The criminal justice system has been known to be, as some would say ’institutionally racist’ towards all ethnic minorities of the world but mostly towards the biggest minorities, black people. We can see the levels of crime rising as the police crack down on crime without realising what they are causing which is the loss of trust in the police due to their actions when conducting stop and searches, the difference in sentencing between the ethnicities and how recent cases have shown the police to have an overall racism and race problem.
Stop and searches
The level of stop and searches have risen drastically over the years due to the police getting more and more powers from Section 1: Police and criminal evidence act 1984, Section 23: Misuse of drugs act 1971 and section 60: Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. These acts in themselves allow the officers of the Metropolitan Police to conduct stop and searches toward anyone they find suspicious if they have reasonable grounds in doing so. These powers have caused the police to make numerous stop and searches towards countless people of all ethnicities however as of late, they have been going after the ethnic minorities. A statistic from GOV (2019) states that “The proportion of stop and searches conducted on whites deceased from 75% in 20142015 to 59% in 20182019” shows us that the Metropolitan Police have gone much easier on white people when it comes to stop and searches however there was an increase from 13% to 22% for black people and 8% to 13% for Asians during this time. The reason for this to have increased is that round this time, the police were cracking down on knife crime as it was rapidly increasing and there were cases of it all over London. The Police however only focused on the BAME communities mostly causing there to be more stop and searches than there was meant to. Another statistic from GOV (2019) said that “Black suspects had the highest proportion of arrests from stop and searches in the latest year”. This shows us that while the Police have been lowering their stop and searches on white people, they have increased this for black and Asian people. Another main fact is that on GOV (2020), it states that “There were 4 stops for every 1000 whites compared to 38 stops for every 1000 blacks”, these stats state the obvious in that the police do have a problem with the BAME community even though they state they do not. This can be shown as evidence towards the argument of has the Criminal Justice System got a race or racism problem towards which end, I would say they have a problem with race. They mostly only target black people when it comes to stop and searches as the police find them the most suspicious due to their idea that black people are the only ones who commit crime and take part in knife crime and drug crime.
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Case study
There have been many cases involving the Metropolitan Police and their abuse of powers, but this case was a real big one. The killing of Mark Duggan on August 4th 2011. This murder caused an outrage in the BAME communities as the public were calling it racism at its finest. This had huge effects on London as within days, The London Riots started and there was havoc. The officers involved stated in The Guardian (2019) “I honestly believed that Mr Duggan had a gun at the time he was shot, he had been lawfully killed”. The word lawfully has been thrown around a lot by the Police. Some would say it is used as an excuse to allow these acts to occur. In this case however the term lawfully was hazy since the gun that Mark Duggan supposedly had in his hands was around 7 meters away from the body and that none of the other officers saw him make any type of throwing motion. Which begs the question, how did the gun get there? This essentially led to the moral panic theory being brought up in the way that there was a problem with crime at the time and there was a problem with how the police acted against the BAME communities. This all lead to the media making their stories and printing it for the public to see and get concerned about. This mixed with the emotions of the ethnic minorities lead to sparks being created which finally also led to the London riots. A quote from Newburn (2017) said that “young people were frequently the subject of moral concerns…they are folk devils”. In this sense the police believe all young people to be folk devils and they may or not believe that BAME are the bigger folk devils. So, they focus more on these communities more and they create a sense of panic between the public and these so-called folk devils. This case study can be shown as evidence towards the criminal justice system having a race problem as it shows that Metropolitan police should be fair and just, but this is not the case. The stats I have previously mentioned all link to the fact that the police are racist, and this incident further adds to the many lists of incidents the police have against the black ethnic minority.
Court sentences and prisons
Racism in the criminal justice system is everywhere. It is also very dominant in the USA. For example, there was a case with a black man and a white man committing the same crime (armed robbery) and had the same number of points on their record and they were in front of the same judge, however the white man got 2 years in county jail while the black man got 26 years in prison. (Snopes, 2018). This is but one case out of many around the world showing the complete corruption within the criminal justice system and how they treat those of colour poorly. There have been many cases where the exact same circumstances have occurred and the white guy will get a lesser sentence than the black guy, this shows the system have a problem. There is also a stat from an American centre called pew research centre (2020) which states that “there were 2272 inmates per 100,000 black men compared to 392 inmates per 100,000 white men”. This statistic itself can explain the huge disproportion within the prison populations. This can be explained as a race problem. The huge differences between whites and blacks are just unreal, no one can deny that they have an issue with racism. The crime rates for Asians and whites are similar so it only shows they are racist to blacks. This is the left realist response. They believe that “Any relationship between crime rates and ethnicity is solely a function of racist policing” (Martin D, 2015) meaning that the crimes black people commit is due to the racist policing that occurs daily on the streets. They also think that there is a huge victimization towards the working classes as they fall into white collar and working-class crimes. This can also be linked to strain theory in the sense that society put pressure on individuals to reach certain goals even though they may lack the means, this leads them to commit crime to get money for these goals which leads them into the hands of the criminal justice system for them to give a long sentence. Yes, black people commit crimes and deserve to go to prison, same for all the other races but when someone of a white colour gets a lesser sentence for the same crime and circumstances, its completely unfair and makes the criminal justice system look like they have a problem with certain races.
The Lammy Review
This independent review was conducted in 2017 and it was into the treatment of black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system. Inside talks about the problems that the criminal justice system has such as problems with trust and fair treatment amongst the BAME communities. They conducted a survey which stated that “51% of people from BAME backgrounds believe that the criminal justice system discriminates against particular groups” (Lammy D, 2017). This is a massive amount of the population who essentially have no trust in the criminal justice system as the communities believe they are racist towards them. This is dangerous as the criminal justice system rely on the public for information on crimes but if people do not trust them, they will be reluctant to share information. This review also listed a few recommendations that the criminal justice system should incorporate into their work for example, Lammy D (2017) mentioned that “All identifying information be redacted from the case information passed to police so they can make race blind decisions”. This is a brilliant idea as in the police force themselves, they can know, who is what race by reading their name and seeing their picture. If you were to take out the information and just present the crimes, they committed the sentencing should be much fairer and that way the public will start having faith in the criminal justice system once again. One improvement that has been put in place though is the use of cameras on all officers so everything is recorded so if anything is wrong, it can be seen front hand. If you are in anyway shape and form racist or nor conducting yourself how you are trained to be, then you would be penalised for it. Another improvement that the Lammy review created is that it caused the criminal justice system to review how modern-day slavery legislation can be used to protect the public from levels of racism and even developed joint training programmes for these issues brought up.
Case Study
The killing of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 was seen as one of the main cases that was explored to find out if the criminal justice system were in fact institutionally racist. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in an unprovoked racist attack by 5 suspects who all evidence pointed towards very quickly in the case. However, they are charged with murder, but the charges are dropped due to the evidence being unreliable despite all evidence points towards them. It took over 20 years and a huge pay out of £320,000 towards the family of Stephen Lawrence that 2 out of 5 suspects, the brothers were arrested and charged with murder and received life sentences. However, in the Macpherson report (1999) it states that” the investigation into the killing had been marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and failure of leadership” A man such as himself has said the criminal justice system is institutionally racist. After this report, many officers were named and blamed and the whole criminal justice system was criticised for their actions at the time. The bad apple approach can be used to explain the actions of the police force. The officers who were involved in the case were racist towards black people however it does not mean every single officer is racist. Only the ones who would let this type of case go on for this long when they had all the evidence to arrest and charge the suspects were. The case itself just answers the question, the criminal justice system is racist towards other races, mostly blacks.
In conclusion, the workings of the criminal justice system have been incredibly racist throughout every year. The main 2 cases I brought up were all caused due to racism, the Mark Duggan case having the racist officer fire shots and the Stephen Lawrence case where the entire force who were on his case did not do anything for so many years. There are even more of these cases such as George Floyd which re started the whole Black Lives Matter movement that swept the world, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin who was the murder that started the Black lives matter movement etc. All these cases and statistics show that the criminal justice system has an overall problem with race and black people. They are targeted the most for stop and searches, they get the longer sentences compared to other races and they are just overall treated very harshly by the Metropolitan police. So, to answer the main question that is: has the criminal justice system got a race or a racism problem. My answer is they have a race problem due to the fact black people are always targeted so much more than Asians or whites. This is due to the police being institutionally racist and if they hope in getting the publics trust back, they need to fix that and root out the bad apple
References
- GOV (2019) Statistics on Race and Criminal Justice system (National Statistics) Minister of Justice
- GOV (2020) stop and search, Stop and search - GOV.UK Ethnicity facts and figures (ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk) (last accessed on 09 December)
- PA Media (2019) Mark Duggan shooting: family settle high court against Met, The Guardian 10TH October (Last accessed on 9th December)
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