Chapter 6 - Ethnicity, crime and justice - Ethnicity and criminalisation

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Official Statistics

Show significant ethnic differences in crime, however black and Asian people are over-represented in the system: 
 - black people make up 3% of the population, but 13.1% of the prison population
 - Asian people make up 6.5% of the population, but 7.7% of the population

Do not tell us whether members of one ethnic group are more likely than members of another group to commit an offence in the first place - simply tell us about involvement with the CJS - eg, differences in stop and search or arrest rates may simply be due to policing strategies or to discrimination by individual officers, while differences in rates of imprisonment may be the result of courts handing down harsher sentences to minorities

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Alternative sources of statistics - victim surveys

Victim surveys:  eg Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) ask individuals to say what crimes they have been victims of (past 12 months). Can gain info about ethnicity and offending from these surveys when they ask victims to identify the ethnicity of their attacker. Show great deal of crime is intra-ethnic (happens w/in ethnic groups)
 - have limitations:
  - rely on memory of events - Phillips and Bowling (2012) found that evidence suggets that white victims may 'over-identify' black people, saying the offender was black when they are not sure
  - only cover personal crimes (1/5 of all crimes)
  - exclude under 10s - minority ethnic groups contain high proportion of young people
  - exclude crimes against organisations - white collor/corporate crime

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Alternative sources of statistics - self-report st

Self-report studies: Ask individuals to disclose their own dishonest and violent behaviour. Baed on sample of 2500, Graham and Bowling (1995), foudn that black people (43%) and white people (44%) had very similar rates of offending, while Indians (30%), Pakistanis (28%) and Bangladeshis (13%) had much lower rates.

Sharp and Budd (2005) note that the 2003 Offending, Crime and Justice survey of 12,000 people found that white people and those of 'mixed' ethnic origins were most liekly to say they had committed an offence (around 40%), followed by black people (28%) and Asians (21%)

Findings of self-report studies challenge the stereotype of black people as being more likely than white people to offend, however they do support the widely held view that Asians are less likely to offend.

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Ethnicity, racism and the CJS - policing and stop

Members of ethnic minorities more likley to be stopped and searched by police, who can do this if they have 'reasonable suspicion' of wrongdoing. Black people 7x more likley to be stopped and searched than white people. Data from CSEW indicate similar patterns. Only small number of stop and searches result in arrest.

Under Terrorism Act (2000), police can stop and search people or vehicles without reasonable suspicion - since this, statistics show that Asians are more likely to be stopped and searched than any other ethnic group under the Terrorism Act.

Phillips and Bowling (2007) note that members of ethnic minority communities are more likley to think they are 'over-policed' than 'under-protected', and tend to have limited faith in the police

Chance of being involved in a taser incident varies w/ ethnicity. During 2010-14, police deployed taers over 38,000 times. Asians, chance of involvement was 3 in 10,000, and for white people 6, but for black people it was 18 in 10,0000 (Hoyle, 2015)

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