Free police from race laws, Phillips urges

POLICE officers should be exempt from race discrimination laws in order to target black youths in areas with high crime, the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said.

Trevor Phillips said “white liberals” needed to stop “hand-wringing” and admit that the wave of knife crime was black children killing black children.

He called for officers to target highrisk inner-city areas and to be exempt from laws that prevent them discriminating on the basis of someone’s race or ethnic origin. Police dealing with gangs also needed greater powers akin to anti-terror, he added.

It comes as police chiefs called on the Government to scrap the requirement that “reasonable grounds” are needed before a person can be searched, according to The Guardian.

Adrian Hanstock, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for stop and search, said he wanted the individual threshold officers currently have to meet – which he described as “very tight and precise” – to be reduced.

A rising wave of violence has seen 250 stabbing deaths in the UK this year, with five murders in London in the past two weeks. Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Mr Phillips said: “We need to be clear about who is dying and who is doing the killing – and we must be honest that there is a racial component to the violence.

“The forlorn attempts by politicians and media to ignore this truth … has been counterproductive; a handwringing dereliction of responsibility.

“It might make ‘right-on’ white liberals feel better. But the price of their smugness is an ongoing bloody massacre of black children.”

He called for high- risk zones to be identified and flooded with officers “using stop-and-search powers as freely as they wish”.