- Conference
- 2004 National Black Members' Conference
- Date
- 28 October 2003
- Decision
- Carried
Forty eight per cent of ‘stop and search’ incidents in the County of Northamptonshire involve black people; less than two per cent of these incidents actually result in an arrest. This means that, despite the requirements of “reasonable grounds for suspicion”, seven out of eight of those searched are doing nothing wrong.
Stop and search figures for black people in Northamptonshire increased again from 39 per 1000 of population (2000/1) to 48 per 1000 (2001/2002). This compares with a rate of 10 per cent per 1000 for white people (in both years). The rate of stop and search for black people was therefore nearly five times higher than for whites and the comparison is increasing.
Nationally stop and search rates for black people also rose between 2000/2001 to 2001/2002 from 86 to 106 per 1000 population, whilst the rate remained the same for whites, at 13 per thousand. The difference between the treatment of black and white is also expanding.
Professor Marian Fitzgerald of the London School of Economics points out, in general “black people are more likely to be stopped then white people, more likely to be searched than white people, though they are no more likely subsequently to be arrested”.
However, we would argue that if you concentrate police power on certain groups, you will arrest more of those groups, and from the figure that group appears to the Black.
In 1999, the Stephen Lawrence/MacPherson Enquiry Report labelled the Metropolitan Police Force “institutionally racist”. It is clear, unease remains within the black community across the country. Undoubtedly, stop and search has been an enormous problem that has caused decades of strife between the black community and the police “says Lester Holloway, news editor of The Voice, a weekly newspaper aimed at the black community.
It is the considered view that the whole use of stop and search should now be seriously questioned as an effective or useful tool in the police’s array of powers. The evidence that it is effective in reducing or detecting crime is, to say the least, very weak, whilst its discriminatory and disproportionate rates of stop and search need to be unambiguously justified on non racial grounds.
In addition, under the Human Rights Act, such police powers need to be proportionate in respect of the aim they seek to meet. We are now of the view that stop and search powers cannot be justified, nor are they equally applied.
Overwhelmingly those stopped and searched are predominantly innocent of any crime and the disproportionate adverse affect on black communities is seriously undermining confidence in policing and good race relations.
The recent BBC documentary The Secret Policeman broadcast on Wednesday 22nd October 2003 showed quite clearly that little progress has been made in ensuring that potentially racist recruits to the Greater Manchester, North Wales and Metropolitan Police Forces are prevented from becoming ‘beat officers’.
Conference calls upon the National Black Members’ Committee to work through its links with the National Executive Council to lobby the Home Secretary and the Government to:
1) provide the proven justification for its continued use in Northamptonshire
backed up by unambiguous independent evidence and/or its total use should cease immediately;
2) review the data that demonstrates its effectiveness as a fair and equitable tool in terms of law enforcement across the country and in particular within the black community;
3) work with the Commission for Race Equality to proactively look at how the stop and search process can be more effectively and fairly applied in the black community;
4) develop links and a nationally available database of approved national civil rights organisations that local and regional black members groups can work with to provide awareness of the rights of community members when dealing with the police in stop and search situations;
5) develop a partnership through the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other related bodies to create closer links with black police support staffs who are UNISON members;
6) work with local UNISON police support staff branches to raise the profile of the potential benefits to developing black members self-organised groups in their branches;
7) work with regional black members’ committees to develop a strategy for developing links through the black police support members to any local black police officer association.
UNISON can and should be playing a more active role in fighting for civil justice within the black community: many of its black members have either personal experience of ‘racially motivated’ police contact, experience of ‘death in custody’ incidents such as the Sylvester family or inadequate policing as experienced by the Reel, McGowan and Lawrence families or know someone who has been a victim of an unfair and unjustified stop and search.
UNISON black members say stop this unfair treatment of our young men in their communities.