When I was working as a speech writer in the Home Office, under Theresa May, one of her special advisers told me that she wanted to give a statement to parliament on the police’s use of stop and search. Part of the motive for doing this, he explained, was political: stop and search is a policy which consistently alienates members of the black community. I was told that it would help the home secretary’s standing with Afro-Caribbeans if she made a statement that was critical of the police’s use of stop and search.
The grounds would essentially be that the tool was racist, or at least used by the police in a racist way: the statistics demonstrated that you were six or seven times more likely to be stopped and searched if you were a member of an ethnic minority.
In fact, the Home Office had done research in the relatively recent past which showed that the statistics do not demonstrate this.
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