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Stop and Search

As the debate re-opens we must make sure we don't reopen the door to the bad old days.

Article by Trevor Phillips. An edited version of this article appears in the Daily Telegraph 7 February 2008

Thankfully, we left many things behind in the 1970s - tank tops, ghastly Blue Nun wine and hairy-chested medallion men.  None of these things should be allowed to see the light of day again.  They were the trivial things. There was also the serious stuff. That decade was stained by the grossly prejudicial behaviour by police officers directed mostly at young Asian and black men. It was what we used to call "sus" – stopping people because you suspected their motives.  Today’s report by Sir Ronnie Flanagan has re-opened the debate about stop and search. We at the Equality and Human Rights Commission will want to be sure that his recommendations don't reopen the door to the bad old days.

There's been a lot of political noise in the past week about the fact that young black people are more exposed to serious violence of various kinds than others.  This is said to justify changing the level of accountability we should demand from the police.  I entirely agree that, in the end, there can be no liberty without security, and that minority communities are desperate for an end to the crime which – at its worse - is killing our children.  But the answers have to be effective; as David Cameron argued last week we shouldn't apply 1980s thinking to 21st century problems.  Sadly, he is in danger of calling for the effective return of “sus” and the offences widely known to minority communities as "driving while black” or “walking at night while Asian".

I genuinely hope that Flanagan doesn't fall into the same trap.  Having touched down, just a few hours ago, from a trip to New York, I wonder if anyone here is actually paying attention to what really works.  In America, the idea that you cut crime or fear of crime by giving police more powers is guaranteed to provoke a hollow round of laughter among both young people and law enforcement staff.

On Tuesday, I spent the afternoon talking to teenagers and younger children about education and crime in one of the city's most murderous districts, Brownsville in Brooklyn.  I remember during a visit to the same district as a teenager being told to make sure I got out of the area before dark.  On this occasion I was with one of my nephews who leads a project for the Police Athletic League. This is an organisation run by the city’s own police staff, dedicated to out of school activities for some of the most deprived children in New York.  He was assigned a year ago to run the Brownsville programme after it had been lethally undermined by drugs, prostitution and corruption.  Within months of his arrival, two of his small team of staff had been shot dead.  If ever there were a case for rough, tough, no-compromise policing, this was it.

Yet in New York's black districts, "freeing the police" failed when the former mayor, Rudy Giuliani, tried it.  In spite of his tough guy image on the international stage the spectacular collapse of his presidential campaign owed something to the fact that he is disliked by many white New Yorkers and virtually all African-Americans in the city.

His police department was encouraged to seek out and to confront street criminals using waves of stop and search, based on little but a hunch.  Mysteriously the hunches always seemed to be prompted by the sight of a black man; and the so called "tough" strategy, already discredited by a series of convictions for police brutality, was effectively abandoned after police shot an innocent, unarmed African refugee 47 times.  Once introduced, the habits die hard.  Last year a young black man with no hint of involvement in crime was gunned down by police outside a restaurant where he was celebrating with friends the night before his wedding.

Here in Britain recent history tells us that if we're going to give the authorities more power to interfere with our everyday life there had better be some evidence that it will make us safer.

We know that the use of "sus" and stop and search was more responsible than any single factor for the riots of the early 1980s.  Lord Scarman and others told us that.  But what has become clear over time is that the real cost wasn't just to ethnic minority young people.  The revelations about the way that the "sus" laws were used in the 1970 and 1980s shook everyone's confidence in the police, whatever their colour - and that was more than a decade before the Macpherson Report gave official sanction to the term "institutional racism".  If anyone has paid a heavy price for the clumsy, discriminatory use of these powers, it isn't the criminals, white or black - it is the police themselves.

We should beware of making the same error again.  It's tempting for politicians, especially when confronted with the disturbing rise in violent street crime, to want to look tough.  And it must be right to try to reduce the levels of bureaucracy associated with police stops. We agree that new technology should be used to help us get over the absurdity of foot long monitoring forms.  But let's remember that we brought in the restraint that police officers must have a "reasonable suspicion" before they are allowed to stop and search any of us, precisely because without it stop and search had become licensed harassment, causing deep offence and destructive conflict without any discernable positive effect on crime levels.

We shouldn't kid ourselves that things have changed.  We don't live in some post-racial melting pot where these powers are used fairly.  No one from an ethnic minority who has been stopped - including me - ever believes that these stops are random.  Today, black people are still 7 times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.  We don't do 7 times the crime, do we?

And far from supporting those who say that policing has become less race conscious the figures show the reverse:  the numbers of black people stopped has climbed by 12 per cent according to the latest Home Office figures.  In the end we need to call this what it is - reprehensible racial profiling, the act of simply stopping someone because you think their ethnicity is suspicious. The number of Asian people stopped has increased by 14 per cent while the number of white people stopped has increased by 0.4 per cent.

Throwing police into conflict with young men in the streets is a solution that has failed everywhere and every time it has been tried.  If we really want to be protected, we could start by using police time more effectively on initiatives like after school sports activities, an approach which seems to have been showing signs of success from when it has been tried in New York by the present mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

When it comes to crime-fighting, firstly we should be smarter.  Instead of investing in a cumbersome weapon that at most leads to arrest in every 10th case - and very few convictions - we should stick to the patient, intelligence led approach. Secondly, if we are hell-bent for political reasons of going down the road of in your face policing, it's hard to imagine a faster route to disaster than to order virtually all white police forces to put black and Asian majority districts under siege.  The really tough thing to do would be to back some creative changes in equality law that would allow police forces to accelerate moves to make their ethnic make-up more reflective of the communities they serve.

Yes, we need to tackle the crimes that leave young people dead and communities under siege and no, we shouldn't shy away from doing anything that will genuinely protect them.  But let's not throw more young lives away on the altar of gesture politics.  Alienated communities do not help the police. As we know, 70 per cent of crimes are solved by what the police call “community-led intelligence”, that is local people telling them stuff. In our effort to save young people today, let's not turn the clock back to the days when police and young people in some parts of our country could see each other only as combatants in a war in which both sides are bound to lose.

• Stop and Search press release

• Article by Trevor Phillips in Daily Telegraph 7/2/08

Present day Jarndyce

The equal pay crisis exposes our dated legal system and demands we get women a fairer deal

Article by Trevor Phillips. Appeared in The Guardian on Tuesday 15 January 2008

I am generally not in the habit of reaching for Charles Dickens when I want to make the case for equality. Most people would think we'd long ago left the crushing injustices of Victorian times behind, and most people would be right. Unless, that is, you're talking about the appalling inequality facing the hundreds of thousands of low-paid women care workers who look after your ageing mum or dad, or the dinner ladies who feed your children. Or the cleaners who do their level best to keep antiquated hospitals from infecting their own patients.

If you watched the BBC's Bleak House last year, you'll recognise all the ingredients: a long-running legal dispute, menacing lawyers and, most important, a slow, arcane legal system. A system that has failed the most important people in all of this - the victims of injustice. It's Jarndyce and Jarndyce for the 21st century.

That is why we yesterday called for a new approach that will deliver some measure of justice for women now. Hundreds of thousands of those working for local councils have been underpaid for decades. The unions blame local government for dragging its heels . No-win, no-fee lawyers accuse the unions of betraying female members in the interest of protecting men's pay. Local councils highlight the huge cost to the public purse.

This situation, already described as a "crisis", is in danger of reaching a meltdown in the next few months. The number of claims currently clogging up the tribunal system is estimated at around 50,000. It's predicted that this could spiral to a unmanageable 150,000 this year.

The equal pay laws were never meant to provide combat weapons for ambitious lawyers. It's time to cut through the legal and political knots and deliver some results. That, above all, is what the Equality and Human Rights Commission is here to do.

First, we want to get these cases out of the gummed-up legal system and find a negotiated compromise. Second, where they are being dealt with by the courts, we must grease the wheels of justice and clear the incredible backlog and move things through quickly.

Today the court of appeal will hear the potentially precedent-setting case of Redcar & Cleveland borough council v Bainbridge and others. At stake is the vexed question of "transitional arrangements". This is the extent to which employers can protect men's pay while they try to put their house in order.

The commission has decided not to provide financial support for the individual claimants in the case. But we aren't bowing out of proceedings. We will send a representative to the court to "intervene" on our behalf as an independent authority in the case. We will offer a solution which we believe will get money into the claimants' pockets faster.

The commission will argue that an employer may lawfully introduce temporary arrangements to protect the pay of existing employees, most often men in these circumstances. But, and it's a crucial caveat, the employer will have to show that their aim is to eliminate unequal pay as soon as possible, and they will disadvantage the women as little as possible.

It's not possible to deliver equal pay in local government overnight. The total bill to councils will, it is thought, come to £3bn. In some circumstances, transitional arrangements, and we really are talking about finite periods of time here, may be a necessary step to stamp out inequality. Without this, the ability of unions and employers to find practical, sensible settlements could be limited.

Just as Dickens' classic is an assault on the British judiciary, surely the equal pay crisis exposes the flaws of the antiquated Equal Pay Act. It has certainly reached its sell-by date.

If we're really serious about a long-term solution, we should scrap it in favour of modern legislation to get women a fair deal quickly. A key change would be the introduction of representative actions, where hundreds of cases could be heard at the same time. We believe representative actions could reduce the number of equal pay claims by 90%, from 150,000 to a much more manageable 11,000.

It's time to dump the bureaucracy, scrap the paperwork and free the lawyers to fight over something else. Let's move things along. Today, the commission is calling on employers, unions, and all those who have a stake in this issue to join us for a high-level summit to debate solutions. I hope together we will write a different ending to this story than the benighted residents of Bleak House.

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