Uncomfortable truths about policing, race and immigrants

Why the police were right not to turn the Liverpool tragedy into a disaster

2024 anti-immigrant rioting

Amidst wild accusations about dual policing favoring people of colour, it needs to be remembered that black people are four times more likely to be stopped and searched by the British police.

Yet the nonsense idea that black people are given preferential treatment by the police was given a fresh lease of life after a white British man was arrested following the appalling attack on Liverpool football fans celebrating their premiership league victory. The gall of this myth’s perpetrators is impressive because the police only released details of identity to thwart these very same people from inciting violence on the basis of false information.

Bearing in mind that rumor travels faster than fact, the police have good grounds to argue that they responded not a moment too soon.

The actual situation regarding two tier policing is that, as a sledge of statistics confirm, the victims of questionable policing are overwhelming black and brown, not just when it involves stop-and-search but also when it comes to police use of weapons (such as tasers), police sexual misconduct, and deaths in police custody. Most shockingly, according to the 2019/2020 report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, 23 per cent of total deaths in or following police custody between 2015 and 2020 were people of a non-white background.

But these statistics will do little to sway the views of those who shout loudest about two-tier policing because prejudice is no friend of factual information.

The Tory politician Robert Jenrick, who would scramble over his granny’s prone body to secure the party leadership, barely paused for breath before plunging in to demonstrate that not only is he no friend of facts but also a dab hand at manipulating data in the cause of immigrant hatred. He recently wrote an incendiary commentary headlined: ‘The facts are in: mass immigration has led to a rise in crime’.

The problem with this tirade is that the headline would be more accurate if it read ‘The selective facts are in’. While it is true that there is, for example, a marginal difference in the share of property crime attributed to asylum seekers, there is no evidence of incomers being more involved in violent crime. More tellingly statistics show that as the number of foreign born people has risen, property crime has fallen. To complicate matters the percentage of foreign born people in prison is higher than the overall percentage of foreign born people in Britain. This either means that they are committing more crimes or that they are more likely to be arrested and jailed.

The complications of interpreting the evidence, some of which does indeed point to a problem among the immigrant population, is a far cry from Mr. Jenrick’s political opportunism in drawing selectively from the evidence.

Talking of complexity brings us to an even more difficult question. Would the police have been right to identify the race of the alleged perpetrator of the Liverpool atrocity if that person was not white, had an Islamic name and was born overseas? And, what would have been the consequences?

This is a hard question to answer because it is entirely possible that the revelation of the suspect’s race would have led to a repetition of the racist rioting seen last year. But suppression of information is most unlikely to be the way forward, however uncomfortable the consequences.

The reality is that this question does not arise out of the ether but at a time of hyper-political sensitivity where race has become the weapon of choice for the rise of not just the Reform party but also a ragbag of other rightwing political opportunists.

In some ways this is to expected, but more worryingly immigrant bashing, once the bailiwick of the extreme right, is gaining ground elsewhere. Now, even the leader of the Labour Party, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is feeling the pull of this gravitational shift.

But, and this cannot be underlined too strenuously, Britain is not a fundamentally racist country and although there are far too many die-hard racists, they are a distinct minority among a generally open-minded population.

With this in mind it is reassuring to believe that a rising tide of racist-tinged bilge can be held back. The issues are complex but complexity is no excuse for inaction, on the contrary there is an urgent need for an honest debate about race and immigration. The chances of that happening are on a par with the Tories winning the next election having ditched Kemi Badenoch for the even more swivel-eyed Robert Jenrick.