The new Police Commissioner has promised a fresh approach to stop and search in the capital, but is police attitude the real problem?
One of the ways in which race agitators agitate is by the misuse of statistics – remember that saying about lies, damned lies, and statistics?
Back in March 2002, Socialist Worker whined under the heading
More police powers equal more racism
THE SO called crime wave is being used to justify stop and search laws. Even the Editor of The Voice, a newspaper aimed at black Britons, approved of an increase in police powers. But this will lead to more racist harassment on our streets.
Black people are already a staggering seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites. This discrimination is getting worse. A year ago blacks were five times more likely than whites to be stopped by police.
Nine years later this racism had grown even worse, and according to the same people, “black people” are now 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than are whites. Which is wrong with this claim, apart from veracity and context?
First, the concerns about increased police/state powers are genuine, so we should not allow this issue to be hijacked by opportunists in order to promote their own political agendas.
Now here is the but, it is not “black people” who are stopped and searched so often by the police, it is young black men, specifically young black men in certain areas of London and other cities and large towns who dress and act in a certain way.
This may be considered stereotyping or profiling, but it is a fact that street crime is of necessity committed predominantly by young men. Other crimes committed on public property, including sexual offences, are likely to be committed by both youths and older men; this is a fact of life. A police force that stopped and searched elderly women in the drive against knife crime would expose itself to ridicule. Having said that, people of both sexes and all ages and races can be used as couriers, mules or even innocent dupes in the commission of all manner of crimes, and in this connection we need mention only one shocking case, that of Nezar Hindawi.
To accuse the police of racism is to miss the point; since especially the ludicrous Macpherson Report, the British police have become the most politically correct and in some ways the most emasculated in Europe if not the world. This is the same police that in 1996 issued an arrest warrant for a cartoon; at the moment, an elderly woman in Suffolk is being dragged into court for putting a golliwog in her own window. Four years ago, the German police went one better and “arrested” a strawberry cake.
If the Metropolitan Police in particular wanted to make life difficult for young blacks for the sheer hell of it, it would make sense to abandon stop and search completely; the rationale behind this is that most knife and gun crime committed by blacks is against other blacks, so as long as they only kill each other, why should we care?
Strangely, the police don’t see it quite like that, listen to the officer in this video at 2 minutes 30. * Ironically, last weekend there were two serious teen knifings in Tottenham, where the recent riots started; this has led to a temporary clampdown beginning today. Maybe we should ask Chris Bambery and his gang what they think about that, and what the police should do instead?
There are other solutions that could be mooted; in certain American states, carrying knives or even concealed guns is permitted, but while an armed citizenry is a good insurance policy against an outright dictatorship, we really don’t want to see that sort of thing here. Or maybe searches of male suspects should only be conducted by women police officers? That would certainly reduce the number of complaints – Excuse me sir, is that a gun in your pocket?
The new Commissioner has suggested something entirely different, a knife stoppers line similar to Crime Stoppers. Good luck with running that one, but whatever is eventually decided, it is vital that this important issue of public safety be kept out of the hands of race agitators, who in the final analysis don’t care about blacks anymore than they do about whites, be they workers or anyone else.
[The above article was first published September 28, 2011. * When I returned to this article in May 2024, the video alluded to had been removed. I have replaced it with a different video on the same theme.]
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