more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person.

In 2020-21, there were 7.5 stop and searches for every 1,000 white people, 17.5 per 1,000 people with mixed ethnicity, 17.8 per 1,000 Asian people, and 52.6 for every 1,000 black people.

Is it justifiable that a person of mixed or Asian ethnicity is more that twice as likely to be stopped and searched than a white person?  Or seven times more likely if that person is black? 

Someone being black in public - or indeed appearing to be lost at an unfamiliar train station (looking for the exit or the taxi rank perhaps) - should not be a reason for raised suspicion.

It's the standard story they always tell when stopping someone without cause (aka for the fun of it).  Thing is, until someone is willing to demand they produce the report / description that the stop is based on they'll keep doing it and getting away with it.

And even if you do they'll try to claim it came over the radio and no written report exists.  In the meantime the complainant will be trolled and villified as happens here.  The fact is that as with sexual assault, a lot of white men think that the victims deserve it.  Usually because they know, subconsiously or consciously, that given the opportunity they'd be doing exactly the same thing.

"a non-white person is significantly more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person"

As ever, this isn't actually true.

The only way that you can make it look as if black people are searched more than white people is if you take stats from high-crime areas (i.e. Central London, many black people) and mix them up in a bucket with stats taken from low-crime areas (i.e. Yorkshire Dales, few black people).

Once you do that, and you're doing a nation-wide comparison in which you hold up Central London stop and search numbers against a pot of numbers that has its stop and search rates dragged down by including stats taken from low-crime areas like the Cotswolds, Dales, and leafy Shires then it suddenly looks as if black people are being searched disproportionately. But what you're really looking at is a set of stats which says that people in high-crime areas tend to be searched more than people in low-crime areas.

Which isn't a particularly startling revelation.

In fact, if you actually want to understand how likely black people are to be searched in comparison to white peers, then you can take stop and search numbers from local areas (i.e. you look at your Central London numbers) and do the same exercise of counting total stops against total populations. When you do that, and when you stop comparing stop rates for young black men in Peckham against old white ladies in Chipping-Norton, you find that black people in the UK get searched at pretty much the same rate as white ones. So a young black man living in, say, Bradford actually gets stopped at roughly the same rate as a young white man living in the same place. A fact that tends to stay true across the UK.

You also note when you do that that black people tend to live in urban areas with high crime rates, and not so much in rural areas with low ones. With black populations outside of large urban areas being so low as to be almost statistically irrelevant in a lot of the UK's rural wards.

It's a classic example of what statisticians call Simpson's Paradox, in which the underlying trend across a number of datasets data appears to disappear/reverse when you add all of the individual datasets together. Which of course is why grievance-mongers insist on adding all of the individual datasets together despite it being an obvious case of comparing apples to oranges.

All of which is pretty obvious to anyone who takes just a few minutes to look at UK stop and search stats and think about them - but none of which serves the cause of making young black men in the UK irrationally fearful that they live in some kind of racist hellscape, thereby isolating them ever further from mainstream public opinion and reducing their chances of improving their life outcomes.

Which some people seem to think is an essential thing to do.

"It's the standard story they always tell when stopping someone without cause (aka for the fun of it)."

Oh yeah, they really enjoy it.

They have nothing better to do than stop you, ask some mundane questions about where you're going, and then listen to you whine about how it's just like 1984 as if you're the hero in some cheap crime-fiction paperback.

It's just so much fun for them. It's amazing they even go home at the end of the day.

"Matching the description? How? Specifically?"

He's black.

Once commuted from an airport in the Channel Islands returning same day.  Dressed scuffily with stubble, jeans and sneakers.  On return was questioned on reasons for travel and occupation. 

Customs jumped when stated I was a solicitor.

Understood there are people transiting drugs through a similar route...

When I was 25, a friend and I got stopped in Peckham late at night, pushed up against the wall and patted down by a policeman who told me to stay with my hands on the wall and my feet spread, or I'd be cuffed. 5 minutes later, an old lady showed up accompanied by another copper and she said "no, it's not them" and they let us go on our way. I'm white, though my friend is Indian. Never really worried me or him - I'd rather the inconvenience than the police be feeble and apologetic for going after bad guys. It happens - sounds like the perpetrators of some bad deed were white and asian, young men but the police cannot be omniscient.

@ Anonymous 17 March 23 13:44

Similar to you, man of colour.  Been told my motorbike was used in a (not-specified) crime, then when I told them my bike had been locked up at my home at the time of the (made-up) offence they said it was the same make and plate number.  Also been told on different occasions I was wearing same hat, same jacket and carrying same bag as invented offender.  Have been stopped on various occasions.

"You look like" or "you match description of" always delivered in a way that suggests "you're black - I'll get you for something".  I wish they'd apply the same rigour to red-trousered asshats with cocaine around West End clubs but sadly that will never happen.

Anyone pretending that the British police aren't racist deserves a good shoeing of their own.  They can only possibly be doing it  because they themselves take pleasure in being racist in a public arena.

If the police received a tip that the suspect is a black person it’s reasonable to stop anyone who matches that description. Just because you were suited up shouldn’t matter my dear. Also, the police had only asked a couple of questions and they would have asked many others during the day - what made your case so special? 

A lot of people think it’s fair to use a strategy of “someone saw a black man under 50 near the scene, therefore stopping any black man under 50 in the area in the vain hope of catching the person who did it with enough evidence on their person for an arrest“.

So instead, ask yourself whether these dumb dragnets are really the best way to solve crime, or instead busy work for a force that’s unskilled to do anything more complicated than shaking the tree to see what falls out.

Not only are these stops arguably (you’ve probably come to your view on this and I’m not going to change it with a comment) institutional racism but also they’re a colossal waste of time: a cause and a symptom of why the solve rate is in the toilet. 

If the police received a tip

The police don't receive those tips.  They make them up after the stop to justify it if they are questioned.

A lot of the "well you blacks are criminals so what to you expect" comments are the typical victim blaming shizzle from the privileged, ignorant and prejudiced that are intended to wear down and exhaust those who protest at their mistreatment.

Just as the British people are finally discovering what it is like to be ruled by the British I sincerely hope that soon you people will find out in person what it is like to be policed by the Met. 

Abuse of power is not a bug in the system, it's a feature.  The policing of the vigil in memory of Sarah Everard, the numerous WhatsApp groups which take it for granted that abuse of women and minority cultures will be accepted, the rallying round and support of the officers who stopped Ricardo de Santos and Bianca Williams and the efforts those people had to go to before they could get justice...  all these things are commonplace.

But of course when it's a copper it's only every a lone wolf one off, even when it involves many people and happens over and over again.

Alas, I too was stopped at around 2 am one morning whilst walking home from a club. 2 police cars and a van turned up and around 6 cops, led by one with a very bad attitude, milled around me.  I felt humiliated….vulnerable and targeted.  Bad attitude cop attempted to goad me into a reaction.  I was told that I fitted the description of a wrong ‘un and questioned for about 20 minutes.  I had to give my name and address and explain why a lone honky was there, without a kebab, dressed in dark clothing.

As I didn’t kick off, despite various sarcastic and goading comments, I was allowed to leave.  

I want to spread awareness about the issue, to highlight that "those who are trying to pursue a professional career" are not afforded "protection from being profiled".  
If you are a honky and you match the description of a criminal honky, whatever job you do, you could be stopped.  If you are, contact RoF immediately to express outrage that you, a lawyer for God’s sake, had a bit of a crap time at the hands of a police force trying to do its job.  

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/19/richard-wallace-british-man-deported-to-jamaica-launches-action-against-home-office
 

further readin’

Dear Roll on Friday

Please make it compulsory for commentators to have an account with you.

The site will be better if you do this because it will then be more difficult for a single person to present themself as many.

On this article, as on many others about sexual impropriety I suspect that one or two commentators deliberately try to skew the comments section.

At the same time as salvaging your own reputation you can strike a small blow for human decency.

C'mon.  You know it makes sense.

Echoing comments from non-white people, I live in a gritty(ish), mixed area of London and have done for about ten years.  I've never been stopped and searched.  There's one black person in my family.  He lives in a much smaller city with low crime rates.  He's the only member of my extended family to have been stopped and searched (multiple times).

Anonymous with his Simpson's Paradox - where are your central London/Yorkshire dales stats? Specifically in London, percentage of population who are black, versus percentage of stopped people who are black. 

@14:34

You couldn't be more wrong. You cannot just be stopped for being black and clothing being irrelevant. You're part of the problem.

"The police don't receive those tips.  They make them up after the stop to justify it if they are questioned."

I mean, there's no evidence for that statement, but sure... it's the Police just making things up to fit a pre-conceived agenda.

Not you, of course. You'd never just make up incidents of dishonesty to justify saying or doing whatever you needed to maintain your state of paranoia that the UK is a racist hellscape.

(which you could then pose as a brave crusader against, with no actual risk or effort on your part required, and with the comfort of knowing that the entire British establishment agreed with you that racism was indeed a bad thing - all the activist chic with none of the rebel against authority downside)

"Just as the British people are finally discovering what it is like to be ruled by the British"

Possibly the maddest thing you'll read all week.

Do you imagine that the British have been unaware of their governance for the interval of time between now and 1707?

Or are you saying that you think they previously imagined that they were governed by someone else? By Guatemalans perhaps?

Or maybe even a race of tiny hyper-intelligent hedgehogs who just posed as humans using sophisticated steam-powered suits?

But only now, three centuries on, the British have discovered that - shock horror - the people they were electing to Parliament are, get this, other British people. Just like they said on all the party-political pamphlets that they put through the door. Amazing stuff.

Also, do you have any idea how mad Twitter catchphrases sound when you take them outside of the echo-chamber?

"Not only are these stops arguably (you’ve probably come to your view on this and I’m not going to change it with a comment) institutional racism but also they’re a colossal waste of time"

Whines someone with no first-hand experience of policing, or even any kind of academic background in it, from the comfort of a swivel-chair in an air-conditioned office. With no constructive suggestion of an alternative.

Seriously, if it's so easy, then just tell us how to change the system. Then direct us to the enlightened utopia that has managed it in practice so that we can use it as a reference point for change.

Until then the Get Report Of Crime: Go Looking For People Who Look Like Relevant Criminal method is probably going to prevail.

Why do these articles need a comment section?  Is it principally to increase user engagement with the site and tickle the tummies of advertisers?

I can't think of any good reason for it - and what we have here is the written equivalent of a radio phone-in show.  It reminds me of the old saw that opinions are like arseholes - everybody has one.  But that doesn't mean I want to look at or listen to anyone else's.

Most of all it looks like this Mitchell & Webb sketch.  It's not a good look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y&t=6s  

It's fascinating to read the blind support for the police from those who seem to have little or no experience of them.

It's as if the horrors and scandals which are being exposed on an almost daily basis never happened or if they did they all happened in isolation.

There is a culture in the police service which allows these people to find each other and set up their abusive WhatsApp groups, ignore calls for enquiries, whitewash disciplinary hearings and betray the trust put in them by the public and the state.  And until that is acknowledged it will never be fixed.

@ Anonymous 17 March 23 18:23

Thank you for mentioning Simpson's Paradox, but please give your source of data for the assertion that: "black people in the UK get searched at pretty much the same rate as white ones"

And then reconcile that with the published statistics on "Stop and search rate per 1,000 people, by ethnicity and area" (link below) and explain why the "Rate per 1,000" for black people is without exception higher than for white people in every police force area, whether for the Met (London 69.5 versus 20.4) or Bedfordshire (11.9 versus 3.6) or Durham (8.5 versus 3.6).  The lowest ratio is Merseyside (61 versus 30.5 so only double) and the highest is Dorset (55.5 versus 2.8 so nearly 20 times). 

In all three police areas in Yorkshire - south, north, and west - a black person is about three times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person, and in Humberside it is six times.  

This incident was in Lewes, which is in Sussex, a police area that has one of the highest ratios (47.8 versus 4.3, over 11 times).

That said, out of 40-something police areas, there are a handful where people of Asian and/or Mixed ethnicity are little less likely to be stopped and searched than White people (Durham, Cheshire, Merseyside, North Wales, Suffolk, Devon and Cornwall).   I suspect it is no coincidence that several of these areas also have relatively low ratios for stopping and searching Black people too, even if they are double or more than the rates for White people. 

Here is a link: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-law/policing/stop-and-search/latest

Check ONS criminal statistics. Per 100,000 people, Black people commit more crimes than any other racial group in the UK.

For religion, Muslims have the highest rate of criminality when compared to other religious groups.
 

Nobody cares to find out why this is.

You all should be ashamed of yourseld. How many times have you matched a description and been stopped and searched? 

Imagine being stopped and search every single week because 'you matched a description' and God forbid you speak on it. apparently you should only speak on it cause it gets you publicity from fucking bellends on the comment section of roll on friday. Fucking idiots 

Race based stop and search has been proven to be woefully and statistically ineffective in preventing crime. Around two thirds of stops are for low level drug possession, not even weapons. In those stops, you have find rates of less than 10% for suspicionless searches (under CJPA section 60) - marginally more than that if you are using reasonable grounds under PACE. Doesn't sound like an efficient use of already scare police resources.

So please do spare us the middle class hand wringing about how stop and search isn't so bad, or about the time you got stopped once in your life by a bobby on the beat. There are people walking around who have been stopped dozens (literally) of times by the police in their lives, but strangely enough, have never been arrested, charged or convicted as a result of that search. According to your wretched analyses, all of them had it coming.

If you or your children were stopped at that frequency (and, as is usually the case, with a level of aggression that is generally attributable to the brutish, racist and classist structure of the Metropolitan Police), you would cry blue murder. The same way Middle England complained in their droves to the Telegraph about loss of liberty, when they were receiving COVID fines for taking their dogs on walks in the midst of lockdown. But clearly, when it happens to a particular demographic of people, you seem to be just comfortable with it.

It's no surprise the Met is in a mess.  Cressida Dick oversaw the operation in which Jean Charles de Menezes was killed.

He was Brazilian rather than South Asian but perhaps police intelligence told them that "they all look the same".

The Met tried to block an inquiry into it, MPs were lobbied by the Met to influence the inquiry,  Information was released saying he was wearing  a "suicide vest", ran through the station and jumped over the barriers to board a train.  CCTV proved he was wearing a t-shirt, walked through the station stopping to pick up a newspaper and used his Oyster card to go on the a platform.

After that she was promoted to deputy commissioner and then commissioner.

Rank and file officers have got to look at that and think if she can do that and get promoted to commish well there's nothing I can do worse than that.  

Which will be broken up first?  The tory party or the Met?

I dunno.  It's all very well complaining about racists, rapists and murderers in the Met but I saw some of them dancing and wearing rainbow helmets at the Notting Hill Carnival.  If you ask me this wokeness is the real problem.

Don't know why people get so upset about it.

Bit of casual racism.  No big deal.  Just a few lawyers or coppers letting off a bit of steam.

Probably got chips on their shoulders.

"Imagine being stopped and search every single week because 'you matched a description'"

... and then relax in the happy knowledge that imagining is as far as it will go, because undergoing a weekly stop and search by the police isn't something that has actually happened to anyone in the story or anyone in the comment thread.

Or, alternatively, get yourself all worked up about an imaginary racist hellscape that you can pretend you live in so as to fit in with hysterical Californians on Twitter.

It's your life and you must live it how you choose.

@Andrew, please refer to @ONS Crime Stats' reply immediately below yours. It's the answer you are looking for (and which your quoted stats aren't engaging with).

The point is that Black populations get searched at a rate which is proportionate to their per-head levels of offending (which are, as a regrettable but objective fact, higher than the national average). That's the case nationwide, which is why stop rates are the way that they are across the UK's wards.

That being so, it's absurd to argue that Population Group A (ethnicity, religion, age, whatever) should be searched at the same rate as another Population Group B, even though it is statistically proven that Group A has higher levels of criminal offending than Group B.

Of course the police are going to have a more frequent justification to stop people from groups which, on average, commit the highest levels of crime.

Put another way, wouldn't you think it was weird if the police were searching the population groups with the lowest rates of criminal offending at the exact same rate as those with the highest?

I'm not (today of all days) saying that the police in the UK are perfect. But frankly it's just really odd (and a bit alarming) that so many people keep asking how it can be justified that black people get searched more often than white ones, and then immediately alight on racism as the only possible answer, without ever seeming to pause to reflect on the underlying justification for stopping and searching in the first place: the commission of crime.

Or, to put it more pointedly (because I think that a lot of people with an 'interest' in this topic come at it with a strong set of preconceptions that they are determined to force through in the face of the actual facts) you all really love stats about stop and search rates. So, why are the stats about the commission of crime so uninteresting to you? 

You seem really selective in questioning the overrepresentation of Black populations in one set of figures, but stubbornly uninterested in acknowledging it in another.

Why is that exactly?

Does anyone read the essay writer's efforts?

I don't and if no-one else does it might be nice to let him know and stop him wasting his time.

I bet he cried when Return of Kings went down tho.

Right, anon, so the argument is shifting away from the previous statement that "black people in the UK get searched at pretty much the same rate as white ones"

Perhaps you would accept that statement is factually incorrect? 

(You should, because the statistics clearly show that black people are stopped and searched at least twice as often as white people at best, on average seven times more often, and one area about 20 times more.  So much for Simpson's Paradox.) 

Instead you are arguing something like: "black people in the UK get searched more than white ones because they are convicted of crimes more often"

Indeed, you claim that the rate of searches is proportional to the rate of crimes committed.  But that correct?  Some statistics on crime and ethnicity might help with that:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1037903/Statistics_on_Ethnicity_and_the_Criminal_Justice_Sysytem_2020.pdf

So, page 3, black people are about 3% of the population but account for about 10% of the convictions (by comparison, the figures for white people are 85% and 79%).  Let us ignore other  confounding factors that might be relevant (socioeconomic, where people live, overpolicing, etc) and guess that a black person is about three times more likely to be convicted of a crime than a white person.  Even so, black people are still stopped and searched seven times more often than white people: on average, more than twice as often than the conviction rates might suggest would be appropriate. 

On the very same day that yet another report gives evidence beyond doubt of the institutional racial discrimination embedded within the UK's leading police force, it is ludicrous to deny there is an issue. 

Deny away, if you must, but frankly it flies in the face of the actual facts. Perhaps you might like to check your own preconceptions?  

While black people are more likely to be arrested, white people have the highest conviction rate for street crime in the UK.

Figures and references here.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_Kingdom#Street_crime_2

Sadly that does nothing for the invented assertions of RoF's resident racist but she won't let that stop him.

@Lydia: What does a drug dealer wear for ‘work’ ?

@Anonymous 21 March 23 19:48

Wikipedia, really?