It's all about what you think words mean. It's general - from the Home Office website:
Police now make a record of all stops and searches, including the self-defined ethnic identity of the person stopped.
Although stop and search figures are now closely monitored to try to reduce disproportionate stopping and searching of non-whites, the Terrorism Act 2000 has led to a palpable increase in stopping and searching of people of Asian origin in particular.
To address this issue, we established a Stop and Search Action Team in 2004 to look at:
* how officers use the intelligence they receive to decide who to stop and search
* where stop and search is targeted and whether this is fair
* how police officers and police authorities can actively involve local communities in reaching an agreement about using stop and search
You might say this means that they were previously stopping and searching people because of their ethnicity, and now they're not doing so, or that the current profile of particular crime and risk means that intelligence-led policing will lead to stop-and-search figures out of line with the population as a whole, and attempting to move to a 'fairer' statistical result in that sense means that you are now declining to stop and search people of a particular ethnicity because you want a certain statistical outcome.
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Date: 2006-02-21 12:31 pm (UTC)You might say this means that they were previously stopping and searching people because of their ethnicity, and now they're not doing so, or that the current profile of particular crime and risk means that intelligence-led policing will lead to stop-and-search figures out of line with the population as a whole, and attempting to move to a 'fairer' statistical result in that sense means that you are now declining to stop and search people of a particular ethnicity because you want a certain statistical outcome.
I think both may be the case.