Law Weblog

Significant rise in number of black people stopped and searched

Saturday 19 June 2010 at 9:02 am | In News | Post Comment The annual statistics on race and the criminal justice system reveal that black people are now seven times more likely to be stopped by the police than white people. This is a higher stop and search ratio than that recorded before the publication in 1999 of the inquiry report into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. The report concluded that the overuse of stop and search had created significant mistrust in minority ethnic communities.

The latest official figures show that the use of stop and search under section one of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act rose 10% in the past year to 1,142,763 searches. Of those, 15% were of black people, 9% of Asian people, 3% of mixed ethnicity and 1% were of Chinese background. Across the country the rate of stop and search per 1,000 population for black people compared with white, ranged from 9.1 times in Avon and Somerset to 0.7 in Cumbria and Durham, where the ratio of white people stopped was actually higher.

The justice ministry’s publication Race and the Criminal Justice System shows that black people continue to be disproportionately involved at nearly every stage of the process. The figures for 2008/09 show there were three times more arrests of black people than white people, based on per 1,000 population figures.

Report here