Dawn Butler, the Labour MP and former shadow equalities minister, has accused the police of being institutionally racist after she was stopped while driving to Sunday lunch with a friend. Butler, a strong critic of police stop-and-search tactics, said the car was being driven by her male friend, who like Butler is black, when two police cars pulled it over in Hackney, east London. Officers said the vehicle was registered in North Yorkshire. After taking the BMW’s keys and checking the registration, the officers admitted there had been a mistake and apologised, Butler told the Guardian. The Metropolitan police later said in a statement that an officer had initially entered the registration number wrongly into a computer system, and that neither the MP nor her friend were searched. It is the third time Butler has been stopped by police as an MP, she said, while her friend had been stopped regularly. The incident places renewed focus on an area of policing, particularly in London, that critics regularly say is racist. Black and minority ethnic people are stopped and searched, and there are concerns this has been exacerbated by the coronavirus lockdown. It emerged last month that young black men were stopped and searched by police more than 20,000 times in London during the lockdown, the equivalent of more than a quarter of all black 15- to 24-year-olds in the capital. Across England as a whole there were four stop and searches for every 1,000 white people and 38 for every 1,000 black people in 2018-19. Butler said she had been happy with the attitude of the officer who dealt with the registration, and would not have complained publicly were it not for the approach of two other police involved. One of them asked Butler where she lived and was going, and said the pair had been stopped because “there’s people who have been coming into the area”, without explaining what this meant, the MP said.

All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/09/labour-mp-dawn-butler-stopped-by-police-in-london

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