Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland’s admission yesterday that racism existed inside his force is an acknowledgement of reality. But it does put governments and police commissioners in Australia in a quandary.
As a UK study released this week shows, racist incidents occur between the police and the community most commonly when the former are exercising their stop and search, or move on, powers. These are the powers the Victorian government has introduced and the Western Australian government wants to invest police with, as part of a campaign to curtail street violence and public drunkenness.
In the West, the Barnett government wants to give police the power to stop and search any individual without the police having to show reasonable grounds for their search. Since December last year in Victoria police have had the power to search individuals without a warrant in what are called “designated areas”, and they can issue on-the-spot fines to people who refuse to leave clubs and pubs. South Australian Premier Mike Rann has pledged to introduce similar powers into his state if he is returned to office in Saturday’s election.
The problem with the police being given these “social control” powers is that they are the cause of racial tension and their misuse by police will expose governments to lawsuits brought by individuals who have been the victim of racial abuse by police. This is what has occurred in the UK where the Blair and Brown governments have handed police similar types of powers.
In fact, as recently as Tuesday the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission released a report that reviewed the use of stop-and-search powers in police areas around the UK over a five-year period. Its conclusion:
“Nationally, black people are still stopped and searched at least six times the rate of white people. Asian people are about twice as likely to be stopped and searched as white people. The evidence suggests racial stereotyping and discrimination are significant factors behind the higher rates of stops and searches for black and Asian people than white people.”
This finding is consistent with analysis of arrest statistics from the Toronto police since 2002 by the Toronto Star newspaper, which found black persons were three times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white persons.
There is no reason to think that the situation in Australia would be any different — in fact it may be worse in states such as Western Australia where racism is part of the furniture in some communities.
The bottom line is this: giving police strong powers to interact with people on the street is a recipe for racist attacks and racial profiling. And people who suffer injuries as a result of wrongful arrests or police brutality will sue governments and generally win their cases. So stop-and-search powers are not only a tool of social division but expensive to the taxpayer in the long term.
Perhaps Overland should be asking the Brumby government not to give his force so much opportunity to show its racist underbelly. Repealing or restricting stop and search powers would be a good place to start.
Could it be that Blacks and Asians are more likely to be carrying weapons?
Let’s ask the family of the young Sudanese boy who was stabbed to death in a newsagent in the middle of the CBD in Adelaide last year, by a former friend (Sudanese) who he had a falling out with.
Or the Asian gang who crashed a house party at Paralowie and stabbed the host to death.
I think Angry Anderson was right. And I’m not afraid to stick my head up and say I agree with him.
Greg, please explain what is wrong with profiling if you object to that, and if you don’t, explain what is wrong with including race in the criteria used by the profilers.
Of course more blacks are stopped and searched in the UK in the parts of the big cities where it makes sense to stop and search people. As in the USA young black men are much more likely than any other group described by race, sex and age to be carrying weapons in public. Do you think it worthwhile wasting resources getting white haired old women to take off their shoes before getting on an aeroplane as often as you require it of young men? Generalise that question to any number of other equally ridiculous examples and you can surely begin to see why you focus attention where it is most likely to pay off.
As to the “Asian” in the UK I would bet that it meant unemployed or working class sub-continental males rather than Chinese and, again, there would be good reason.
Anyone who watches UK shows like The Bill will have heard use of a convenient shorthand – based presumably 0n appearance – such as IC1 Male which means a white man or IC3 Female which, I think, means sub-continental woman. That’s just in case anyone believes the ridiculous cant about there being no such things as “race”: it’s all a social construct etc.
Profiling is only an aspect of generalising which we do all the time in millions of ways to avoid treating the world as a badly brain-damaged person might as made up of billions of unclassifiable unconnected particulars. If police have prejudices which are unjustified then they should be trained better. If they have prejudices which are soundly based on fact but the don’t follow the logic and morality which should reasonably flow from applying such prejudices then, again, they need training. To suggest that they should ignore class, appearance, age, sex, ethnicity on some PC ground is….. well, just stupid PC is it not?
The Bill is a TV soap opera, a work of fiction. It also happens to be the greatest PR machine the UK plod has ever known.
I think the data driven question, as opposed to the ideological one, is the number of times a person searched actually possessed an illegal weapon/drugs etc. If it is a high percentage, then the powers are being used appropriately regardless of the race of the person searched. The argument one could then mount is that more non-asian, non-black people should be searched in the expectation of finding just as many illegal weapons in which case I say search-away. But a racial discrepency in searches is not in itself a justification for stopping searches of the groups in which the contraband has already been found.