Archbishop’s Notebook

I’m not surprised that black people are still eight times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by the police, despite the less frequent use of those powers. It happened to me regularly in the 1990s. One rainy night I was driving through the City of London in one of the cars loaned to bishops for their work, when a constable flagged me down. It was winter and a scarf covered my dog collar. I asked him repeatedly why I had been stopped. He replied repeatedly and with increasing agitation, ‘Just open the boot.’ Then he asked me what I did. When I said, ‘I’m the Bishop for Stepney’, and I removed the scarf from around my neck and he saw my collar, he nervously gasped, ‘Whoops.’ I felt a bit sorry for him and the small world he lived in. Black man with nice car? Black man a bishop? They didn’t fit his stereotypes.