Police are searching white people under terror laws simply to provide’racial balance’ to statistics, it has beenrevealed.
They are targeting people they have no real reason to suspect to avoidbeing accused of prejudice, said terror law watchdog Lord Carlile.
But their tactic of ‘self-evidentlyunmerited searches’ was a waste of money, a breach of civil liberties and ‘almost certainly unlawful’, he added.
‘It is totally wrong for any person to be stopped in order to produce aracial balance in the statistics. There is ample anecdotal evidence that this is happening,’ he said.
The Liberal Democrat peer and QC condemned the misuse of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in hisannual report on anti-terror laws.
He wrote of cases ‘where the person stopped is so obviously far fromany known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not theslightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no otherfeature to justify the stop’.
Later, he told the BBC: ‘If, forexample, 50 blonde women are stopped who fall nowhere near anyintelligence-led terrorism profile, it’s a gross invasion of the civilliberties of those 50 blonde women.’
Officers used the powers to search 125,000people in 2007/8, up from 42,000 the year before. Only one per cent ofsearches led to an arrest, leading to claims it was being overused.
Black people were eight times more likely and Asians were twice as likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
Lord Carlile said the ‘ethnic imbalance’ was a’proportional consequence’ of the fact that the main terror threat wasfrom Islamic extremists.
Met Police assistant commissioner John Yatessaid: ‘We ask our officers to apply common sense and discretion in theway that they police this.’