I am indebted to @kathryn_gale for tweeting a photo on Monday. Without her tweet I would most definitely have missed it, as the Daily Fail is not high on my reading list.
The article contains what I consider to be a bombshell allegation that Theresa May may have told the odd Melton Mowbray whilst participating in her favourite sport of Police Bashing recently.
As you can see in the article, it is alleged that she was advised how to present her article on Stop and Search in order to best make the Police look bad, and improve her own standing within the Afro Caribbean community.
Unfortunately she didn’t reckon for her OLD speechwriter, Alasdair Palmer, who thought he could smell smoking rodent, did some digging and remembered an old piece of research by the Home Office, some years ago, that concluded something quite different.
By studying the ethnic composition of ‘the streets’ when Stop/Search was being carried out, rather than the ethnic composition of the town/city generally, they concluded this;
“Overall, across the five sites, the findings of this research did not suggest any general pattern of bias against people from minority ethnic groups either as a wholeor for particular groups
:● white people tended to be stopped or searched at a higher rate to the available population
;● Asian people tended to be under-represented in those stopped or searched (with some exceptions); and
● black people have a more mixed experience, sometimes under-represented in stops and searches and sometimes over-represented.”
The fact that this is old research does not mean that it is not currently relevant. I am unaware whether there has been any further research updating the subject, but I’m guessing not, and I have sent a Freedom of Information request to the Home Office asking for copies of any research and/or analysis on this subject in the last 5 years. So if Mrs May has based her speech on something else we should all be able to see that work soon, or not.
I assume that “Home Office research reveals that white people are more likely to be Stop/Searched by Police” does not make such a compelling headline so this particular piece of work has been sidelined, but you can find all 109 pages of it here. In reality, the Executive Summary will probably satisfy your needs though.
All this leaves me with the thought that a cynical person might think that the Home Secretary has not only bashed the Police unjustly, kicking up a storm as she went, but possibly even misled Parliament, which I’m led to believe is not a good thing to do.
