Guardian: "Minorities stopped disproportionally in decade after Macpherson report"

New research finds that stop and searches for black and Asian people doubled while rate for white people rose only slightly

What a half-baked article. Don't we need to know more about the underlying crime figures before we assess whether the SaS figures reveal institutional racism or operational efficiency?

This article is garbage without the statistics. Vikram Dodd you're a disgrace to reporting sir, in fact lets not even call it reporting as that would be a disservice to reporters everywhere.

I SINCERELY hope that the Guardian, and Vikram Dodd in particular, has made a hash of reporting the contents of the report by "criminologist Dr Ben Bradford of Oxford University" - because otherwise, there is someone claiming those credentials who has NO idea of criminology or statistics or of how to write an academic report.
Such a report SHOULD balance "stop-and-searches" against criminal suspect profiles.
It is stupid to ignore such matters and I am sure that "Oxford University" would not like one of theirs expounding such stupidity.

Black people make up 2.7% of the UK population but account for 13.4% of the prison population. Chinese people make up 1.7% of the UK population but only account for 1.1% of the prison population. More focus on black, mixed race and aisan people is simply common sense, it is very unfortunate that the majority of law abiding people from these groups may also be effected.
We are in danger of allowing political correctness to hinder the best use of resources to aprehend and imprison criminals, a very dangerous situation.

I am so very sick of these articles.
We all know full well what critical piece of information should be included but never is, and it's the following question;

Is the increase in stop and searches of ethnic minorities proportional to the increase in crime rate in the area in which they live?

Not once have I seen one of these articles begin, end or include this piece of information. Instead we're invited to point at the police (even the officers who are themselves from these minorities) and scream "racist!". Well, I'm not going to, because I find it more than a little suspicious that the critical piece of information a thinking person would need before doing that is always conspicuously absent.

Vikram Dodd is blowing the racism dog-whistle hard in this morning's piece of junk journalism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/apr/22/ethnic-minority-britons-stop-search-white



Have a read, come back here, and tell me what fairly blatantly obvious bit of detail is missing.

Yup, that's right. The facts.

I'm pleasantly surprised by how many left-leaning Guardianistii have picked up on this - of the currently 316 comments, I can find very, very few defending the article. More are like this:

http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22945690


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22941759


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22941583


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22947268


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22940195


Fair points?

Incidentally, a fair few of the comments have been removed, and these are often the ones linking to official government crime statistics by demographic. I wonder what the Guardian and their mods are scared of?

Just for fairness and the fact I can't be bothered searching for them Would you mind putting those statistics up?

Otherwise you'll just be accused of being racist by others.

What statistics?

the ones linking to official government crime statistics by demographic.

Why would anyone do that?

Because that's what people do when they disagree with somebody on race related matter.s

Incidentally, a fair few of the comments have been removed, and these are often the ones linking to official government crime statistics by demographic. I wonder what the Guardian and their mods are scared of?

These statistics are meaningless and unhelpful if they are not juxtaposed with other variables in a multivariate analysis like this one. Socioeconomically disadvantaged 'white' people in Glasgow and socioeconomically advantaged 'white' people in Sevenoaks are not equally likely to commit/be exposed to crime, yet a simple demographic crime analysis will treat these two parties as the same. I also challenge the comment about prison populations by ethnic background as a justification for more stops and searches on people with certain ethnic backgrounds for this reason (notwithstanding the unfair comparison of 'race' and nationality).

Given that it is not in the Met's policy to search people on the basis of their ethnic background, I feel the publication of statistics that utilise ethnic background as the basis of analysis only serves to mislead and aggravate people.

Good use of big words.

I know it's a bit old but although I know they teh stats for demographic breakdown of criminal activity thy're quite hard to find. It's almost like they don't want them found.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7856404/Police-statistics-shed-fresh-light-on-link-between-crime-and-race.html


"Twelve per cent of London’s men are black. But 54 per cent of the street crimes committed by men in London, along with 46 per cent of the knife crimes and more than half of the gun crimes, are thought by the Metropolitan Police to have been committed by black men. "


I'd agree that race is not a link to crime, but there's other issues. But when Police are doing stop and searches, they're doing it in order to stop crimes being committed.

There's these (Government figures):

Not sure exactly what you're looking for but there's a wealth of information here (Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System 2010): https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/172542/stats-race-cjs-2010.pdf.pdf

There's these (Government figures):

Vikram Dodd is blowing the racism dog-whistle hard in this morning's piece of junk journalism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/apr/22/ethnic-minority-britons-stop-search-white



Have a read, come back here, and tell me what fairly blatantly obvious bit of detail is missing.

Yup, that's right. The facts.

I'm pleasantly surprised by how many left-leaning Guardianistii have picked up on this - of the currently 316 comments, I can find very, very few defending the article. More are like this:

http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22945690


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22941759


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22941583


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22947268


http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/22940195


Fair points?

Incidentally, a fair few of the comments have been removed, and these are often the ones linking to official government crime statistics by demographic. I wonder what the Guardian and their mods are scared of?