Race and crime in the United Kingdom
The relationship between race and crime in the United Kingdom is the subject of academic studies, government surveys, media coverage, and public concern.
[16] The Equality and Human Rights Commission state that their research suggests that perpetrators tend to be unemployed young white males with previous convictions.
[4] Since 2011, there has been widespread debate in the UK around what is called "grooming" – depicted as a new crime threat associated with ‘South Asian sex gangs’ who seek out white British girls for sexual abuse.
The first investigation was by Quilliam in December 2017, which released a report entitled "Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation – Dissecting Grooming Gangs".
[29] Operation Trident was set up in March 1998 by the Metropolitan Police to investigate gun crime in London's black community after black-on-black shootings in Lambeth and Brent.
[30] In 2003, Lee Jasper, Senior Policy Advisor on Equalities to the London mayor, said drugs and gun crime were the "biggest threat to the black community since its arrival here".
"[32] A similar sentiment has been shared in the Supreme Court, where Lady Hale stated "It must be borne in mind that many of these gangs are largely composed of young people from black and minority ethnic groups".
[33] Lady Hale went further as to use this as justification for "disproportionate" effects,[34] in this case stop and search powers, had on minority groups, saying "put bluntly, it is mostly young black lives that will be saved if there is less gang violence in London and some other cities".
[37] Janet Daley has argued in The Daily Telegraph that the issue of black people and crime is downplayed, due to fear of accusations of racism.
Filmmaker Sorious Samura studied statistics on 29 gang rapes and found that "a high proportion were committed by black and mixed-race young men".
[45] According to UN estimates, approximately 136,000 people were trafficked in the UK up to 2018[46] The number of potential victims referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM)[47] has risen from 2,340 in 2014 to more than 10,000 in 2020.
[52] Increases in hate crime were seen around certain "triggering" events, such the EU Referendum in June 2016, the 2017 Westminster terror attacks and the widespread Black Lives Matter protests and far-right counter-protests.
[58] A 2013 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee describes a group first making contact with the child in a public place.
[59][57] In August 2003, a television documentary reported details of an 18-month police and social services investigation into allegations that young British Asian men were targeting under-age girls for sex, drugs and prostitution in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley.
[63] Following further child sex abuse rings in Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Huddersfield, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochdale, Telford, and others, several investigations considered how prevalent British Asian backgrounds were in localised grooming.
[65] This report was criticised by child sexual exploitation experts Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, who said it was unscientific and had poor methodology, in a paper published in January 2020.
[71][72] In June 2007 the Home Affairs Select Committee published a report on young black people and the criminal justice system of England and Wales.
[84] More recently, between April 2019 and March 2020, the use of stop and search powers under Section 60 Criminal Justice & Public Order Act occurred 11,408 times, which was an increase of 19% from the year prior.
Comparative analysis by researchers at the London School of Economics and the Open Society Justice Initiative has shown that, in England and Wales in 2008/09, black people were 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
[86] Ben Bowling, a professor of criminal justice at King's College London, commented on the analysis, stating: The police are making greater use of a power that was only ever meant to be used in exceptional circumstances and lacks effective safeguards.
[90] This is echoed by the recent weakening of guidelines for section 60 (s60) stop and searches, being both the lowering of the requirement from reasonably believing an incident involving serious violence “will” occur to “may” and allowing inspeauthorizeauthorise s60 instead of Senior officers.
Director General of the MI5 Ken McCallum in his annual threat update of 2021 stated that racism is a significant causative factor in far-right extremism and a major cause for concern.
[99] A study published by the Home Office in 2003 found that 70 percent of mugging victims on commuter railways around London identified their muggers as black.
[102] In June 2010, through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Sunday Telegraph obtained statistics on accusations of crime broken down by race from the Metropolitan Police Service.
Between April 2005 and January 2006, figures from the Metropolitan Police Service showed that black people accounted for 46 percent of car-crime arrests generated by automatic number plate recognition cameras.
Rania Hamad of charity Iriss wrote:Mass media and political influence can be crucial, with the sensationalist reporting of some events leading to ‘spikes’ in hate crime (eg following the EU Referendum and terrorist incidents).
[114] Past research shows that the media misrepresents the picture of crime and that stories involving violent and sexual offences are over-reported beyond the official statistics.
[7][8] The fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism has been identified as one of the main contributing factors in explaining the recent increase in human trafficking.
"[124][125] The earliest explanations, in the 19th century, offered a racist framing, focusing on the perceived biological and psychological characteristics of offenders, which were particularly influenced by the work of Charles Darwin and other Darwinists.
[129] The Home Office published an updated version of the survey (using 2006 data) showing that once other variables had been accounted for, ethnicity was not a significant predictor of offending, anti-social behaviour, or drug abuse amongst young people.
