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Under The Cjpo 1994 It Was Noted That There Had Been A 5% Increase In The ...

Under the CJPO 1994 it was noted that there had been a 5% increase in the number of Black people being stopped and a 22% increase for Asian people whilst in the same period the number of White people being stopped decreased by 3%. Under the Terrorism Act however the proportions changed with the number of White people increasing and the number of Black and Asians decreasing (7% and 5% respectively). However, as we noted above PACE is by far the most commonly used with the recorded number of stops being 839, 977 as opposed to a combined 73, 363 under the other two powers. Thus PACE gives a much more widespread and statistically accurate sample. What arises is that particularly black people seem to have been targeted more than white people. These statistics are worked out by looking at ‘the extent to which police powers are exercised on a group out of proportion to the number of that group in the general
population'. What is even more striking about these statistics is that they remain relatively unchanged over the last few years thus despite increased attention on this issue there has been little substantive impact.
Unfortunately these statistics do not highlight a new problem as long ago as the Scarman Report in 1981 there was a view that racism existed ‘in the behaviour of a few officers on the street. It may be only too easy for some officersto lapse into an unthinking assumption that all young people are potential criminals'. Furthermore there have been reports that stop and search powers have always been used in this way for example a power to stop people under the Vagrancy Act 1824 and the Metropolitan Police act 1839 are reported to have been disproportionately used against black people
The findings of the Lord Scarman report were confirmed later by other studies such as that carried out by Norris et al. which discovered that ‘not only that young blacks were stopped very much more frequently than other racial groups, but that these stops were made on a more speculative basis'. Then in the Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence the same concerns were voiced but they made the point that it was Institutional Racism rather than Individual Racism causing the disparity and they pointed to the causes:
‘can arise because of lack of understanding, ignorance or mistaken beliefs. It can arise from well intentioned but patronising words or actions. It can arise from unfamiliarity with the behaviour or cultural traditions of people or families from minority ethnic communities. It can arise from racist stereotyping of black people as potential criminals or troublemakers. Often this arises out of uncritical self-understanding born out of an inflexible police ethos of the "traditional" way of doing things.


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