Effnic

I’ve been thinking a lot (ok, a bit) about the latest news regarding stopping and searching people based on their ethnic background, which was in all the news and papers yesterday. Personally, I don’t understand the entire aspect of “we’ll do it more based on whether we think you’re Muslim or not”, which seems to be the main thrust of the argument.

If you’re publicly targetting one sector of society more than others, then any potential threat will do itself up to not fit in with that stereotype. In fact,the police are probably less likely to catch anyone using this method than they are by just saying “We’re increasing the likelihood that anyone could be stopped and searched at random”.

Of course, the Metropolitan police have always had a bit of a preference for singling out certain ethnicities for their stop and search programmes and so on. So I suppose it shouldn’t really be a surprise that they’d seize (pardon the pun) on this set of events as an excuse to target the same sections of the community that protested last time the stop and search became overly politicised.

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