Police search more whites 'just to balance the books', watchdog claims, the Daily Mail headlined its story yesterday about the new annual review by Lord Carlile on Britain's anti-terror laws. In the report he presented to Parliament, Lord Carlile paid special attention to the use of extended stop-and-search powers the British police were granted under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act. And he found, in the Mail's telling, that "Police are making unjustified and 'almost certainly unlawful' searches of white people to make Government figures racially balanced."
For once, the narrative in the right-wing tabloid rag was echoed throughout the print press, on the left and the right. "Police are making unjustified and 'almost certainly unlawful' searches of white people to make Government figures racially balanced," the Guardian opened its story. "White people are being unjustifiably stopped and searched to provide racial balance in police statistics," was the lede in the Times. The Scotsman opened, "WHITE people are being stopped by police to prevent accusations of racial bias because of the higher number of Asian people being detained under terrorism laws".
This, then, must not be the usual tale of the Mail trumping up a tendentious story to sell papers to its rabid constituency. The conclusion must be legit, and something strange must have been happening.
It appears that the observation the media have collectively judged headline material is paragraph 140 in Carlile's actual review. He writes:
Can't argue with that. Nevertheless, it strikes me that there is a preponderance of judgement here, and a dearth of data. He first specifies the problem of police stopping and searching people for merely statistical reasons as occurring "in one situation," then adds that there is "ample anecdotal evidence" that it is happening, without specifying said evidence. The rest of the paragraph is condemnation of the practice. You've got to wonder whether that's really enough meat to choose this paragraph as the main story for almost every news report.
More to the point, whether you consider the practice sufficiently substantiated or not, is this really the most important thing to take from the report? Consider what else Carlile wrote. Here's the Guardian - emphasis mine:
[Lord Carlile] said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop and search powers by the police could prevent an act of terrorism.
"While arrests for other crime have followed searches under the section, none of the many thousands of searches has ever resulted in a conviction for a terrorism offence. Its utility has been questioned publicly and privately by senior Metropolitan police staff with wide experience of terrorism policing," said Carlile. He added that such searches were stopping between 8,000-10,000 people a month.
Reuters put it more succinctly:
"There is little or no evidence that the use of Section 44 has the potential to prevent an act of terrorism as compared with other statutory powers of stop and search," [Lord Carlile] said in his annual report.
Section 44 prescribes far-reaching police powers. Under the more conventional Section 43, police can stop and search any person it "reasonably suspects to be a terrorist to discover whether he has in his possession anything which may constitute evidence that he is a terrorist”. But Section 44 goes further. Under that section, police can authorise special stop and search powers for any geographic area, in which stop and search actions then "do not have to be founded on reasonable suspicion," as Carlile points out. As the Guardian explains, it allows "the police to search anyone .. without suspicion that an offence has occurred." It is an offence not to comply. And in practice, Carlile adds, "It is used throughout London on a continuous basis".
In short: 8-10,000 people are stopped and searched every month under blanket authorities covering all of London on grounds that don't even prescribe reasonable suspicion. And none of these searches has ever uncovered any terrorist.
Wouldn't that be the real issue here?
As Lord Carlile points out, stop and search powers are invasive. The report states, as Police Professional notes, that "damage to community relations if they are used incorrectly can be considerable." Carlile added: "I cannot see a justification for the whole of the Greater London area being covered permanently. The intention of the section was not to place London under permanent special search powers." And yet it has been - without any tangible result whatsoever in terms of preventing actual acts of terrorism. Isn't that the real scandal?
The racial stuff, in light of this broader issue, seems more of a sideshow - if a freaky one. Of course it's ridiculous that the police stops thousands of people just to balance its racial statistics, especially considering how confronting and invasive such a procedure is. It's like they took a problem - blacks and other minorities are disproportionally stopped and searched - and came up with the solution that makes least sense: just stop way too many white people too!
Even so, Red Pepper reported earlier this month, it's non-whites who bear the bigger brunt of this police overreach: "Government figures released in May show that since 2007 the number of searches under the powers has risen by 322 per cent for black people, 277 per cent for Asian people, but just 185 per cent for white people."
Perceived white victimhood, of course, sells many more papers than infringements of civil liberties - not just among Daily Mail readers. But it's hard to see how one can argue that this is the salient point in Carlile's report. Is it a question of media succumbing, across-the-board, to the populist temptation when prioritizing their points? Or is it more simply, more lazily, a mere question of herd mentality?
I can easily imagine reporters not sitting down to read the actual report, but instead scanning the tenor of the incoming stories on other TV stations, other sites, and quickly looking up the relevant para in Carlile's report to swiftly write up their own story. But if ever they enabled the misdirection of anger, it is here, where the outrage of the police invasively and uselessly searching masses of innocent Londoners is turned into a white-versus-coloured issue. In what seems to me a stunning bit of bait-and-switch, suddenly, the humiliations endured under a both expansive and useless authoritarian power grab become the fault of ... liberal political correctness.
