Blacks ‘26 times’ more likely than whites to face stop and search by UK police: Report
By ANISunday, October 17, 2010
LONDON - A new report has revealed that black people are 26 times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by police in England and Wales.
The figures relate to stop-and-searches under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which was introduced to deal with football hooligans and the threat of serious violence.
Analysis by the London School of Economics and the Open Society Justice Initiative found that there are 41.6 Section 60 searches for every 1,000 black people, compared with 1.6 for every 1,000 white people, the Guardian reports.
Asians were 6.3 times more likely to be stopped than whites, according to the analysis of Ministry of Justice figures for 2008-09.
Researchers at the Open Society Justice Initiative said that the British figures provided the widest “race gap” in stop-and-search that they had found internationally.
The previous highest use of stop-and-search powers against ethnic groups was in Moscow, where non-Slavs are 21.8 times more likely to be stopped by Russian police than Slavs.
A study in Paris found that people of Arab appearance were seven times more likely to be stopped.
In New York, blacks are nine times more likely to be stopped than whites. (ANI)
