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Met police to start recording ethnicity of people stopped in cars

Britain’s biggest police force will start recording the ethnicity of people stopped in their cars in a move aimed at stopping the alleged targeting of people for “driving while black”.

It follows a spate of cases last year when people were stopped and found to be innocent.

Vehicle stops were at the heart of controversial incidents including the searching of champion athlete Bianca Williams and her partner, both of whom were handcuffed while their baby was in the car, and nothing unlawful was found by officers.

The case is under investigation.

Until now, police have had to record the ethnicity of people they stop on foot in the street, which has exposed the disproportionality in stop and search, but not for vehicle stops.

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A small pilot last year in London suggested black people were six times more likely to be stopped while driving than white people.

The Met scheme, believed to be the first of its kind, will record the location, time of the vehicle stop, ethnic background, sex and age of the driver, and the make and model of the vehicle.

The pilot will last six months and is part of a package of reforms under a plan following pressure on the Met by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, after last year’s Black Lives Matter protests and the race crisis the Met was plunged into.

The Met commander Kyle Gordon said: “This pilot will help us assess our proportionality in relation to vehicle stops. This is part of the steps we are taking to increase even further public trust and confidence in the Met – particularly among London’s black communities.

“We want all communities to have the same level of trust in us and for us to be the most trusted police service in the world. Lower levels of trust create challenges to keeping Londoners safe whether it is a reluctance to share information, to report crime, or to support our work to tackle violence.

“Our job is quite simply to protect all of London’s communities and to do so with professionalism and empathy. This pilot is, I believe, a way to ensure we keep doing just that.”

Attempts at driving bias out of public services such as policing has seen the collection of ethnic data as a way of identifying potential issues.

Sadiq Khan said: “We’ve listened and responded to the continued frustrations of black Londoners, who are concerned that they are six times more likely to be stopped in a car than a white person, and this pilot will help us to begin to assess and address concerns about racial profiling and disproportionality in our city.

“Road traffic stops are an important tool the police have to keep Londoners safe but they can have a huge impact on community relations and deserve the same level of scrutiny as any other kind of police stop-and-search power. For many Londoners, that interaction is their defining experience of the police and that is why we are committed to carefully scrutinising the outcome of the pilot and acting on its findings.”

Khan has asked the home secretary to mandate all 43 forces in England and Wales to record the race of those stopped to see if ethnic groups are experiencing different levels of police attention while driving.