I mean, you couldn't more spectacularly prove my point if you tried.Sandydragon wrote:And yet you ignore evidence of the police not investigating non white suspects due to the potential to be seen to be racist. And has it occurred to you that most of the residents in high crime areas want the police to reduce crime levels? Is there a correlation between high crime areas, very high levels of poverty and ethnicity? Often yes there is. That means that vehicle stops and stop and search will be disproportionate. You wouldn’t do stop and search in area with no crime. Where would be the justification? Have you spent any time in sink estates recently?Eugene Wrayburn wrote:Unfortunately Sandydragon shows exactly why this is an unending clusterfuck. He's very obviously a decent person. But he doesn't give enough of a shit about the people in the police who are not. There's always an excuse. There's always a reason. To people like him it doesn't matter whether there is a report showing that the police are (still) institutionally racist, the bigger issue must be societal. It doesn't matter if the research shows that black people are disproportionately stopped, that must be because they are disproportionately criminal - the gloss that it's because of societal reasons isn't the defence that Sandy thinks it is.
Until the decent people in the police stop thinking that the way of protecting the institution is to sweep obvious wrongdoing and structural problems under the carpet this will go on. Until police officers are prepared to challenge each other and say "Wait, why are you checking the numberplate of that nice car? Is it just because the driver is black?" and be backed by their management for doing so then this will go on. Until there is a genuine penalty for stopping kids randomly then this will go on. Until we can do better than a Met Police Commissioner actively obstructing a corruption investigation then this will go on. It's fucking frustrating as a person who has spent most of their life as a prosecutor.
Meanwhile smug lawyers moan about the police whilst wringing their hands at the levels of knife violence where black children are murdered almost daily and the police can’t be effective in responding due to fears of being called out as racist. It would almost be worthy of a monty python sketch if it weren’t actually serious.
I’ll repeat myself for the hard of understanding. Poverty leads to crime. Police respond to crime. If a poor area is predominantly ethnic then that will reflect in the statistics.
Here you go some academic research following vehicle stops over a seven year period which suggest that racial profiling is rare.
https://theconversation.com/amp/we-spen ... und-149563
Fancy commenting on the accusation that black suspects are dealt with more harshly by the courts?
What is it exactly that you're claiming the police don't do for fear of being accused of being racist? Needlessly stop random black people? Because I have never heard of a police officer saying "You know what we had reasonable cause for belief that he was up to no good but I just decided to let him away with it because he was black and L was scared." I've seen and had presented to me plenty of stops for walking/driving whilst black though.
I've done you the courtesy of reading the article that you linked. It doesn't say what you think it says. It says in witnessing (only) 146 stops they did not witness overt racial prejudice or profiling. That doesn't mean that there wasn't. Indeed one could reasonably infer from what they say that they believe there to be a bias - hence their mention of the subjective bases for reasonable grounds for believing and the fact that the police seemed to be finding alternatives to "smell of cannabis". That's quite apart from the fact that if you've got a researcher sitting in your car you are hardly likely to be overtly racist.
As for your whataboutism I'll respond pretending it's in good faith because maybe you'll see how people expect you to respond. The CPS has a problem with overcharging black suspects. The judges/magistrates have a problem over-sentencing them. See? That's not tricky. Now having acknowledged the problem there's some prospect of changing it.
