When Plod Runs Scared of the Equality Police
Police carrying out stop and search 'just for statistics' - Telegraph
Police are making unjustified searches of members of the public to provide "racial balance" to stop and search statistics, Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, has said.
He warned that police were wasting money by carrying out "self-evidently unmerited searches" which were an invasion of civil liberties and "almost certainly unlawful".
He said police were carrying out the searches on people they had no basis for suspecting so they could avoid accusations of prejudice.
As the terror threat against Britain is largely from Islamist extremists, the figures show disproportionately more Muslims and therefore more Asians being searched than whites.
But the peer said police should stop trying to balance the figures, and it may be that an "ethnic imbalance" is a "proportional consequence" of policing.
Officers in England and Wales used the powers to search 124,687 people in 2007/8, up from 41,924 in 2006/7 and only 1 per cent of searches led to an arrest.