(UK) Metropolitan police 'buried' report in 2004 warning of race scandal
Source: The Guardian
A secret Metropolitan police report warned police chiefs that they needed to take tougher action to stop officers discriminating against black people, and that a failure to do so would threaten a breakdown in community confidence.
The report, obtained by the Guardian, warned top officers that innocent African-Caribbean people were being stopped too often by officers, who wrongly "racially stereotyped" them as criminals.
The report was by Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate for London mayor, who was then a Met commander. He says his bosses ignored the warnings made in 2004 and buried the report.
(...)
The report says officers were racially stereotyping African-Caribbean people as criminals, and thus disproportionately subjecting them to stop and search. It says officers were exercising the power without having the legal requirement of having reasonable suspicion that the person stopped was involved in crime: "Many police officers make the illegitimate step in their minds from 'black people are disproportionately involved in crime' to 'the black person I am about to stop and search is likely to be a criminal' without consideration of the other factors necessary to establish sufficient 'reasonable grounds'.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/06/metropolitan-police-warned-racism
= new reply since forum marked as read
^^^^^
For further reading, please see:
"The Inquiry Into The Matters Arising From The Death Of Stephen Lawrence":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/02/99/stephen_lawrence/report/
and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
