Children’s commissioner finds wide disparity with white counterparts in year to June 2023, with 88% of searches aimed at finding drugs
Black children are four times more likely to be strip-searched by police officers across England and Wales than their white counterparts, according to the latest nationwide figures disclosed by a watchdog.
The children’s commissioner also found that children under the age of 15 are a bigger proportion of those subjected to intimate searches, official figures from the year to June 2023 showed. Fewer than half of all searches of children in that year (45%) were conducted in the presence of an appropriate adult.
A report released on Monday also found that nearly nine out of every 10 of searches [88%] conducted by England and Wales’s 44 forces were trying to find drugs.
That’s also my pet peave with situations like this.
Are they searching black people (and so racist)?
Are they searching poor people (and so classist)?
Are they searching based on evidence (fair)?
All could reach the same result, but the solution is vastly different.
Unfortunately, 1 points to a simple problem, with someone to blame. The other 2 are complex social problems that require complex solutions and don’t have a simple bogeyman to blame.
Do you really think that there’s a bunch of children running drugs around so they need to be strip searched? Let me repeat that: do you think children are committing crimes right and left?
The police searched them, so if there was “evidence” they would have been arrested. “Child drug gangs” would be all over the news. Since that didn’t happen, we know that these children were targeted based on assumptions (probably race).
Black children have a problem with people assuming they are older than they really are and treating them like adults. If you think there’s a ton of “evidence” that literal children are committing a ton of crime, you’re part of the problem.
You can follow this down the pipe and find a pattern of behavior. This doesn’t just end with searches. More cases get dismissed when you’re rich and white. More acquittals happen when you’re rich and white. Fewer and lesser charges are leveled against rich white defendants for the same actions and convictions carry lighter sentences. And jail populations reflect these figures.
One result rests on the theory that poorer, blacker residents are naturally more criminal than their richer, whiter peers.
The other rests on the theory that there’s systematic discrimination in policing, prosecuting, and sentencing.
Both functionally lead you to the same conclusion - that the system is biased against a particular race/class cohort. But the first theory asserts that this a desirable outcome due to faults of the race/class cohort, while the second asserts it is a structural problem with law enforcement.
The question is not “Are police being fair or racist/classist?” This question is “Is being racist/classist a smart policing policy?”