Any strategy to address violent crime (Javid backs police as chiefs seek £15m fund to tackle knife crime, 7 March) will be undermined by resorting to kneejerk, counterproductive and discriminatory tactics. The 1999 Macpherson report found that institutional racism was apparent in the countrywide disparity in stop-and-search figures and reached a core conclusion of racist stereotyping. Stop and search is still concentrated on BAME communities.
You are now eight times more likely to be stopped and searched by police if you are black than if you are white, and 14 times more likely in the case of suspicionless stops under section 60, even though black people are no more likely to be found with prohibited items than white people. At the same time, the government’s own serious violence strategy sets out that the reduction in stop and search over recent years is not the cause of rising violent crime.
Calls to ratchet up stop and search and deploy suspicionless powers are not the serious, considered response that this pressing issue deserves. Nor are the government’s proposed knife crime prevention orders, which will fast-track young people into the criminal justice system. The police must be able to work effectively in the communities they serve. These punitive suggestions can only undermine that.
Corey Stoughton Advocacy director, Liberty
Katrina Ffrench Chief executive, StopWatch
• The chancellor urges police forces to use existing money more efficiently (Hammond call to reassign officers angers police, 8 March). Yet successive governments and home secretaries have missed the obvious opportunity for savings. We have 43 separate forces, almost no central procurement, and massive duplication of strategic and tactical management and administration. Surely 43 could become, say, 10? National teams could focus on, for example, child abuse, modern slavery and the county lines problem. Doing the same thing over and over again with shrinking budgets is making us all unsafe in the streets and at home.
Kim Thonger
Finedon, Northamptonshire
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