Metropolitan police report states that black people are more likely to commit crime
Recent police figures suggest that most violent inner-city crime is committed by black men. According to the Metropolitan police, these statistics also indicate that black men are twice as likely to be victims of such crimes as their fellow citizens.
By Tiija Rinta
The Scotland Yard report states that the police force hold black men responsible for more than two-thirds of shootings and more than half of robberies, as well as street crimes in London. For instance, the Greater London Authority, 2010 state that 67 percent of those caught for gun crimes are black men. Moreover, 77 percent of young murder victims are black men and 67 percent of youth who have committed such crimes are black men.
Furthermore, black women are also held accountable for crimes for a disproportionate amount of the time. According to the British Society of Criminology in 2009 both black males and females are at least six times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts. In an article published on Voice Online this year, Trudy Simpson says that these statistics are also applicable to black youth.
According to Claudia Webbe, Chair to the Operation Trident Independent Advisory Group and trustee of the Children Society and Crimestoppers, ‘at every stage of the criminal justice system black young people are discriminated against’.
Moreover, Dr Richard Stone who is a Vice Chairman of the Runnymede Trust has recently published a report on the website Ali Aleph UK (2010) revealing the persistent existence of institutional racism in the British police force. He stated that, even if only 10% of the Metropolitan Police Force are abusing African and other minority groups, that is an army of 5,000 racist police officers on our streets.
Dr Stone further argued that whilst racism today is not as overt as it was ten years ago, it still exists and has only gone underground. It has been further claimed that the police attitudes range from professional with clear standards to adversarial or conflict ridden. This has also been echoed in a report by Trudy Simpson in Voice Online where she says that the adversarial style has been found to be particularly prominent in inner-city areas, and the relationship between the police and young black people has been shaped by a history of friction.
After the statistics were released under the Freedom of Information Law, there has been much debate on racial issues related to violent crime. The debate has been stirred by the fact that just over 12 percent of London's population is black, with this 12 percent figure including those of mixed black and white parentage, according to the Office for National Statistics (2010).
Richard Garside from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London has commented on the statistics the following way: 'Given Britain's long history of racism and imperialism, it should not greatly surprise us that black and minority ethnic groups are disproportionately members of social classes that have tended to experience greater victimisation and to be the subject of police attention. Just because the police treat black men as more criminal than white men, it does not mean that they are.'
