MPs clash over stop and search powers

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Philip Davies claimed stop and search numbers had reduced dramatically as a result of "politically correct chatter", adding: "One of the reasons is that the police are fearing stopping and searching people in case they are branded racist."

The last thing police needed, he argued, was "meddlesome politicians" interfering in their operational work.

The MP for Shipley said: "It's totally unacceptable to have a situation where officers are leaving criminals free to commit crimes simply because they want to avoid having complaints about racism against them."

His comments during a Westminster Hall debate on the effect of police stop and search powers on BAME communities drew sharp rebukes from Opposition MPs.

Labour's Naz Shah, who brought the debate, branded stop and search a "blunt tool for the prevention and detection of crime", adding it had a "profoundly negative impact on police-community relations".

The Bradford West MP said stop and search was neither the solution to crime problems nor a substitute for intelligence from good relationships with communities.

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She said: "For many in our BAME communities, racial profiling and discriminatory policing is real. It is corrosive and it is undermining trust in public institutions."

She added: "On the ground the ease with which police officers can use their discretionary powers together with their widely divergent views about what constitutes as reasonable suspicion means that stop and search has become the go-to power for social control, and one that is influenced by unconscious biases or outright racial prejudices."

Figures for 2017, she said, estimated that black people were searched at over eight times the rate of white people.

Ms Shah warned society was at risk of "allowing stop and search to regress back to unacceptably high levels of disproportionality".

The Prime Minister, she argued, had allowed disproportionality to increase and the pace of reform to grind to a halt.

Mr Davies said recent changes in the culture on stop and search was "very much hurting parts of these communities".

He said: "They are suffering not from the over-use of stop and search as (Ms Shah) would contend, but the potential under-use of stop and search."

Young lives being lost on the streets, he said, were "predominantly not white".

He added: "So, when it comes to the most serious offences of all, murder, it is clear that black people, in particular black males, are far more likely to be victims. They are also more likely to be murderers."

Mr Davies argued the evidence showed the community much more likely to be stopped and searched and yet found to have done nothing wrong were white people, adding: "They are the facts - they might be inconvenient facts for people who have a particular agenda, but they are nevertheless the facts."

Ms Shah intervened, saying that right from the offset black people were being much more stopped and searched in comparison to their white counterparts.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott intervened, asking: "For the avoidance of doubt, are you saying that the disproportionate levels of stop and search exercises on black people, on Muslim people, people from south Asia, is because we are more criminal?"