Restriction On Police Stop And Search

Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has a comment piece in today's Telegraph:

Thankfully, we left many things behind in the 1970s - tank tops, ghastly Blue Nun wine and hairy-chested medallion men. None should be allowed to see the light of day again.

There was also the serious stuff. That decade was stained by the grossly prejudicial behaviour of 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.

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.