Police forces to cease recording ethnicity during stop and accounts

Really not good news.

The ethnic disproportionality in the application of police stop powers is one of the most invidious aspects of current police practice in the UK - and probably in many other countries as well. There is nothing better suited to driving a wedge between the police and the people they serve (i.e. us) than the sense that we are being unfairly stopped by officers in order that (a) we should account to them for our movements, or (b) that we should be body searched (with no reason necessary under several pieces of legislation). Disproportionality in this type of police behaviour seems to me to be the antithesis of procedural justice (and distributive justice and probably any other type of justice as well).

The argument made by Craig Mackey, who's ACPO lead on stop and search - that police have no real powers to stop and account (so presumably the change is therefore of little consequence) is I think slightly disingenuous. I wonder how many ordinary people distinguish between a stop for an account and a stop for a search, or how often a stop intended to lead to a search does not, and therefore becomes in essence a stop and account.

We should not forget that stopping people in public places merely on the suspicion that they may have committed a crime is one of the most significant powers the police have. On one hand, in the final analysis police officers should be able to approach members of the public to ask them questions and, yes, 'account' for what they are doing. Policing as it is currently construed in the UK would be impossible without this type of contact between police and citizen (for one thing policing would have to become almost entirely reactive). But on the other hand they do this not as ordinary citizens but as wielders of the power of legitimate violence. The coercion in this type of police behaviour lies not in the legal status of the act but in the power of the people doing it. Until they have proved that they can use this power fairly monitoring all stop activity is vital.