Blacks more likely to be targeted by UK police

Black drivers are significantly more likely to be targeted by British police than their white peers, a new study has revealed.

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.

“We estimate that there were approximately 5.5 million vehicle stops in 2010-11, approximately five million of which did not involve a search and therefore were not covered by the recording requirement,” read a Stopwatch briefing document.

According to the group’s study, 10 percent of adults in England and Wales are stopped in a vehicle by police each year.

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.

Niamh Eastwood, the executive director of the charity, Release, and a member of Stopwatch, said, “The use of strip search before arrest is an incredibly intrusive and humiliating experience for the individual subjected.”

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.

This comes as Release said the rate of blacks using drugs was almost half of whites in 2010 (5.8 percent compared to 10.5 percent).