Stop and search: white people held 'to balance racial statistics'
Terror watchdog accuses police of intervening without evidence or suspicion
Only 1 per cent of searches using terrorism legislation led to an arrest
White members of the public are being unlawfully detained by the police in order to give "racial balance" to stop-and-search statistics, a report by the Government's watchdog on terror laws has found.
Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said he knew of cases where suspects were stopped by officers even though there was no evidence or suspicion against them.
He warned that police were wasting money by carrying out "self-evidently unmerited searches" which were an invasion of civil liberties and "almost certainly unlawful".
Lord Carlile, a QC and Liberal Democrat peer, condemned the wrongful use of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, in his annual report on anti-terror laws.
He said police were carrying out the searches on people they had no basis for suspecting so they could avoid accusations of prejudice.
As the terror threat against Britain is largely from Islamist extremists, the figures show disproportionately more Muslims and therefore more Asians being searched than whites.
But the peer said police should stop trying to balance the figures, and it may be that an "ethnic imbalance" is a "proportional consequence" of policing.
Civil liberty lawyers and black and Asian groups reacted angrily. Raj Joshi, vice-chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers, accused the police of playing into the hands of far-right organisations like the BNP. "The latest statistics show exactly what black and Asian communities have been saying for years: that they are being unfairly treated from stop and search through to sentence and punishment in the criminal justice system," he said.
"It is not enough to use anti-terror laws to target Asian communities when we have been told that the police rely on so-called intelligence-led policing."
Lord Carlile wrote in his report published yesterday: "I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop. In one situation the basis of the stops was numerical only, which is almost certainly unlawful and in no way an intelligent use of the procedure."
