No-one doubts that the case of Stephen Lawrence has resulted in unprecedented public awareness of racism in institutions and in the police in particular. Even hostile commentators are no longer able simply to shrug their shoulders and talk about a few bad apples. Nevertheless the debate so far has been considerably less penetrating as to
News Service
Stop and Search: Strong words but limited action
THE report of the Lawrence inquiry singles out countrywide racial disparities in the use of stop-and-search as one of the key areas of ‘institutional racism’ in the police. In doing so, the report does no more than to confirm what has long been widely known in the black community. The Macpherson report goes on to
Institutionalised racism and human rights abuses
A special investigation into 45 deaths in Europe in 1998. Human rights abuses, we are told, occur in the Third World – certainly not in democratic Europe. But the 45 deaths we document here throw into question Europe’s respect for human rights. For the treatment of immigrants, asylum-seekers and ethnic minorities is the benchmark by
Evidence submitted for Part 2 of the Lawrence Inquiry
Institute of Race Relations Evidence submitted for Part 2 of the Inquiry into Matters Arising from the Death of Stephen Lawrence The Context IRR believes that it is essential to place the events surrounding the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent police investigation in the context of organised racial violence and relations between the
Europe, the Press And Crime
Across Europe, thanks to press reporting, ‘criminal’, ‘immigrant’, ‘Roma’ are becoming interchangeable. In focusing on immigrant crime, the press reflects the priorities of police and politicians who are the main sources for such stories. Police crime statistics The raw material for immigrant crime stories are police reports, particularly the release of selective and ethnically-based crime
Public accountability not public relations
For more than two decades, anti-racists have struggled to put the issue of institutional racism on the agenda. In the period from the Scarman inquiry of the early 1980s through to the last few months, the accepted wisdom was that police racism existed but it was a case of ‘a few rotten apples’. To root
What is institutional racism?
Institutional racism is that which, covertly or overtly, resides in the policies, procedures, operations and culture of public or private institutions – reinforcing individual prejudices and being reinforced by them in turn. Why do we need to distinguish institutional racism from individual racism? The problem is that individual racial attitudes and stereotyping have often been
Globalism and the Left
If imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, globalism is the latest stage of imperialism – and, yet, nowhere in the whole literature of the Left[1] is there any evidence of a systematic attempt to understand, let alone combat, the havoc being wreaked on Third World countries by capital in its latest avatar. Instead, the
Terror Act: A Charter For Repression
In November 1997, Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism unit staged simultaneous raids on the Kurdistan Workers Association in Haringey and the Halkevi Turkish and Kurdish Community Centre in Stoke Newington. Police spent seven hours at the KWA photographing and searching each room seizing the centre’s financial records, bank statements, chequebooks, grant application information, training records, National Lottery
The Internet: New Media Or Old Values?
”One European is worth 28 Chinese, or perhaps 2 Welsh miners worth 1000 Pakistanis.” That was the unwritten rule used by BBC news in the 1970s to rate a story’s importance, according to the inside account by Philip Schlesinger in his book Putting ‘Reality’ Together . In the intervening years we may have seen some