The Observer view on racism within the police

‘You have to be careful because being black is a crime,” explained Bianca Williams, the Team GB athlete, when talking about her experience of being stopped and searched by the Metropolitan police last weekend. She and her partner were forced to leave her three-month-old baby in their car and were handcuffed while officers searched them, claiming they could smell cannabis (which they did not find).

Every police officer in the country, from the Met commissioner Cressida Dick down, should have had the humility to pause and reflect on Williams’s words. Instead, senior representatives of the Met rushed out defensive statements that sought to justify their officers’ actions.

As an elite athlete and a new mother, Williams’s case has got traction in a way most black people’s experiences of stop and search never do. By sharing her experience, which was filmed, Williams offered the police a chance to reflect. Not only has Dick wasted it, her force responded in a way that promulgates racist stereotypes.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in the US, the complacency from some quarters – including Dick herself – that racial bias is absent from policing in the UK is utterly misplaced. Black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites. Astoundingly, this is up from five times at the time of the MacPherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which identified the use of stop and search as discriminatory back in 1999.

These statistics do not capture what it is like to feel as if you are being treated as guilty until proven innocent because you are black; the humiliation of being handcuffed in front of neighbours though you have done nothing wrong; the injustice of being treated like a criminal who will run away unless restrained. The figures do not communicate the experience of black former Met chief superintendent Victor Olisa, who said: “There is a growing practice of officers handcuffing young black boys who have not been arrested and who are not resisting ... before they start searching them … this is a worrying development of a practice that seems to reinforce the stereotype that conflates blackness with dangerous… black boys are treated as police ‘property’ while their white friends are treated ... with courtesy and respect.”

The section of the MacPherson report addressing stop and search could have been written in 2019. It said any attempt to justify the implicit discrimination “exacerbates the climate of distrust”. This is exactly what the Met has done. It has argued that the disproportionality of its practices is justified because youths from an African-Caribbean heritage are more likely to be knife attackers, without mentioning the contextual factors that contribute to this, thus propagating racist stereotypes.

It has claimed that stop and search is an effective tactic in reducing violent crime without confronting the contrary evidence that it has, at most, a very marginal impact on crime rates – little surprise that stop and search does not discourage boys frightened for their lives from carrying knives for their own protection – while undermining trust between the police and the communities they are supposed to keep safe. It has failed to acknowledge that policing and prosecution of drug possession disproportionately targets black people, who though reportedly half as likely to use drugs as white people are nine times more likely to be searched for possession. Ken Marsh, the chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation has tried to justify high rates of stop and search of young black men during lockdown by saying “anyone out in the first four weeks was a drug dealer”.

Yet Dick had the gall to mark the 20th anniversary of the MacPherson inquiry by asserting that the Met no longer had a problem with institutional racism. We welcome the news that the Independent Office on Police Conduct will undertake a review of racial discrimination. But why, more than 25 years after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, are questions still being asked about how deep that institutional racism runs, rather than what action has been taken to address it?