IS POLICE USE OF STOP AND SEARCH ETHICAL?

Is Police use of Stop and Search Ethical?

Is Police use of Stop and Search Ethical?

Introduction

Early forms of policing in England were localised and unsystematic rather than centralised or systematic. In Saxon England, for instance, family groups belonged to a tithing, who policed their local kinships.

Zero tolerance policing is an assertive form of policing designed to clamp down on any infraction that may spiral out of control or spill over into more serious criminal activity. This type of policing has been adopted by Britain's Cleveland constabulary, as well as by the police in Glasgow's Greater Easterhouse area and in London's King's Cross area. In King's Cross, while the policy was initially aimed at drug-related crime and prostitution, it later targeted beggars and the homeless (Rowe, 2004).

Discussion

While the earlier Scarman Inquiry had rejected claims of institutional racism and instead attributed the racist behaviour of the police to the actions of only a few “bad apples” within the service, the Macpherson Report went much further in condemning the practices of the police, and indeed other public institutions in the United Kingdom, as being institutionally racist. The use of the term institutional racism, which, according to Macpherson refers to an organisation's collective failure to provide an appropriate service to people on the basis of their ethnicity and includes unintentional or thoughtless racism, was contested by many police officers and sections of the media who saw the term as little more than a sweeping accusation that all officers are racist (McGhee, 2007).

However, commentators in the United Kingdom have largely welcomed the acknowledgment of the institutionalised, and not simply individualised, nature of racism, and the recommendations of the Macpherson Report, endorsed by senior police officials and the British government, triggered a wide-ranging program of reform designed to tackle problems of racism in British society.

Although considerable progress has been made in the years following the publication of the Macpherson Report in 1999, a number of significant challenges have emerged within the context of race relations in the United Kingdom, most notably with regard to the position of British Muslims and the renewed popularity of the Far Right (Macpherson, 2008). Outbreaks of disorder between White communities and predominantly Muslim communities in northern England during the summer of 2001 sparked intense debate over the integration of Muslims and other minority ethnic groups within mainstream British society. This debate has intensified following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States, and, more recently, the bombings in the London Underground, on July 7, 2005, in the United Kingdom (Bowling, 2006).

The British government's response to the 2001 disturbances in northern England called for a renewed emphasis to be placed upon the concept of community cohesion as a way of establishing a common sense of national identity, irrespective of ethnicity, to resolve escalating tensions between different cultural, religious, and ethnic groups, but fears over the threat of Islamic extremism, expressed through alarmist media narratives and bellicose political rhetoric, have raised levels of public anxiety ...