Yesterday, the Metropolitan Police confirmed that a three month dispersal zone had begun in the Stratford area, which “will specifically cover Stratford Town Centre, including the Magistrates’ Court, the main transport hubs in Stratford and the areas along West Ham Lane commonly known as the West Quadrant”. Read more
This article appears in the current issue of Labour Briefing
Estelle du Boulay and Kevin Blowe, Newham Monitoring Project, ask if anything has changed in the way police relate to black and Asian people following the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence nearly two decades ago. Read more
This article by Estelle du Boulay and Prity Patel-Bedia appears in the February 2011 edition of Labour Briefing
David Cameron’s recent attack on ‘the doctrine of state multiculturalism’ for cultivating separatism and with it ‘domestic Islamic extremism’ fails to recognise that state racism – the race and class inequalities indivisible from state power – engineers the division of communities in British society. Read more
For a period of about twenty-four hours after the release of the Home Secretary’s report on the ‘Tackling Knives Action Programme’ in December 2008, the police tactic of using stop and search as an effective means of catching criminals seemed to finally to shaken off the controversy that has clung to it since criticism by the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1998. Stop-and-search works, the government said. But within a day of ministers claiming a victory in its fight against a weapons-culture amongst young people, accusations were mounting of manipulation of the statistics. If stop and search is genuinely effective, critics asked, why spin the evidence? Where were the real figures to back it up the claims for its use?
