White people are discovering what police harassment feels like for the first time

Last week, the UK’s police forces were issued a stark warning against “overreaching” in the use of new lockdown enforcement powers.

“This is what a police state is like,” remarked former supreme court judge Lord Sumpton after reports of officers curtailing (perfectly legal) exercise and quibbling over the definition of an “essential” item. “It is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes.”

In particular, Sumpton singled out Derbyshire Police, who filmed hikers in the Peak District and uploaded the footage to Twitter. Their actions had “shamed our policing traditions” Sumpton said.

Except what Derbyshire Police did was actually very in keeping with certain traditions – they just happen to be ones that almost 86 per cent of the UK don’t tend to experience on a regular basis.

Overpolicing, unfairly targeted harassment, arbitrary searches; these are all far more common experiences at the hands of those charged with keeping the peace if you’re a member of an ethnic minority, particularly if you are a young, black man.

But under coronavirus regulations, white people are finally getting a taste en masse of what it feels like to be automatically seen as a suspect. And it’s a sour medicine.

This week, Cambridgeshire Police were met by outcry after they tweeted about patrolling a local Tesco.

“Good to see everyone was abiding by social distancing measures and the non essential aisles were empty,” they wrote.

The backlash was swift and furious, with thousands outraged at the thought of officers sifting through their baskets to arrest them on suspicion of buying Hob Knobs.

“There is no law which prevents retailers selling 'non essential' items,” wrote human rights barrister Adam Wagner. “There is a list of retailers which can stay open and they can sell what they sell. And even if there were, who defines 'non-essential'?”

Who indeed? Quite the infringement on our basic individual liberties. And people are right to oppose it.

But this sort of overzealous policing is familiar knowledge in the UK to Bame communities, with black people bearing the brunt of it (who can forget Bristol Police tasing their own race relations adviser?).

You’re nearly 10 times more likely to be subject to an intrusive police stop and search in England and Wales if you’re black. And if a Section 60 order – which allows officers in an area to conduct “suspicionless” searches for a limited period – is in place, that rises to a shocking 40 times more likely. Figures from London also show that black individuals are 12 times more likely to suffer through more intrusive searches, which meant they were forced to remove more than just a coat or jacket.

Despite this overrepresentation, outcome rates are similar whatever someone’s ethnicity: 25 per cent of searches result in action being taken. And although the use of Section 60 orders was expanded in order to specifically tackle knife crime, a recent investigation by The Timesdiscovered that increased stop and search showed no consistent correlation with reduction in knife crime.

Moreover, the yawning racial chasm regarding who stop and search targets has not improved in recent years – it’s actually got worse. Not to mention the racial disparity in those on the receiving end of police violence; from 2017 to 2018, black people experienced 12 per cent of police force incidents, despite only accounting for 3.33 per cent of the population. It’s massively disproportionate.

As many are discovering for the first time under lockdown, being treated with constant suspicion by the police is a harrowing and psychologically stressful ordeal.

A report by StopWatch, a UK organisation campaigning for fairer policing, collected the experiences of black and Asian individuals who’d been subjected to stop and search. Participants spoke of feeling fear, anger and helplessness during and after the experience.

“The impact it had on me was huge, huge; and it was negative,” said Paul Mortimer, a former footballer and anti-racism campaigner who has been stopped more than 20 times.

“I felt that I needed a shower after. I felt really inadequate, I felt dirty. You’re looked at a certain way, you are treated a certain way, as if you are actually guilty”.

Others in the report remarked on the lingering distrust they felt towards the police as a body.

“If you’re an eight-year-old child and you go to play football, and [a] police officer stops and searches you, if you experience that from the age of eight, all the way through your secondary school career, then you’re not going to have a positive view of the police. You will not invest faith in the police if something happens to you,” said Kwabena Oduro-Ayim. “For my entire childhood I would never have turned to the police for any assistance."

It’s a point we’re seeing reflected now in current lockdown discourse. “Genuinely bemused some police officers straying so clearly beyond their powers,” tweeted Gavin Phillipson, professor of Law at Bristol University, referring to the Cambridgeshire Police shopping debacle.

“First don't they have enough on their plates just enforcing the actual, legal restrictions? Second, don't they realise this kind of thing undermines public trust and thus hampers policing by consent?

Well clearly not, because they’ve been doing it to minority communities for years. It’s only now that police officers are starting to be held to account by a large swathe of the general public, and not just dedicated action groups, that they’re having to backtrack so publicly to avoid swinging a wrecking ball through their relations with the UK population at a time when they’re requesting more cooperation than ever.

Clearly, it should not have taken a pandemic to wake a nation up to the reality of targeted and often unlawful harassment at the hands of the police.

A problem as persistent as this one should be top of the agenda, whether it affects white people or not. But now that so many understand what it’s like to carry the terrible, crushing weight of being viewed as a suspect for simply going about their (perfectly lawful) daily business, it must spark action.

Because empathy isn’t enough when human rights are being erased.