Political correctness is the real failure of stop and search

David

"The risk of being accused of racist practice is not one the Met police are keen to take after all the internal reform it has gone through to promote diversity. But that risk would be attached to Richards’ targeted searches. For that reason, I suspect the Met will be hesitant to adopt the practice."

What a tragic world we live in. A police force reluctant to stop and search the very people who are statistically proven to have a higher chance of being both victims and perpetrators of knife crime for fear of stepping on a few toes. Promoting diversity should not mean ignoring certain crimes because their prevalence is far higher among different races/religions/social groups. But with the wet way the Met behave with Muslim extremists, any inaction on knife crime wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

Hereford

So, we can't use profiling to ensure we search the people we know, absolutely, not through prejudice, but through empirical evidence are most likely to carry knives.

We can't use profiling to ensure we search those who we know, again through empirical evidence are most likely to be carrying bombs.

Let's just abandon ourselves to blind luck then. Stop searching anyone and accept that it is more important to preserve the dignity of individuals than the life and liberty of the majority.

Welcome to the post apocolyptic, Madmaxesque distopia that is modern Britain.

cuffleyburgers

We all know that if the people most suspicious were white christians there would be no fannying around...

That is racial discimination

Austin Barry

So, let me see, the police force (er, sorry, service)can't do random stop searches for fear of further marginalising the marginalised (i.e. young blacks) or targeted searches of those known to it (i.e young blacks) because this may upset its internal diversity efforts. Meanwhile, the bodies of the stabbed (mostly young blacks) litter the streets. So to avoid upsetting young blacks the police are quite content to let them go on killing each other. Hopeless.

Verity

The promotion of "diversity" was always deeply stupid and was brought about to make few people look Mahatamaesque.

Frankly, I don't want to be policed by West Indians or Pakistanis. I want to policed by my own people who ethnicity and understanding of our mores is as deep as my own.

This is all part of Labour's malicious plan to destroy Britain which, inexplicably, they hate.

I am baffled, though. After they have destroyed Britain, what?

Verity

Austin Barry - It is not "hopeless". Such blanket perversity does not happen by accident.

You - meaning the Brits - allowed it to happen because they put nice labels on things. 'Political correctness", with the inference that any other thinking was "wrong".

"Diversity", as though this were a good, and not a dangerous, thing. Homogeneity, deeply rooted in mankind, works. So it had to be torn down.

Verity

Austin Barry - It is not "hopeless". Such blanket perversity does not happen by accident.

You - meaning the Brits - allowed it to happen because they put nice labels on things. 'Political correctness", with the inference that any other thinking was "wrong".

"Diversity", as though this were a good, and not a dangerous, thing. Homogeneity, deeply rooted in mankind, works. So it had to be torn down.

David C

I am baffled, though. After they have destroyed Britain, what?

Fear.
If you control a society that is afraid of itself then you have eternal power. People have nowhere else to look other than 'Big Brother'
This was the message in 1984.

Austin Barry

I don't think Labour wants to destroy Britain, rather by massive indiscriminate immigration it hopes to replicate in reality the Nirvana of the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland, where all races, creeds and colours can live and sing in perfect harmony. So, Verity and all other Coffeehousers, after me on the count of three: one two, three.."It's a small world after all, it's a small world.." Sing you bastards, sing.......

David C

Pardon me.
That is why Brown was so determined about 42 Days detention and why he attacks Cameron over ID cards.
Cameron, by opposing these, could be portrayed as weak in defense of public safety.

Brown may not understand courage, but like any bully, he understands fear.

Anon2

David C @ 4:21p.m: I think so too. I gather from my US 'peers' (="superiors")that: Brits and non-Marxists need to learn "Respect". Increasingly, I sense superiority/inferiority complexes asserting themselves in all this.

David C

Austin:
I see you've also visited N. Korea as well as Disneyland.

LOL!

simon hb

If this article is about the Met, why is the illustration of a Merseyside Police constable carrying out a search in Liverpool? I thought The Spectator had learned its lesson about stigmatising the people of Liverpool...

Tiberius

I agree with Austin, that the PC brigade are just a bunch of misguided fools who happen, by whatever means, to have seized the levers of power. They wouldn't be capable of organizing a grand conspiracy.

The problem is that no one has yet had the courage or opportunity to trump their thinking with a return to common sense.

YoYo

The murders and stabbings go on and still they howl that it's nothing to do with scrapping stop and search.

They're not police any more, they're just jumped-up Marxists who don't like the facts they find and so try to socially engineer ever more ways to obscure those facts. So the killings go on...

London Calling

The Met have to be tough but fair, and I agree that more time should be spent targeting known gangs with constant searches until they realise that carrying knifes and guns is not acceptable. Gangs bully and murder other gangs and innocent members of our community and think they own our streets and its time a clear message was sent out by disarming these gangs.

Check points work in our community, but having witnessed one recently at a shopping centre, I noticed groups of youths quickly doing a sharp left or right to avoid the checkpoint and in that respect checkpoints only send out a formal message, don’t get caught in my net, by the met.

Polite policing works well in a safe environment, but when the police have to be tough, we must support them, we all want knife and gun crime to end and we can only end it by targeting those who perpetrate it on our streets.

James J

“Political correctness is the real failure...” you should keep that part of the title; I think it will come in handy.

Trumpeter Lanfried

I am not sure it is the young blacks who carry knives. Very broadly speaking, blacks carry guns, whites carry knives. But the point is the same. What we need is:
(a) a relentless, targetted stop and search policy for weapons of all descriptions;
(b) deterrent sentences;
(c) a deaf ear to the howls of anquish from the Guardian-reading liberals; and
(d) the knowledge that the gratitude of the silent majority will be our reward.

TGF UKIP

Easy to agree with all posts so far but in many ways Cuffleyburgers' is the most telling and pithy.

I must also ask if there is the slightest chance that the approach might be radically different under a Cameron Tory government.

Verity

Not for the first time, I agree with Trumpeter.

What I cannot understand is how supine the British are. You are taking orders from the police. It is your privilege, as the employer to give the police orders amd dismiss them if they fail to carry them out.

I cannot imagine a)why Iain Blair is still in a job and b) why you're allowing him to give you your orders. If any chief of police in the United States even essayed such an attitude - and they wouldn't - they'd have their desk cleared out and cartoned for them and their parking space re-stencilled with someone else's name within two hours max.

And the security guards would have been given orders to fire on sight. OK, I made that last bit up, but I was thinking of an ideal world, with bluebirds, rainbows, puppies and ammo.

I cannot believe how passive you are and how you have allowed the servant to become the master.

Alistiar Fleming

You miss the problem - that the woman is talking policing and statistical rubbish. For one, current Sec 60 or sec 1 of PACE searches are not "random" at all, Sec 1 requires formal grounds and Sec 60 at least needs a reason which will stand up to an IPCC enquiry. So intelligence-led targeting (knowing who the villains are and turning them and those with them over, not the old ladies from the WI), is already in full swing. Naughty or very ignorant not to mention that. That 90% of knife murderers already known in some fashion to the police is such a statement of the obvious. Most murderers are er, villains. The trouble is the sea of false positives - millions of people in the UK are 'known' to the police, but only a microscopic number go on to murder - her information is as useful as looking for ten particular wisps of hay in a haystack and saying - look for um, hay-ish stuff. NB her website noted she had found what Jack the Ripper 'possibly looked like' in a TV programme. Amazing

Austin Barry

The trouble is that the silent majority is just too bloody silent. Wasn't it George Orwell who said that England was like a family where most of the power was in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Mmmm.. more like in the hands of weak insipid defeatists and the stupid.

Verity

Austin Barry - I would say more like the unemocratic, power-mad, dictatorial left, which has already shut down free debte in Britain with a list of forbidden words and thoughts.

The immigrants are being used as a whip to lash the indigenous British, but people (our people) feel they have been slyly robbed of their power as voters because their rights have been ceded to the EUSSR politburo. And there is nothing they can do about it. And if they try, they will be crushed by garbage and effluent like Iain Blair, Ed Balls, Jack Straw, Jacqui Smith, Harriet Harpic, Milibands, Gordon Brown and the rest of the oncoming One Worlder army.

dave

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't operation trident a division set up to identify and target black on black crime?

David MICHAEL

There is a big difference between intelligence led targetted searches and profiling on the grounds of race and ethnicity. Police should have no fear of lawfully stopping and searching anyone they genuinely suspect to carrying guns or knives on our streets for an unlawful purpose. Racial profiling and stereotyping has no place in lawful and effective policing. Unless police operate in a way that engenders trust, confidence and co-operation of the public, their efforts will be counter-productive.