Morning:
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Several young men in my circle of friends and family have recently been stopped and searched by the police, just some of the 8,000-plus people so questioned by the Met in 2007-8.
They are brown- and black-skinned Londoners with attitude, ambitious professionals, born and made in Britain. Some have been bothered too many times and they are getting angry.
After the aborted bomb plot on Haymarket in 2007, the police were given extraordinary powers.
Incredibly, law officers are now allowed wilfully to obstruct citizens and rummage around their bodies and possessions, even if they have no cause to suspect them of any sinister motive or crime. Such clout can turn the sweetest bobby into a petty tyrant. It patently has.
Numbers of stop and searches last year soared by 322 per cent for black people and 277 per cent for Asians over the previous year - against an increase of 185 per cent for whites. Of the 8,000, eight were arrested; fewer still will stand trial.
After the suicide bomb attacks in London I felt we all had to accept that there would be more overt and annoying policing, and that it would be based on racial profiling, seeing as the plotters weren't blue-eyed natives of Henley.
In the Eighties when similar sus laws were used in Brixton and Notting Hill to control and humiliate black men, I used to go out on demos and write angry pieces about the injustices. In recent years I grew compliant.
Now I question my own gullibility. Perhaps I too hastily adjusted to the new demands because of the shock of those explosions in my beloved city.
This pre-emptive policing is provocative and stupid. It has not helped break into networks of terrorists.
The Home Office under the hapless Ms Smith makes hyperbolic claims for the strategy which its own arrest-and-charge figures deflate.
But what if super-stop and search was never meant to be a vital "tool" to prevent terrorists and criminals? That it was instead a plot to make us prickly and ready to panic?
Upping the level of natural trepidation helps governments and law enforcers to impose excessive controls.
Be afraid, be very afraid. That kind of power grab is a greater threat to our democracy than the young Londoners subjected to stop and search.
Reader views (13)
I totally agree with Derek (London). Many of a copper are simply too low IQ-ed for our comfort and safety. They need to be properly trained and assessed before letting them roam the streets and pester the innocent passer by...
The guy from Brentwood (Gary) who endorses them below ultimately share their intellectual (and emotional) disability. (Or is he one of them !?)
So yeah! well done Yasmin, I very much agree with you this time as always...
- Compayee (An Anti-Racist White Londoner), London, 22/10/2009 16:01
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Eric, London, most knife crime is commited by my fellow country men white English but you only get told about the small percentage in London but across England you will get a more reflective scary picture.
- Clare, London, 09/10/2009 15:33
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Well I for one would rather have the police search anyone they feel like than have sharia law or the kind of lawless nonsense that goes on in the West Indies. The police search black young men simply because they do more crime out of all proportion to their numbers. Deal with it. When young muslims stop plotting against us and young black men no longer spend their time shooting and stabbing each other then perhaps the situation will change.
- Squiz, Islington, 09/10/2009 14:33
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Outrageous eh? Policemen allowed to stop and search. Why should they be allowed to target the purpetrators of crime?
Forget the fact that most of the knife crime and all of the recent terrorism has been perpetrated by ethnic minorities, that's irrelevent in Alibhailand.
This gullible woman, protected by Newlabourland anti white mantra, spews venom from her Newlabourland fortress with imputiny. (Does the fortress look a bit shaky)?
Plot to make her and her ilk "prickly and ready to panic"? Seems she's learned nothing from Uganda. Portent?
- Eric, London UK, 09/10/2009 14:33
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The police have a duty to protect the public hence the stop and search.It is overwhelmingly muslims who try to blow us up.
- Watson, London UK, 09/10/2009 14:33
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Don't kid yourselves that stop and search is OK because its mainly black people who need to be put in check, or some such rubbish rationalization like that. This is the wrong thing to do in so many ways and it must be shelved. Yasmin is spot on on this one.
- Bloke, London, 09/10/2009 14:33
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It's a great shame that the stop and search operation is being scaled down. That leaves members of non-threatening tribes like mine (white middle class tax payers) further at risk of the activities of those who carry knives and guns and plot bombings. Mrs A-B is allowed to push for her kind, but I am not. That's the way it is.
- Jilly, London, 09/10/2009 14:33
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I'm a nondescript looking middle aged white guy who wears a suit a work and I've been stopped and searched twice at King's Cross by smirking (yes, really, properly enjoying themselves) Met Police officers who seemed to take great pleasure frisking me and rummaging around in my brief-case. This isn't a race issue, it's about the kind of people who leave school with almost no qualifications and go into the police (that seems to be the only type of person that wants to join up in the first place as far as I can see) taking out their inadequacies on anyone they don't like the look of. If you give fascist powers to people of very limited intelligence and then have the managed by people wholly unprepared to accept responsibility for their staff, what else would you expect them to do other than abuse those powers?
Until we have a police complaints commission that is able and willing to treat the police it comes into contact with the exact same level of contempt and abuse the police show to the general public of all colours and creeds, this will not change. Also, you can be sure that it will not change whilst we have the current National Socialist administration. And anyone who moans that the Tories would be much worse is denying reality - which party was it that passed the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and, in one go, stopped the endemic practice of forging confessions and other evidence?
- Derek, London, 09/10/2009 14:33
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a stop doesn't give the right for a p.c to rummage around someones body the police are allowde to search outer gaments gloves and hat,for the record a 'sus' law was based on exactly that guessing a suspision, section 44 stops are based on reasonable belief, who couldn't just stop an old lady, secondly the amount of stops last year refer to stop and accounts to its only a small proportion that make up stop and search, remember in 1986 when the GLC proposed an end to stop and search teh polceif ederation said if that wsa the case they couldn't see how they could maintain law and order
- John P Reid, london, 09/10/2009 14:33
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We moan about the amount of crime and how the police deal with it but when ways and means are given to them to combat it then we moan again. Stop and search and ID cards will be good news to those who have been the victims of fraud etc.
T H Leeds
- Thomas Hayes, Leeds UK, 09/10/2009 14:33
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No Mrs A-B, it doesn't threaten us all.
But you see I'm white, middle class and have never threatened anyone....
- Mike, London, 09/10/2009 14:33
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Perhaps your friends live in an area where Police have intelligence of certain activities and your friends match the ID of the suspects, easy to judge, not so easy to approach a person you think has a weapon or bomb and search them. Well done the Police please keep it up.
- Gary, Brentwood, 09/10/2009 14:33
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I don't agree with the new sus laws but you must understand how we have arrived here.
Perhaps it's just unfortunate then that the official figures show that most knife/gun crime in London is committed by black people.
- Margy, London, 09/10/2009 14:33
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