Children’s commissioner finds wide disparity with white counterparts in year to June 2023, with 88% of searches aimed at finding drugs
Black children are four times more likely to be strip-searched by police officers across England and Wales than their white counterparts, according to the latest nationwide figures disclosed by a watchdog.
The children’s commissioner also found that children under the age of 15 are a bigger proportion of those subjected to intimate searches, official figures from the year to June 2023 showed. Fewer than half of all searches of children in that year (45%) were conducted in the presence of an appropriate adult.
A report released on Monday also found that nearly nine out of every 10 of searches [88%] conducted by England and Wales’s 44 forces were trying to find drugs.
I’m sorry, maybe it is in the article, but why are children being strip searched in the first place? This is fucking wild to me
No, no. Not “children”.
That’s the key.
If a gang is using children to deal drugs, then it’s an unfortunate, but necessary, thing.
A while back, gangs realised that the police and courts will go easy on teenagers. Teenagers are also notoriously easy to manipulate. This makes them the perfect cover and scape goats for a gang.
The real question is why blacks are being targeted. Is it the police being racist, or are the gangs targeting them, and so the police follow?
children under the age of 15
I don’t doubt you, but that is fucking sick on both sides if it is the case. Surely there is a better method than blindly strip searching underage minorities
Edit: I can almost guarantee racism by the police, and if not, systematic racism put them in the situation to be targeted by the gangs
Is it though? Necessary, I mean?
Oh yeah. Didn’t you see they just found a bunch of meth hidden in a celery shipment? Strip search the kids!
/s
Strangely enough the people who make up largest market for drugs are never stopped and searched because they are rich middle class people.
Reality of two tier policing is not as gammons would have us believe.
What happens when they control for family income? I don’t mean to belittle the point but it’s frustrating that so many injustices that are class issues get twisted into race issues to further divide people and strip them of collective power.
Why can’t it be both racist and classist? They reinforce each other.
Looking at the situation in the US, I long ago concluded that Wealth Discrimination is the mechanism via which Racism gets turned into people living hard miserable lives 24/7/365 - poor people have bad houses, bad furniture, lower life expectancy, lots of money related stress, live in more dangerous neighbourhoods, spend a lot more time commuting and so on, and their children only have access to bad underfunded schooling, so have little or no hope of leaving that pit: Racism pushes people into poverty and ghettos (for example by not having access to certain jobs or not being allowed to buy or rent houses in certain places) and once there it’s the high uneveness of access to resources depending on one’s Wealth (i.e. Wealth Discrimination) that grinds them day in and day out and makes sure that subsequent generations cannot climb out of it.
Whenever someone hears a “liberal” politicians claiming to be against Racism whilst at the same time being for Private Education and Private Healthcare, they should ponder on why would an “anti-Racists” want to maintaining and even expand the mechanisms that make life be unending misery for the racially discriminated against and their children.
deleted by creator
That’s also my pet peave with situations like this.
Are they searching black people (and so racist)?
Are they searching poor people (and so classist)?
Are they searching based on evidence (fair)?
All could reach the same result, but the solution is vastly different.
Unfortunately, 1 points to a simple problem, with someone to blame. The other 2 are complex social problems that require complex solutions and don’t have a simple bogeyman to blame.
Are they searching based on evidence (fair)?
Do you really think that there’s a bunch of children running drugs around so they need to be strip searched? Let me repeat that: do you think children are committing crimes right and left?
The police searched them, so if there was “evidence” they would have been arrested. “Child drug gangs” would be all over the news. Since that didn’t happen, we know that these children were targeted based on assumptions (probably race).
Black children have a problem with people assuming they are older than they really are and treating them like adults. If you think there’s a ton of “evidence” that literal children are committing a ton of crime, you’re part of the problem.
Are they searching based on evidence (fair)?
You can follow this down the pipe and find a pattern of behavior. This doesn’t just end with searches. More cases get dismissed when you’re rich and white. More acquittals happen when you’re rich and white. Fewer and lesser charges are leveled against rich white defendants for the same actions and convictions carry lighter sentences. And jail populations reflect these figures.
All could reach the same result, but the solution is vastly different.
One result rests on the theory that poorer, blacker residents are naturally more criminal than their richer, whiter peers.
The other rests on the theory that there’s systematic discrimination in policing, prosecuting, and sentencing.
Both functionally lead you to the same conclusion - that the system is biased against a particular race/class cohort. But the first theory asserts that this a desirable outcome due to faults of the race/class cohort, while the second asserts it is a structural problem with law enforcement.
The question is not “Are police being fair or racist/classist?” This question is “Is being racist/classist a smart policing policy?”
Americans: “First time?”
Well blacks do have higher arrest rates in the UK so it would follow they would also have higher incidences of being strip searched.
