Isn't it always nice to discover that other countries can be just as screwed up as the US? (... Well, OK, perhaps "nice" isn't quite the right word. Maybe "appalling" would be a better term.)
A fresh row over stop-and-search powers has erupted after it emerged anti-terrorist police had received orders to single out black and Asian people. Civil liberties campaigners and black groups have reacted furiously over orders to the British Transport Police which say terrorist suspects are of "Asian, West Indian and east African origin". They have urged the Commission for Racial Equality to investigate.
Officers patrolling on the Tube and train network, have been told not to "use stereotypical images of terrorists when deciding whether or not to use their powers of stop and search." But the operational order, issued after the July 7 attacks in London, which The Independent has seen, adds: "It should be noted, however, that recent suspects have included individuals of Asian, West Indian and east African origin, some of whom have British nationality."
The order has re-ignited the row over "racial profiling" by police and revived concerns that a disproportionately high number of black and Asian people are stopped and searched, without reasonable grounds for suspicion....
Well. Yes. Quite. And profiling is working so well for the British police, what with murdering an innocent man from an entirely different part of the planet.
So the operational order is, in effect, "Don't use stereotypes to profile. Except that you should." And the stereotypes are even broader than those used by the US -- one can but imagine the PR disaster if the FBI were discovered to have an operational order that read, "Many terrorists are West Indians, of African appearing origin."
I'm feeling really sorry for East Asians in most Western countries these days. Of the major Anglophone countries, only Canada appears not to have gone totally insane; the US, Britain and Australia all seem to be at various points on an insanity continuum, when it comes to The War on Terra. (And it may well be that Canada maintains its relative sanity because they're the only one of the big four that hasn't been deliberately targeted in some way.)
Posted by iain at September 13, 2005 03:05 PM
