No doubt over coming weeks, we will keep hearing that the causes of the riots are complex – but if you ask locals in Tottenham and other areas – one of the main factors is anger over the use of military policing, especially the overuse of stop and search by the MET in those areas where the rioting took place –

This is certainly what Darcus Howe is claiming in this interview – he draws on the example of his grandson who is an ‘angel but can’t count the amount of times he’s been stopped and searched by the MET’

 

 

So is Darcus Howe right? Are the police at least partly to blame for these riots – the evidence is extremely compelling!!

Quantitative analysis strongly suggests that stop and search is used disproportinately against ethnic minorities and is ineffective in combatting crime – According to this post

 “Research for the group shows African-Caribbean people in Britain are 26 times more likely to be stopped under section 60 of the Public Order Act, where an officer does not require reasonable suspicion.”

“When the law requires reasonable suspicion of involvement in crime, black people are still ten times more likely to be stopped in some areas than white people, according to research by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.”

Also, a Human Rights Watch report in July revealed that although 450,000 stop and searches had been carried out under Section 44 between April 2007 and April 2009, not one was successfully prosecuted for terrorism offences as a result.

Looks like that could build resentment – and some qualitative probing also sheds some interesting light on the abuse of stop and search – 

This June 2011 article from the Guardian backs up this idea – reporting on an event in Hackney in June – a 2011 ‘community conversation’ about youth crime….apparantly Bishop Wayne Malcolm of the Christian Life City church. got the evening’s biggest cheer of the day –

(from the Guardian article) – “There appears to be a disconnect between young people’s actual experience on the street of the police and what the statistics say,” he said. “There is a perception that the police are not on their side – on the side of law-abiding people – that the police are thuggish, that they’re pretty much another gang, that they are abusing their powers of stop-and-search and that they are treating people and speaking to people with such lack of dignity or respect that …”

At this point the bishop’s words were drowned out by applause. Once it had subsided he referred to the purpose of mentoring young people and how bad policing undermined this: “On the mentoring side we are saying to people, ‘You are someone, you can become someone.’ And their experience with the authorities is, ‘You are nothing, you are in the way.’ I’m saying the perception is real and it really has to be managed.”

Well – is stop and search unfair? Again from the above article – this is what deputy London Mayor Kit Malthouse said in June 2011 –

 “We are very conflicted about stop-and-search,” he said. “We recognise that it can be controversial and frankly also that there appear to be quite a lot of very rude police officers, who are more aggressive than they need to be – rude, disrespectful, and not necessarily conforming to the rules.”

So if the deputy mayor is coming out and saying the police are overdoing it – they really must be abusing their powers.