By Sandrea:-MYGRIPE
Recent report in the media that 26 per cent of Black people and 6.3 per cent of Asians are more likely than whites to be stopped and searched by the British Police comes as no surprise to the black community.
We have been living with racial profiling for as long as anyone in the black community can remember. This type of institutional racism has become part and parcel of the lives of the great majority of, especially young black men.
Most people will remember the ‘Brixton riot’ of the eighties, and although politicians hurry to try and fixed the problems that caused the riots the underline trends still remains to this day. It would appear that the Police authorities find it hard to believe that black people do work hard and they like to be owners of nice houses, cars and all the trappings that the white community take for granted, and therefore, whenever a young black man drives a nice car it is perceived by the police that he must be a drug dealer and therefore he his targeted and can be stopped and search several time in a single day.
It is commendable that the likes of Rev Jesse Jackson are in London to speak about the problem, but that will not make the problem go away. Until institutional racism is rooted out from the organisations that has the power to deal with everyone and do so on a level playing field then there is going to be little anyone can do to reverse the trend that has been part of the British culture for decades.
Until the British police come to terms with the fact that every single race that inhabit this planet have the potential to commit crimes and in fact they do then there is always going to be an imbalance in the way that they treat each race.
The British police do not seems to understand or want to realise that the vast majority of the Black and Asian community dislike the criminal elements that are in our society and I am sure the majority of White equally dislike the criminals as well and that all we want to see is that each group is treated fairly and that the colour of your skin is not a determine factor as to why you are stopped searched and harassed by the very people who are suppose to serve and protect.
Majority of police officers will tell you that they do not get cooperation from the Black community when they are investigating crimes, but what they fail to understand is that the Black community does not have any faith in the way in which they undertake their duties and that there is a genuine feeling within this community that there is no need in assisting the police because they are not going to taken seriously and therefore the best way is to remove themselves from the situation and once they isolate themselves getting their assistance in solving crimes are virtually non-existence.
There are many who, especially White that would say that if the Black community do not have nothing to hide then they would not be against stop and search, but they need to be place in the same situation whereby they are constantly stopped and question, they cannot drive a nice car without being the target of the police and they will begin to understand the frustration that the Black community has to live with everyday in the UK
I am not only blaming the police officer within the UK, the same can be said about the USA, there seems to be a fear factor among the White community against especially black people and they believe the only way that they can counter this fear is by targeting blacks, making their lives a living nightmare and that way they can suppress a race of people.
However, if racial profiling is not knock on its head, if the government do not do something about the way that Black and Asian young people are treated by the police then they are continuing to allow a boiling pot to keep on boiling and eventually it is going to explode, and we in the UK knows what happen when a community explodes as we have seen the devastation that can occur, we witness this in the eighties and it seems that none of the lessons there has been learned.
No one, especially the Black community want to see crimes and criminal activities progress because the police are turning a blind eye to these criminal activities. What they are saying that we have to join together as a multi-racial communities to achieve our goals of discouraging anyone be it Black, White, Asian, to stamp out crime from among our communities but this can only be achieve if it is seen that all of these communities are treated fairly and with respect and none is targeted over the other.
I hope that this report will make the Government take steps to get the Police authority to start treating the Black and Asian communities fairly and stop their racial profiling and start to truly stop and search someone because there is a genuine reason to do so and not because he’s driving the latest car, walking with a group of friends, have a hood pulled over his face because he may be cold, seen running because he want to get home before his parent become worried, none of the trivial things that a Black person has to experience on a daily basis.
This is the 21st century and we should not be still debating these clearly racist issues, we should have come a long way from treating individuals unfairly because of the colour of their skin. The world is made of varying races and that is what makes it so exciting, I would never want to wake to a world that only has pure Blacks, White or Asians, how boring that would be.
Racial profiling if used should be about helping the police to determine how best to solve a crime that has been committed, it should not be a mechanism that is used to suppress minority groups.
The time has come to change behaviour, we do not want the next generation to have to endure this kind of discrimination and we have the opportunity to change it now so that we leave them with the knowledge that the measure of a person’s integrity is not to do with the colour of his skin but the esteem in which he hold himself.
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