What is “ethnic profiling”?
Ethnic profiling is the use of race, ethnicity, religion or national origin, rather than individual behaviour, by law enforcement officers as a basis for making decisions about who has or may be involved in criminal activity and is often used when searching for drugs, despite there often being little or no actual evidence.
It is a problem across much of Europe that has gained urgency since 2001 with the targeting of particular communities associated with what some term a “war on terror”. The term is little known or understood outside the UK. Indeed, no direct translation of the term appears in many European languages.
Since the 9/11 attacks in the United States, 32% of British Muslims report being subjected to discrimination at airports (Ethnic Profiling in the European Union, 2009). The personal data of 8.3m people were searched in a massive German data mining exercise which targeted – among other characteristics – people who were Muslim, and did not identify a single terrorist.
Law enforcement may properly rely on sets of behavioural patterns associated with particular offences to identify perpetrators. But such patterns of activity, e.g. paying in cash or carrying little baggage, should be grounded in accumulated investigative experience about particular categories of crime.
Why is it a problem?
Ethnic profiling is a form of discrimination and therefore a fundamental breach of human rights. However, to date, it has yet to be expressly outlawed by any European government. Ethnic profiling is counterproductive because it alienates some of the very people whose cooperation is necessary for effective crime detection. It destroys the trust of communities in the police and reduces their willingness to cooperate in criminal or terrorism investigations or turn to the police to control crime in their neighbourhoods.
Stops should be based upon a reasonable individualised suspicion that the subject in question has committed or is in the act of committing a crime. For the individual stopped and detained, the experience can be frightening and humiliating. Ethnic profiling also serves to stigmatise whole groups as “suspect communities”, contributing to the over-representation of ethnic minorities in other parts of the criminal justice system, perpetuating negative stereotypes and legitimising racism.
Police treatment of the person they have stopped, or the quality of the stop, has been found to be the greatest concern to people stopped. It is challenging to find objective measures of stop quality, but studies have assessed how long stops take, how often they lead to searches, the hit rate (or percentage of stops revealing a crime or other violation), and use of force (such as handcuffs or physical restraints). In the UK, in 2006-7, black people were 7.7 times more likely to be searched than white people. Asian people were 2.2. times more likely than white people.
Article 14 ECHR prohibits discrimination in the enjoyment of rights protected by the Convention. Convention rights that are particularly relevant include the rights to liberty and security of the person (Article 5(1); fair trial rights associated with “the determination of [an individual’s] civil right” and of “any criminal charge against him” (Article 6(1); the right to respect for privacy, family life, correspondence, and home (Article 8)’ freedom of religion (Article 9) and assembly (Article 11); and freedom of movement (Article 2, Protocol No.4).
Protocol No.12 prohibits discrimination in any ground in respect of any right set forth in national law “by an public authority” (Article 1). The Explanatory Report to Protocol No.12 makes clear that this prohibition applies to discrimination “by a public authority in the exercise of discretionary power”, which would include identity checks, stop and searches, and surveillance activities by law enforcement officers.
Why does it happen?
Although ethnic profiling may result from intentional racism of individual police officers, it is usually the cumulative result of unconscious and unchecked ethnic stereotypes.
Several factors have contributed to heightened use of ethnic profiling in the context of immigration control practices. Political authorities can demand clampdowns and strict enforcement of national immigration laws, including proactive police efforts to seek out illegal immigrants. Under these circumstances, police are especially likely to stop people who “look foreign” – even as the number of persons of minority appearance who are in fact naturalised or native-born has significantly increased.
(EU) country statistics
Throughout Hungary, Roma (more commonly referred to as gypsies in Britain) are 3x more likely to be stopped by police than non-Roma, yet the rate at which each group is detected in the commission of an offense is almost identical. This is all the more alarming when we consider that Hungarian police conduct a massive number of stops: 325 per 1,000 residents in one pilot site, 65 per 1,000 and 93 per 1,000 in the other two. This is compared to an average of 29 per 1,000 in two Spanish sites, and 39 stops and 20 stops and searches per 1,000 in the United Kingdom.
The data clearly showed that Hungarian officers were not detecting crime: only 1% of their stops lead to arrests and 18% to petty offense procedures being instigated.
In Spain, some ethnic minorities groups were stopped more than others, but all ethnic minorities were stopped more than ethnic Spaniards [6]. In the Girona region , Moroccans were stopped 6.7x more and Romanians 10x more often. Yet they detected offences in 9% of stops of Moroccans compared to 17% of stops of ethnic Spaniards and 19% of stops of Romanians.
In a 2005 research project carried out by the Open Society Justice Initiative (“OSJI”) in Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain, researchers conducted interviews with police officers and found that officers frequently cited unobjective and unverifiable factors such as “sixth sense” or “intuition” or “past experience” as driving their decisions about whom to stop, sometimes adding such factors as a person appearing “nervous”, “out of place” or “strange”.
Nevertheless, the dearth of data on the ethnicity of those stopped made it impossible to detect the extent of ethnic profiling taking place. Ethnic statistics are essential to identify discriminatory outcomes, including those that result from policies or patterns of practice that do not necessarily reflect discriminatory intent. To date (2009), the UK is the only EU member state systematically collecting data on police stops and ethnicity. Data collection has not ended the problem in the UK – black and Asian British people are still stopped more than whites – but it has provided the basis for open and informed discussion between the police and local communities about the reason for these disparities, and helped in developing policies to respond to them.
The hit rate is a common measure of the effectiveness of stops. Yet police services do have a consistent definition of what constitutes a “hit”. Consequently, hit data cannot be compared across police jurisdictions without first carefully assessing the types of outcomes that each service considers a hit. The UK measures arrests resulting from stop and searches, whereas many U.S. jurisdictions include all positive outcomes, including seizure of contraband, administrative or traffic citations, and arrests.
It is often argued that ethnic minorities and immigrants are profiled because they offend at higher rates. But data on hit rates from different cities and countries are remarkably consistent in showing that hit rates do not vary significantly by ethnic group. In the UK, in 2006-7, the arrest rate for whites and blacks who were stopped was 12 percent, while it was 10 per cent for Asians.
The Council of Europe’s Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has flagged the issue in several countries, including Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
France
French police reportedly conduct discriminatory identity checks on Muslims, Travellers, and Gypsies. Abusive raids of Gypsy and Traveller camps are regularly reported, as are forced evictions and ill-treatment of Roma, Gypsy, and Traveller minorities. The ECRI in 2004 expressed concern over the persistence of reports of “discriminatory identity checks” conducted by the French police.
In 2005 the Commission Nationale de Deontologie de la Securite (CNDS), the official national body that reviews police conduct issues, stated that it was “[s]truck by the colour of the skin and the statistical frequency of foreign persons, or persons have foreign sounding names”, among victims of police ill-treatment, noting the over-representation of young North African (Maghreb countries) and African males. The report added that these incidents frequently arose from “identity checks on a purely preventative basis” - Jacky Durand “Bauvres au facies”, 2005.
A study of stop and search in Paris (2009) by OSJI reconfirmed earlier findings. Further, it was found that an equally important determinant of who was stopped by police for identity checks was the style of clothing worn by the stopped individuals. Although people wearing clothing typically associated with French youth culture (“including hip-hop”, “tecktonic”, “punk” and “gothic” styles) made up only 10% of the population available to be stopped by the police, they made up 47% of those who were actually stopped.
Germany
Misti Duvall, “Evidence of Ethnic Profiling in Selected European Countries” (2005), suggests that in recent years the German police have repeatedly engaged in racial profiling of Roma and Sinti. According to OSJI’s 2002 EU Monitoring and Advocacy Program (EUMPA), “although ethnic and racial profiling is officially forbidden, exception may be made for the investigation and/or prevention of crime”.
ECRI in 2003 expressed concern over reports that members of “visible, notably black, minority groups” are disproportionately” subject to checks carried out by the police and disproportionately singled out for controls in railway stations and airports.
In 2004 Amnesty International documented cases of police ill-treatment and brutality towards foreigners and ethnic minorities, and has complained that comprehensive figures on complaints of ill-treatment have not been compiled by German authorities.
Italy
Italy has a history of racial profiling by police against its Roma minority. According to the ERRC (“European Roma Rights Center”) in 2002, police “single out old cars in bad repair for control on the road, because it is assumed that such cars are owned by immigrants”.
U.S.
The consistent overrepresentation of minorities in U.S. custodial and correctional facilities is not contested. According to official Justice Department statistics, more than 60% of federal prisoners in 2002 were from minority groups, although they make up only 25% of the population. This figure, the department noted, was unchanged from 1996.
Northern Ireland
Mary O’Rawe in her 2005 Article, “Ethnic Profiling, Policing, and Suspect Communities: Lessons from Northern Ireland” suggests that a principle problem with policing in Northern Ireland has been the historical failure by both British and Northern Irish governments to place human rights at the core of policy, in deference to a perceived national security imperative. Partly as a result, ethnic profiling has played a significant role in the policing of Northern Ireland.
In fact, the term “ethnicity” describes inexactly the basis of profiling in Northern Ireland, which has been premised on religion, socioeconomic status, and political allegiance. Despite the absence of official statistics, there is no shortage of indicators, she suggests, that ethnic profiling by police existed and is still perceived to exist. She recognises, however, that recent developments in Northern Ireland have made policing fairer, more transparent and more accountable.
The counterproductive processes by which “suspect communities” are created (and radicalised) have similar effects everywhere. What has happened in Northern Ireland shows that a firm brake should be applied, as a matter of urgency, to one of the most invidious aspects of the current “war on terror” – the apparently relentless drive by numerous governments to deploy antidemocratic tactics in the name of safeguarding democracy.
O’Rawe suggests that in the absence of official data, the practice of profiling must be established through inferences from a variety of sources: (1) harassment – government authorities repeatedly dismissed claims of police misconduct as unsupported anecdotes. Yet, no official attempt was made to monitor patterns of abuse that might have refuted or supported widespread allegations that Catholics were significantly more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, and detained than Protestants; and (2) internment without trial.
“The fundamental lesson to be learned from decades of de facto ethnic profiling by police in Northern Ireland is its failure to check terrorism. To the contrary, discriminatory police action fuelled terrorist recruitment and radicalised the affected population. Although the threat to police lives from terrorism was real, the potential perpetrators comprised only a small minority...The more a community feels voiceless, unable to address the injustice in their lives, the more tolerant of violence they become particularly when it is aimed at the perceived source of injustice”.
Greece
In 2004 the United Nations Committee against Torture (UNCAT) raised concerns about excessive use of force against members of racial and ethnic minorities and foreigners by Greek police. Common targets included Roma, Albanians, and (other) immigrants.
Russia
A 2006 study of ethnic profiling in the Moscow Metro (OSJI) found that persons of non-Slavic appearance made up only 4.6% of riders on the Metro system but 50.9% of persons stopped by the police at Metro exits. In other words, non-Slavs were, on average, 21.8 times more likely to be stopped than Slavs. By comparison, the highest rates detected in the United States and the UK show that minorities are four or five times more likely than non-minorities to be stopped.
The study also analysed the effectiveness of police efforts in stopping non-Slavs at such a disproportionate rate. The results clearly show that the Moscow police are wasting their effort: in the overwhelming majority of instances, police simply release those they have stopped.
Why do we need data?
(1) Measuring fairness – fairness is assessed in terms of (a) disproportionality in the rate at which ethnic minority and majority residents are stopped, in relation to their numbers in the wider population; and (b) the treatment of people once they have been stopped.
(2) Disproportionality – is calculated by using police records to measure the rates at which people from ethnic minority groups are stopped, compared to the rates at which the majority is stopped. The clearest way to understand disproportionality is by using an odds ratio, e.g. X persons are X times more likely to be stopped than white people. A ratio of 1.0 indicates no more likelihood amongst all groups. Odds between 1.0 and 1.5 are most likely benign/trivial; an odds ration greater than 1.5 indicates ethnic profiling.
Evidence of disproportionality does not automatically prove discrimination; the data will need to be examined further, however, without any data it becomes near impossible.
http://www.talkingdrugs.org/ethnic-profiling-in-stop-and-search-practices-in-...
