Quote Originally Posted by TISS View Post
come on Jon you're clever enough. knife crime is not homogeneous in London it is restricted to certain areas, areas that have higher than average BAME residents. Thats not suggesting that BAME are more likely to commit knife crime, but areas of social deprivation are more likely to have higher incidents. If you specifically target those areas, then you are going to have higher than normal instances on people from those areas being stopped and searched. That's not racist. However, as these areas have higher than average BAME residents, then it would appear than the BAME community is being searched out of proportion.

Let me put it another way - during the Northern Ireland troubles, were the RUC and MI6 looking for terrorists in Northern Ireland, Wales, France or Kenya? Where do you think the security services would have more success in focusing their attention - it is the same here. If there is knife crime, then focus on those areas where the crime is happening.
I agree with some of that but it dodges the charge of racial profiling. If the police are targeting people just because of their skin colour or nationality - that is racist. It is simple. If they are targeting people because of location, time of day, gang membership, behaviour consistent with probable criminal activity, and a number of other relevant factors, that is probably a reasonable and evidence-based way of targeting resources. As I understand the data and anecdotes, what is presented as one thing regularly slips into the other - with crude racial profiling underpinning the stop and search statistics (and in fact most of the statistics that show discriminatory treatment of BAME people throughout the police and criminal justice system - from police stop to conviction and sentence length).