Kategorie: International news

In a speech that will reignite one of the most contentious issues in British po licing, the president of the National Black Police Association will dramatically call for an increase in the policing strategy in black communities. It marks a U-turn by the association, which has previously questioned the high proportion of black people stopped and searched by police.
 
Speaking at the group’s annual conference, Keith Jarrett will ask Police Minister Tony McNulty and Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to consider escalating stop-and-searches among black people to reduce the number of shootings that have claimed the lives of another two teenagers in the past week.
 
The disputed use of stop-and-search has arguably caused more conflict than any other modern policing tactic and first achieved national notoriety during the Eighties, when it was blamed for precipitating inner-city race riots. Black people are four times more likely to be stopped than white people, according to Scotland Yard’s figures, which continues to give rise to charges of police racism.
 
Jarrett admitted he was braced for a negative backlash during his headline speech in Bristol last Wednesday. It is the first time that a senior black officer has called for an increase in stop-and-search among the black community.
 
Traditionally the association, which has 8,000 members ranging from senior figures such as Tarique Ghaffur, assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan police, to backroom staff, has pointed to the ‘alarming’ and disproportionate numbers of black people who are stopped and searched.
Jarrett told The Observer: ‘From the return that I am getting from a lot of black people, they want to stop these killings, these knife crimes, and if it means their sons and daughters are going to be inconvenienced by being stopped by the police, so be it. I’m hoping we go down that road. I am going to be pressing him [Blair] to increase stop-and-search. It’s not going to go down very well with my audience, many of whom are going to be black. We have talked about disproportionate use of stop-and-search in the past, but what I am proposing is quite the reverse. The black community is telling me that we have to have a look at this.’ Controversially, Jarrett said he would not oppose a random use of stop-and-search when officers had ‘reasonable suspicion’ an offence had been committed. He argued that, as long as officers used the powers courteously and responsibly, many within the black community would accept it as a necessary evil. He added that the toll of shootings and knife crime meant that deep-seated misgivings over the policing strategy were being increasingly outweighed by fears over mounting violence.
 
The backlash was led last night by Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg, who said stop-and-search only ‘increased community tensions and distrust in the police’. He added: ‘Effective policing depends on good intelligence and smart ways of fostering community co-operation. This suggestion points us in exactly the opposite direction and risks repeating all the worst mistakes of the past’.
 
Although widely viewed by senior officers as an effective policing tool, stop-and-search use was blamed for the 1985 Handsworth riots in Birmingham which erupted after the arrest of a black man. Its predecessor, the discredited ‘sus law’ which empowered the police to arrest any person they suspected of loitering with intent to commit an arrestable offence, was abolished after its widespread use against young black men sparked the 1981 Brixton riots.
 
In the wake of the south London uprising, new rules for stop-and-search determined that officers required ‘reasonable suspicion’ that an offence had been committed. Yet its use against the black community has continued to attract claims of racism.
 
Publication of the Macpherson Report in February 1999 into the murder of the teenager Stephen Lawrence, which found that police were institutionally racist, condemned the use of stop-and-search. Racial equality watchdogs have also threatened the police with legal action over stop-and-search, claiming its use has single-handedly poisoned relations with ethnic minorities.

Until Jarrett’s speech this week, senior black and Asian officers publicly agreed that stop-and-search risked criminalising and alienating ethnic minorities. Last year Ghaffur warned that counter-terrorism laws, including an increased incidence of stop-and-search, had indirectly discriminated against Asians.