On Sunday 9th August, a former shadow equalities minister and a Labour MP accused the police of “institutional racism” after being pulled over in Hackney, London while on her way to a lunch with a friend.
Dawn Butler, a strong critic of the stop-and-search tactics, stated the car was being driven by her male friend, when two police cars pulled them over. According to Butler, it was the third time Butler that she had been stopped by police, while her friend had been stopped regularly.
According to the officers, the vehicle was registered in North Yorkshire and admitted that it had been a mistake and later apologised to the MP. Later in a statement, the Metropolitan police said that an officer had initially entered an incorrect registration number into the computer system, and that neither the MP nor her friend were searched.
Last month it was reported 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 on an average four people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background were stopped and searched for every 1,000 white people.
In the video, Butler was seen telling the officers, “It is really quite irritating. It’s like you cannot drive around and enjoy a Sunday afternoon whilst black because you’re going to be stopped by police. We were just going out to have a nice lunch. My plans were basically ruined. It’s a sunny Sunday, and you don’t get many of those. I’ve been stopped while driving twice as an MP. My friend has experienced it a number of times. That’s why his attitude was just like, ‘Here, have my driving licence. Here we go again.’”
One of the officers tells her, “I appreciate everything you say and I do apologise for wasting your time.”
One of them had even asked Butler where she lived and was going and another officer, a woman, had “inflamed the situation” by saying tinted rear windows on the car could be illegal, she added. The law about tinting on windows applies only to the windscreen and front windows.
Butler has previously urged for an end to stop-and-search system, saying the approach was racist. “It does not work, or rather, it works the way it’s designed to work. It is designed to be discriminatory.
“The fact is, where a police officer can stop a person of colour driving a car, saying, ‘We smelled drugs coming from your car; that’s why we stopped you’, and then, when they search the car, there are no drugs, you have to ask yourself: what were they smelling?”
