Blacks four times as likely to be stopped and searched
BLACK people in the West Midlands are now nearly four times as likely to be stopped and searched as white people – the biggest gap seen in a decade.
New figures from the Home Office reveal that West Midlands Police stopped and searched black people in the region 2,285 times last year.
It meant that black people had a one in 72 chance of being stopped and searched in the West Midlands in 201617.
In comparison, white people were searched 6,442 times over the same period, giving them a one in 298 chance of being stopped and searched.
That makes black people more than four times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people – the biggest gap seen in the region since 2006-07. In almost every year since then, black people were closer to three times as likely to be stopped and search as white people.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission have said the figures are “disappointing”, and have called for a “comprehensive race strategy” to tackle the problem.
The figures show that while the racial disparity in stop and search has worsened in the West Midlands over the last few years, the total number of searches has gone down.
There were 11,004 stop and searches in the West Midlands in 2016-17 compared to 14,704 in 2015-16.
The fact that certain ethnicities are still more likely to be targeted by stop and search in the region persists despite pressure from the government to close that gap. In 2014 police forces across the country agreed to reforms that were intended to eliminate discrimination in stop and search – new regulations that have clearly had little difference in terms of closing the racial gap in stop and search rates in the West Midlands.
Black people were by far the most disproportionately stopped and search ethnic group across the country, and the same is true in the West Midlands.
However, people of mixed heritage and Asian people in the region also saw much higher rates than white people.
Both people of mixed heritage and Asian people in the West Midlands were twice as likely to be stopped and searched by police as white people last year.
Ben Wilson, executive director of the EHRC, said: “These disappointing stop and search findings reflect many of the concerns we raised in our own race report, Healing a Divided Britain, and prompt us to call, yet again, for a comprehensive race strategy with stretching targets to reduce the race inequality that is still so entrenched in our society.”