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Saturday 15 February 2014 - 08:09

Community group urges boycotting UK police

Story Code : 351849
Community group urges boycotting UK police
Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC) has accused the police in the UK of targeting minority ethnic males with controversial stop-and-search tactics.
 
“Institutionalized racism has increased massively over the last five or six years, leading to huge disproportionality in stop-and-search, in charging rates…, “said Lee Jasper, the co-chair of the BARAC.
 
“There needs to a national boycott of all non-essential contact with police and all black recruitment into the force, until such time as the police admit that they remain an institutional racist organization," he added.
 
Reports also say that black drivers are significantly more likely to be targeted by British police than their white peers.
 
Researchers from Stopwatch, a coalition that monitors the use of stop-and-search powers by the British police, said black people reported higher levels of car stops than white people in 2013.
 
The coalition said the “the disproportionality could not be explained by any other social or demographic factors.”
 
Stopwatch, which used figures from the British Crime Survey for its estimates, also said millions of cars are pulled over by the police every year without being officially recorded.
 
Stopwatch also voiced concerns over the use of strip search by the metropolitan police, saying people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds accounted for more than half of those strip-searched after being arrested by officers over the past three years.
 
An earlier study by the London School of Economics revealed that minority groups, particularly blacks and Asians, are disproportionately targeted by the police for drugs stop searches.
 
According to the analysis on the figures for 2009-2010, the overall search rate across England and Wales was 10 in 1,000 while it was 7 in 1,000 for whites, 18 per 1,000 for Asians and a shocking 45 per 1,000 for blacks, which means blacks were targeted 6.3 times more than white people.
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