Ethnicity

• Black people make up 3% of the population
• Black people make up 13% of the prison population
• Victim surveys (CSEW)


  • Shows that a great deal of crime is intra-ethnic
  • Black people are overrepresented as offenders of mugging
  • Relies on a victim's memory of events
  • Only cover personal crimes (1/5 of crime)
  • Exclude crimes by and against organisations
• Self-report studies


  • Ask individuals to disclose their own criminal behaviour
  • Findings challenge the stereotype of black people as being more likely to offend
  • Findings also support that Asians are less likely to offend
  • People lie
• Since the 1970's there have been many allegations of oppressive policing of minority ethnic communities
• Black people are 7 times more likely to be stop and searched
• Asian people are twice as likely to be stopped and searched
• 2000 Terrorism act, police can stop and search persons or vehicles whether or not they have reasonable suspicion
• During 2010-14 police tased over 38,000 times, black people were 18 in 10,000
• In 2014-15 the arrest rate for black people was 3 times the rate for white
• Arrests and cautions


  Maybe because members of minority ethnic groups are more likely to deny the offence and to exercise their right to legal advice (mistrust of police)
• Prosecution and trial


  CPS is more likely to drop cases against ethnic minorities because the evidence presented to the CPS by police is often weaker and based on stereotyping of ethnic minorities
• Pre-sentence reporting


  • A risk assessment written by probation officers to assist magistrates in deciding on the appropriate sentence
  • PSR's allow for unwitting discrimination. They found reports on Asian offenders suggested they were less remorseful than white offenders
• In 2014, 5.5 per 1,000 black people were in jail
• 1.6 per 1,000 Asians were in jail
• 1.4 per 1,000 white people were in jail
• Left realism

  • Ethnic differences in the statistics reflect real differences in the levels of offending by different ethnic groups
  • Racism has led to the marginalisation and economic exclusion of ethnic minorities
  • Police often act in racist ways, and this results in the unjustified criminalisation of some members of minority groups
  • 90% of crimes known to the police are reported by members of the public, not by police discovery
  • We cannot explain the differences between minorities in terms of police racism, as black people have a higher rate of criminalisation than Asians, the police would have to be very selective in their racism
  • Arrest rates for Asians may be lower not because they are less likely to offend, but because police stereotype the two groups differently: black people as dangerous, Asian people as passive
• Neo Marxism

  The idea of black criminality is a myth created by racist stereotypes, a result of the police acting on these racist stereotypes, ethnic minorities come to be more criminalised and therefore appear in greater numbers in the official stats
• Hall


  • 70's saw a moral panic over black 'muggers' that served the interests of capitalism
  • Moral panics, mugging was just a new name for an old crime, there was no significant increase
  • The myth of the black mugger served as a scapegoat to distract from the true cause of problems such as unemployment
  • The 'black mugger' came to symbolise the disintegration of social order, British way of life was 'coming apart at the seams'
  • This divided the WC on racial grounds and weakened the opposition to capitalism
  • Do not show how the capitalist crisis lead to a moral panic, nor do they provide evidence that the public were blaming crime on black people
  • Inconsistent in claiming that black street crime was not rising, but also that it was rising because of unemployment
• Police recorded 54,000 racist incidents in England and Wales in 2014/15 (property damage/harassment)
• CSEW estimates 89,000 racially motivated incidents in 2014/15
• People from mixed backgrounds has a higher risk (27.9%) of victimisation, black people (18%) and Asians (15.8%) and white people (15.7%)
• Being a young male have higher rates of violence victimisation
• Racist victimisation


  Tends to be ongoing over time with repeated minor instances
• Communities have been active in responding to victimisation: situational crime prevention, organised self-defence campaigns
• Macpherson enquiry: police investigation into the death of Steven Lawrence was 'marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism, and failure of leadership'