The Police Aren’t Racist. Prove us Wrong.
We are going to posit a radical idea, and one that will be controversial, because it goes against the current trend of Labour and Left thinking where it is axiomatic that the police are racist.
Succinctly put, the current zeitgeist is that the police are racist because they
Harass black youths by disproportionately stopping more of them than they do of youths of other ethnicities.
If they are not racist personally, they are a part of a system that is systemically racist because it targets black people.
Here is the radical idea. The police are not racist. There may well be racist individuals, (in the old-fashioned meaning of the term), but neither the majority of officers nor the force in general is racist, at least not in any meaningful sense.
We are considering violent street crime, robbery, assault, battery, use of a weapon etc. using the maps available from plumpot.
We will posit the suggestion that there are biases, but that these are neither irrational nor racist
Young people, almost always young men, are the subject of stop and search.
That the place you are is as likely to determine who is stopped as other factors. (Is it the site of recent knife violence? Do the police have intelligence of impending criminal activity in this area?)
Violent Crime in London
Robbery Rates in London
Violent crime and robbery rates have a very similar spread across London. With regard to stop and search, other than in very specific exceptions a police officer needs to have reasonable suspicion in order to stop and search someone. There is a useful guide as to what constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion, done in a Q&A format here. Both being in an area where there is a high prevalence of crime and the attitude and behaviour of the person questioned can be taken into account when determining whether it is reasonable to search a person on the street. Cussing a police officer who is trying to prevent crime is generally not going to reduce the chances of being searched.
The first thing to note about the maps is that the leafier suburbs of London have far less robbery and less violent crime in general than central London.
Because there is less street crime here, we suggest that there is far less need to use stop and search proactively. We suspect that the populations of these areas are older and whiter than the average for London This isn’t the police favouring old white people, it is the natural application of resources to need. Police officers are tasked with work on the streets where crime is higher.
It also follows that there will be an immediate bias in the sampling if the green suburbs are included in the London average against which people stopped and searched are measured. We have suggested that the appropriate comparator should be locality and age.
Indeed, it begins to suggest that the use of the London Average is a meaningless comparator, aimed we suspect at promoting a narrative to assert the inherent racism of the police. It is not designed to enhance understanding and it certainly doesn’t contribute towards good police work.
This pattern is even clearer when we look at the spread of people in unlawful possession of a weapon.
Possession of a Weapon
If the police see it as their job to prevent the spread of weapons, usually knives, on the streets (and we hope that they do), our suspicion is that they will concentrate their efforts on those areas which show as bright red rather than those areas which are bright green.
We’ll try to dig out the data for the same year for the number of stop and searches by borough to compare. Our suspicion is that those areas with the highest density of possession of a weapon, robbery and knife crime will be those areas with the highest density of stop and search.
There is, we suspect an implicit bias in the way in which stop and search is used. The bias is towards geographical areas where there has been a high level of street crime.
Prove us wrong.
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