Met to stop recording ethnicity of drivers stopped by its officers
The Metropolitan police are to stop recording the ethnicity of drivers who are stopped by officers, just as other police forces start doing it, the Guardian has learned.
Police in England and Wales had not previously recorded the race of those stopped on the roads amid claims that black drivers were picked on by officers.
In 2021, the Met was the first force to record a driver’s ethnicity as part of a pilot project. It agreed to do so under pressure from the mayor of London as it plunged into crisis.
Details from that Met pilot scheme show some disproportionality, meaning that black and Asian drivers were stopped at a higher rate than white British drivers, according to documentsobtained by Liberty Investigates.
Compared with their share of the population, black people were 56% more likely to be stopped than white British people, analysis of the traffic pilot shows.
The disproportionality was much lower for road stops, compared with when officers stop and search people in the street, with black people being seven times more likely than white people to be targeted when they are on foot.
The documents show that when conducting road stops, Met officers said they often did not know the ethnicity of the driver when they decided to exercise their powers.
Some officers, according to the Met documents, felt recording the race of drivers took too much time, which took on average an additional two minutes. Now, Britain’s biggest force will drop the scheme aimed at identifying potential racial bias.
But several other forces across the country are to start recording the ethnicity of drivers, and police chiefs hope all forces will join.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council says it wants to close the race gap in policing, which means an almost 20% deficit in trust and confidence black communities have in police compared with the average.
The Met pilot followed a spate of cases in 2020 when people were stopped and found to be innocent. This included athlete Bianca Williams, and her partner, Ricardo dos Santos, who were handcuffed while their baby was in the car. Nothing unlawful was found by officers, some of whom now face a disciplinary hearing.
Dos Santos told the Guardian the Met should keep recording the data to avoid damaging public trust, adding: “Confidence is already running low; rather than taking a step forward, they are taking a step backwards. It makes people think there is something to hide, because you would not want to stop doing that if there was not something to hide.”
Until now, police have had to record the ethnicity of people they stop on foot in the street, which has exposed the national disproportionality.
A small pilot in London in 2020 suggested black people were six times more likely to be stopped while driving than white people.
The latest pilot, much bigger than the previous, lasted six months from January 2021 to July 2021 with data for 7,556 stops collected.
Dr Krisztian Posch of University College London analysed the data for the Guardian. It showed the biggest disproportionality was for black people, who are 13.5% of London’s population but who made up 17.2% of stops during the pilot. Asians make up 19% of the population, but made up 21% of stops where people stated their ethnicity.
White British people make up 37.8% of the capital’s population, and made up 30.8% of stops, while white other – which can include white eastern Europeans- make up 18% of the population and 24% of stops during the pilot.
The Met document from June 2022 said of officers: “In most cases they could not see who was driving the vehicle until it had stopped.”
The collection of ethnic data is seen as a way of identifying potential bias and driving it out of public services.
The Met figures show that 86.4% of those were stopped were male and 13.5% were female.
A spokesperson for the National Police Chiefs’ Council said: “We’ve been piloting the section 163 [of the Road Traffic Act] action in the Police RaceAction Plan with five forces, and will be piloting it with more forces in the coming months, with the aim of gathering the evidence necessary to consider a national rollout.”
Despite being given over two working days to respond, the Met did not, and the London mayor’s spokesperson said it was working to boost trust, adding: “The findings of the pilot (June 2022), which looked at road traffic stops by the Met p`Police, did not identify racial bias.”
Habib Kadiri of StopWatch said the organisation “finds it hard to believe that the effort to record ethnicity during vehicle stops is significantly greater than that during street stops (considering how long it takes to verify car details anyway).
“It is also insulting to the many drivers who are stopped either for no reason or for trivial road traffic offences. Establishing racial disproportionality is not a matter of how far officers can be bothered.”
Source: (The Guardian)